CIS - a central Asian breakaway?

Russia has said it will not oppose differing rates of integration within the CIS - the Commonwealth of Independent States. This follows a meeting of the five presidents of the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union in the Turkmen capital, Ashkhabad - where they talked of expanding economic and security ties. Here is the BBC's Malcolm Haslett:

The Ashkhabad summit, apparently arranged at short notice, seems to have given an impulse to a plan to step up regional cooperation. This perhaps should not be exaggerated, since there are well-known disagreements between the various presidents on the general course the region should be taking. But what has happened in Ashkhabad has been sufficient to elicit some comment from Russia's minister for the CIS, Anatoli Adamishin.

He noted that another group of nations, the so-called GUAM group of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, had already been formed in the autumn to strengthen economic and political ties between those four nations. He implied that although the formation of another sub-group might not be ideal from Russia's point of view, Moscow would try to learn to live with it.

So was the foundation laid for another breakaway in Ashkhabad? Turkmenistan, for one, does not seem interested in a sub-group within the CIS, or any grouping at all really. President Niyazov, who likes to go his own way in most things, underlined that Turkmenistan will not join any such group, except as an observer.

But the final statement after the Ashkhabad talks underlined the Central Asian states' determination to "strengthen their political and economic independence on the basis of developing international ties." This presumably means both developing ties among themselves and diversifying ties with the outside world, making the region less dependent on links with the CIS.

Tajikistan, moreover, said it was prepared to become a "fully fledged" member of the embryonic tripartite economic union already agreed between its northern neighbours, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

And while the Kazak president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stated that in his view the CIS was "an acceptable model for cooperation at this transitional stage", he also spoke of creating a "real economic space of 50 million people" in Central Asia to attract investors.

His Uzbek counterpart, meanwhile, was typically quite negative about the CIS, saying it "cannot act as a legal entity, a military or political bloc."

At the last CIS summit in Moldova in October, a number of the member states were critical of Russia for trying to make it a group for the reintegration of former Soviet republics, under Russian domination. Resistance to such a trend will probably grow. This may not mean the end of the CIS, because most former Soviet republics still trade a lot with Russia. But it may well undermine its unity and effectiveness.