What is the Collective Security Treaty Organisation?
The Russian-led alliance is flexing its muscles in Kazakhstan
WHEN PROTESTS in Kazakhstan, an oil-rich country of 19m people, erupted in mass unrest in the opening days of the new year, Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, the country’s president, knew who to call. Early on January 6th he picked up the phone to the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Within hours, Russian paratroopers and Belarusian special forces were boarding planes for Almaty, ready to help Mr Tokayev control the uprising. What is the CSTO?
As the cold war drew to a close in July 1991, the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of eight socialist states, and the Soviet Union’s answer to NATO, dissolved. Less than a year later Russia and five of its allies in the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose club of post-Soviet countries, signed a new Collective Security Treaty, which came into force in 1994.
It was smaller, weaker and less ambitious than the Warsaw Pact. And with Russian power at a low ebb, the group did very little for many years. But in 2002, as Central Asia loomed larger in geopolitics—America had invaded Afghanistan the previous year—it declared itself the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a full-blown military alliance. Today it has six members (see map): Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan (Uzbekistan quit the club in 2012).
For Russia, the CSTO is a useful tool to tighten its grip on Central Asia, against both Western and Chinese encroachment. It justifies Russian military facilities in member countries, while also giving Russia a veto over any other foreign bases in the region. In turn the CSTO’s members benefit from co-operation with Russia’s advanced armed forces, including training and discounted arms sales.
Over the past decade, the CSTO’s ambitions have grown. In 2007 it agreed to create a 3,600-strong peacekeeping force and two years later established a rapid-reaction force of what it claims are 20,000 elite personnel kept on high alert. The alliance has also held joint exercises with increasing frequency, including a series of high-profile “anti-terrorism” drills last summer and autumn in response to the growing chaos in nearby Afghanistan.
Until this week, though, no CSTO member had ever invoked Article 4 of its treaty, a mutual-defence clause akin to NATO’s better-known Article 5. The growing chaos in Kazakhstan, which Mr Tokayev blamed on foreign-trained “terrorist gangs”—the scapegoats of choice for most Central Asian dictators confronted by anti-regime movements—changed that. Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, which holds the rotating chair of the CSTO, said that the group had agreed to send in peacekeepers. In addition to Russia and Belarus, Tajikistan and Armenia also agreed to send modest contingents.
The alliance’s quick response may be a reassuring sign to the club’s other strongmen, including Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who received Russian—but not CSTO—assistance last year against his own protesters, and Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon, who has been in power for 28 years. In 2010, when Kyrgyzstan sought the group’s help in quelling an outbreak of violence, Russia declined to step in. A decade on, and with wars in Ukraine and Syria under its belt, Russian confidence has grown.
Russia’s allies may also have some jitters, though. The CSTO did not support Russia’s wars against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, understandably wary of the precedent of having Russian troops carve out chunks of territory from ex-Soviet states. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has long claimed that Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, is not a real country, and instead simply part of the “greater Russian world”. Mr Tokayev’s survival in office may come at the price of his country’s sovereignty. “CSTO has now proven that it is a defensive alliance,” quips Sergey Radchenko, a historian, echoing old Soviet jokes about the Warsaw Pact. “It only invades its own members.”
