SCO military cooperation mainly aimed at terrorism
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Military activities within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are mainly aimed at fighting terrorism, rather than any specific country or military organization, SCO Secretary General Muratbek Imanaliev has told Xinhua.
The SCO would maintain efforts to ensure the regional and global security and development, and would expand economic, technological and cultural cooperation, Imanaliev said.
The SCO would continue to combat the "three evil forces" of terrorism, separatism and extremism to maintain the regional security in Eurasia, especially in the Central Asia regions, Imanaliev said.
He said the "three evil forces," as well as drug smuggling and transnational crime, were serious threats to the regions around SCO member states, making them a major target for the SCO.
However, Imanaliev stressed that the SCO was not a military organization according to its charter.
Multi-national military drills under the SCO framework were held to meet growing regional security challenges, said Wu Hongwei, a researcher at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The drills were intended to strengthen the member states' anti-terrorism abilities and to deter the "three evil forces," Wu said.
In addition to cooperation in security, the SCO members had also made remarkable progress in economic cooperation, Wu said.
The SCO had established the SCO Interbank Consortium in 2005, which had provided tens of billions of U.S. dollars of financing and credit to member states for construction of energy, transport infrastructure and agriculture projects.
Moreover, the SCO had set up an Entrepreneurs' Committee and had been holding an annual industry and business forum to promote cooperation.
Economic cooperation could benefit all member states in tackling their domestic challenges such as improving living standards, Imanaliev said.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will attend the ninth SCO prime ministers' meeting in Tajikistan's capital of Dushanbe on Nov. 25.
