#1
U.S. senators in Uzbekistan to stress partnership
By Shamil Baigin
TASHKENT, Jan 13 (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate delegation headed by Majority Leader Tom Daschle arrived in Uzbekistan on Sunday to emphasise Washington's long-term political interests in Central Asia, officials said.
South Dakota Democrat Daschle, who will stay in the ex-Soviet state until Friday, will hold talks with top Uzbek officials including President Islam Karimov and top clergymen of the mostly Muslim state of 25 million.
"The two sides are expected to discuss the issue of fighting terrorism, the situation in the Central Asian region and bilateral relations," an Uzbek government official told Reuters.
Uzbekistan has become a key strategic partner of the United States in ex-Soviet Central Asia after it embraced with enthusiasm Washington's "war on terrorism."
Karimov allowed U.S. warplanes to use the country's Khanabad airbase for search-and-rescue and humanitarian operations in neighbouring Afghanistan, after which Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also opened bases to coalition aircraft.
Diplomatic sources say Daschle's bipartisan group will visit Khanabad, as well as the garrison town of Termez that overlooks Afghan territory across the Amu Darya river.
Termez is the site of the imposing Friendship Bridge, used in 1989 to withdraw Soviet troops after their Afghan defeat, and now a key part of a humanitarian cargo route to Afghanistan.
Another government source told Reuters that Daschle was expected to fly over the Aral Sea in northwestern Uzbekistan on Tuesday.
Daschle, whose office was contaminated last year by a letter containing spores of anthrax, would fly over the sea's Resurrection Island, once used as a test site for Moscow's top-secret biological warfare programme. Anthrax was one of the weapons tested there.
U.S. officials have been trotting through a region suddenly thrust into the headlines by the war in Afghanistan.
Daschle's senate delegation arrived in Tashkent as a separate group of six U.S. congressmen led by Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe was to depart for Tajikistan.
Another group of senators, led by Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican John McCain, visited Tashkent last weekend.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who commands U.S.-led forces in the region, have all visited Uzbekistan since the war began.
Some politicians in Moscow, the region's former colonial master, have expressed unease at the growing U.S. clout.
"Let them (the Americans) deal with Afghanistan. The most important thing is that they should not deal with Central Asia with the same fervour," Gennady Seleznyov, Communist speaker of Russia's State Duma lower house of parliament, told Russian soldiers in Tajikistan on Saturday.
"But appetite comes with eating, and they may want to build bases here seriously and for long. This is not in Russia's geopolitical interests," he said.
Back to the Top
Next Article
January 13, 2002:
#6020
- Back to the Top -