Leading Russian newspapers Saturday highly praised the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), describing it as a "significant event" in world political life, which will produce profound influence on regional security and cooperation.
The Rossiyskaya Gazeta (the Russian Gazette) said in a commentary titled "Shanghai: Guarantee for Security via Cooperation" that the sixth Shanghai Five summit that ended Friday in its birthplace pronounced the creation of a new regional cooperation organization. From the historic day, the international politics dictionary has a new term of the "Shanghai Cooperation Organization."
The SCO will draw great attention and interest from all the countries that are ready to discuss regional security and cooperation on a multipartite basis, the article predicted.
The newspaper "Izvestia" (News) said that the SCO has boundless prospects as it combines the military-political coordination with economic cooperation and stands for developing interaction in all fields.
It stressed that the SCO members pledged to strictly hold the "Shanghai spirit" established by the previous Shanghai Five cooperation mechanism. They agreed that the cooperation should not be narrowed in regional issues, but be extended to the international arena, as the threats to security come not only from Central Asia.
In its Friday edition, Izvestia stressed that President Vladimir Putin "heard the words of support for the cause of preserving the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty. It may be easier for him to hold acquaintance dialogue with (U.S. President George. W.) Bush in Ljubljana."
An essay with the headline of "From Trust Measures to Full- Scale Cooperation," carried by the military newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda" (Red Star) in Saturday's front page said that the essential sense of the sixth Shanghai summit lies in driving and promoting the active cooperation among the SCO members in the spheres of economy, politics, science, technology, transport, ecology and culture, rather than in the change of the name of the forum or its enlargement.
On Friday, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Gazette) published an article of Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov with a title of "Novelty and Succession in Russian Foreign Policy," which called the formation of the SCO "a great success of President Vladimir Putin in foreign policy."
The newspaper TRUD (Labor) noted that "the new association is not an alliance against third countries or groups of states. It appeared as an alternative to closed blocs, and implements the idea of strengthening regional security through cooperation by various guidelines."
(People's Daily 06/18/2001)
