Eric's Insight: SCO and NATO -- peace maker vs war monger

The 22nd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is going on in the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Over two decades after its establishment, the SCO has emerged as a role model for regional peace and international cooperation.

Originating in east China’s mega city of Shanghai, the organization has been putting into practice the tenets of “mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diversity of civilizations and pursuit of common development.”

With India and Pakistan winning its membership in 2017, the SCO has grown to be the most populous regional organization in the world, accounting for almost half of the world’s population.

And by acting as a pillar of global peace and development, the young but original inter-governmental organization to the west coast of the Pacific has made a sharp contrast to the out-dated and rigid North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The SCO was officially established in 2001 to give impetus to regional economic cooperation and cultural exchanges, but it was actually born out of a series of border demarcation and demilitarization talks among the original Shanghai Five countries of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.

Therefore, the SCO is peaceful in nature, serving as a peace maker. “Security cooperation remains the biggest pillar for the SCO, and most of the results achieved over the past 20 plus years have been relevant to security,” said Li Yongquan, director of the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In crisis-ridden Central Asia, the SCO has taken the lead in curbing terrorism, separatism and extremism, and it thus helped maintain regional peace and stability, providing a good environment for member states to focus on development. Without the SCO, Central Asia could have fallen into chaos.

The recent years also saw SCO put more efforts into people-to-people exchanges among its member states. The SCO-China Centre for Youth Exchanges opened in Yunnan province in December 2017, and the SCO Kunming International Marathon was held annually to boost regional friendship.

While the SCO was making peace, the NATO was mongering war. Born out of power politics and the US-USSR confrontation in the wake of World War II, the US-led military alliance has a fighting gene, initiating the deadly Cold War that lasted for over four decades.

When the Shanghai Five was talking about demilitarization in Asia in the late 1990s, the NATO was air-striking the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and shamelessly attacked the Chinese Embassy in the country, killing three journalists and injuring dozens of staffers.

In the 2000s and 2010s, a great times of globalization and economic integration, the SCO was pursuing win-win cooperation in peace, economy and culture across Eurasia, but the NATO was busy with the Iraq War, the Syrian War and War in Afghanistan, agitating color revolutions here and there across the globe.

Now, the US-led NATO is gearing up for supporting Ukraine in the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict, for which the NATO expansion in eastern Europe was the root cause. In the Asia Pacific, the military block is trying to contain China with an Asian version of NATO, represented by the Quad exercises.

In spite of these, the NATO actions are doomed to be a failure for its narrow mindedness and war-mongering nature. Looking into either history or today’s Ukraine, we can clearly see the horror and destruction on the battle field, so the war agitators will surely be opposed by the international community.

At present, more than 10 countries hoped to join the SCO or upgrade their legal status within it. At the on-going SCO summit in Samarkand, Iran will be accepted as a full member, and the procedures for Belarus to be a member will be initiated.

Cambodia, Nepal, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Maldives and others will be promising observer members or dialogue partners of the SCO. With more peace-loving countries joining in the SCO, we will definitely see a more secure Euro-Asia continent featuring win-win cooperation and lasting prosperity.

(The writer Eric Wang Shixue is an English editor with the Mekong News Network based in Kunming, Yunnan province. The view in the article does not necessarily represent that of Yunnan Gateway.)