Kyrgyz parliament votes to close U.S. airbase

 

Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to approve a presidential proposal to close a U.S. airbase used to support NATO operations in nearby Afghanistan since 2001.

The move to close the base was supported by 78 lawmakers, with one against. The pro-presidential Ak Zhol party has 70 seats in the single-chamber, 90-member legislature.

Kyrgyz parliament votes to close US base – “We should only keep company with and believe Russia.”

The Kyrgyz parliament voted on Thursday to close a key US military supply base for Afghanistan as the United States tried to persuade NATO allies to send more troops to defeat a growing insurgency.

Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the bill to close the Manas air base outside the Kyrgyz capital, with 78 out of 81 lawmakers present voting in favour. One MP voted against and two abstained.

The setback for coalition forces seeking to defeat the Taliban came as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates met other NATO defence ministers in the Polish city of Krakow to pressure them to match US increases in troop numbers.

The bill must now be signed by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, whose announcement last month of the base’s closure shocked Washington. The United States will then have 180 days to shut it down.

Bakiyev’s initial announcement of the closure came after Russia offered more than two billion dollars in aid to the struggling Kyrgyz economy. The government has insisted that Moscow did not set the closure as a condition.

Kremlin And The Closure Of Kyrgyzstan Air Base

Euro-Rus comment : this guy is not happy with it 🙂

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by Ariel Cohen

A sinister Kremlin agenda may be involved in the intrigue around the closure of Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. The Kremlin is obsessed with the U.S. missile defense deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic. Sources in Moscow tell UPI that the Kremlin may use the Manas closure and an offer of cooperation in supply of the Afghanistan deployment as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the United States on the future of missile defense in Europe.

 

Russia is essentially creating bargaining chips it may be willing to trade in exchange for the American concessions it considers vital. This was the case with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s threat to deploy short-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad province on the Baltic coast in response to the planned ballistic missile defense site that the Bush administration planned to construct in Poland. The missile shield in Europe has become even more vital after Iran launched its first satellite. History is witness to many a satellite program becoming a precursor to an active long-range ballistic missile program, or vice versa.

Russian guards fired on stricken ship: prosecutors

Russian border guards repeatedly fired on a cargo ship that hit trouble off its Far Eastern coast at the weekend with the loss off several crew members, prosecutors were quoted as saying Thursday.

Officials said the ship, the Sierra Leone-flagged New Star with 10 Chinese crew and six Indonesians on board, was in Russian waters illegally and repeatedly ignored warnings to stop.

“The investigation into the shooting on the foreign ship is being led by military prosecutors,” Alexander Selentsov, an official from prosecutors in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok, told the Interfax news agency.