CIS countries getting closer, but slowly
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Heads of government of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) wrapped up a meeting in Russia's St. Petersburg on Friday, covering over 20 topics in economic, security and humanitarian fields.
The meeting adopted the guidelines of forming a free trade zone in the post-Soviet space, intellectual property rights protection, development of health care and other joint programs, demonstrating that the 11 CIS countries are slowly getting closer, analysts said.
GRAVITATION OVER ALIENATION
The two-day meeting means the CIS countries believe they are not going to split apart for at least a decade to follow, Yelena Yatsenko, president of Moscow's Eurasia Heritage think tank, told Xinhua.
The heads of CIS governments discussed the development of the Eurasian Economic Community, which oversees integration process within the Commonwealth and in the Customs Union.
At the meeting, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said trade among the CIS members increased by 30 percent for the first eight months of 2010, calling it "a sign of recovery" of the CIS investment and trade connections.
"The meeting in St. Petersburg, in spite of its generally nonpolitical flavor, has got one very important implication: it has demonstrated that the CIS countries have been fed up with their independence," Yatsenko said.
"The tide is changing -- forces of the mutual gravitation start to prevail over the forces of alienation," he said, citing Putin's proposal to re-establish national exhibitions of all post-Soviet republics in Moscow, as it used to be in the Soviet times.
The expert said the CIS, as an organization, is a sort of "matrioshka", the well-known Russian nesting doll, because many of its structures overlap and duplicate each other.
Also, some CIS countries have formed blocs with non-CIS countries, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), thus the multilayer structure gives the CIS flexibility to withstand such crises as the one between Russia and Georgia, the expert said.
"Even though Tbilisi left the CIS in 2008, Georgia did not cancel 73 inter-government agreements because they worked in its favor," Yatsenko said.
Vladimir Zharchikhin, deputy director of the CIS Institute based in Moscow, echoed that the structure of matrioshka or onion should be considered as CIS' advantage rather than weakness.
"Countries which are ready for full-fledged integration join the Customs Union. Countries that are less ready lean to Eurasian Economic Community. Those interested in political cooperation participate in the SCO. Those concerned mostly about security issues are part of Collective Security Treaty Organization," Zharchikhin said.
"Each cluster fulfill its particular task. All combined, they form a complicated still effective mechanism that has been capable of tackling global challenges," he added.
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