The leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a six-nation security bloc, called for a deadline to be set on the pullout of Western bases from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and slammed outside interference in their affairs at a summit in Central Asia on Tuesday.
At the meeting in the Kazakh capital Astana, the SCO, which comprises Russia, China, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, signed a declaration that called for deadlines to be set on the presence of military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, set up in 2001 by the US-led coalition that toppled Afghanistan's Taliban leadership.
"Considering that the active phase of the military anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan has finished, member states ... consider it essential that the relevant participants in the anti-terrorist coalition set deadlines for the temporary use" of bases in Central Asia, the declaration read.
At what was their first meeting since the ouster of Kyrgyz leader Askar Akayev in March and a military crackdown in Uzbekistan in May, the leaders also included a clause on the inadmissibility of "monopolizing or dominating international affairs" - apparently a reference to growing US influence in Central Asia.
"This declaration calls for templates and standards not to be imposed by force, or the threat of force," Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"There should be no place for interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states," Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said.
Tuesday's declaration echoes a similar one on the "twenty-first-century international order" signed by Putin and Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in Moscow last week.
It follows a string of complaints by leaders such as Uzbek President Islam Karimov suggesting that the West was behind uprisings in three former Soviet republics in the last two years - Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
The Shanghai group leaders also signed a commitment on Tuesday not to harbor persons sought by each other's security forces.
The latter appeared to fly in the face of recent Western criticism of the mountain republic of Kyrgyzstan for handing back to Uzbek authorities four people who fled the May violence in eastern Uzbekistan.
The Shanghai group has made fighting alleged extremism in the region its top priority, while also trying to use the forum to boost economic ties.
Human rights groups have said that member states use the perceived threat of extremism as an excuse to crack down on the political opposition and other dissenters.
Relations between Central Asian states and Western countries have cooled since the events in Uzbekistan in May, amid widespread condemnation from rights groups that claim that Uzbek troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians.
Karimov on Tuesday thanked the leaders of Russia and China for recent support, while saying that outside forces were threatening to "hijack stability and impose their model of development" on Central Asia.
Amid the growing criticism of several of the Shanghai group members over human rights, the New York-based Human Rights Watch urged the group to condemn the military crackdown in Uzbekistan.
"The Shanghai Cooperation Organization should hold member state Uzbekistan to account for the violence committed by government forces in Andijan," Holly Cartner, Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia director said in a written statement.
The two main coalition bases, one at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan, the other at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, have each been used to support US-led operations in Afghanistan since 2001. Both are predominantly staffed by US forces after other countries earlier had forces based at the Kyrgyz base.
Germany also has a few hundred military personnel, most of them engineering and medical staff, at a separate base in Uzbekistan, Termez, while a few hundred French forces work from Tajikistan's main airport in Dushanbe.
Central Asians demand pullout of Western military bases
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