President to visit Kazakhstan

As APA reports, the summit scheduled for June 17 in Almaty will bring together nine heads of state from 17 member states as well as prime ministers and other high ranking officials from several other states. Presidents of Azerbaijan, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and several other states are invited to the summit.

The discussions at the summit will focus on the ongoing processes in Asia, problems and solution ways of these problems, and documents will be adopted. These will be a treaty on establishing CICA's permanent secretariat in Almaty, Resolution and final decision of the second summit.

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan is expected to sign a treaty on delivery of Kazakh oil via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Main Export Oil Pipeline on June 16. The high ranking officials of the CICA member states will hold a preparatory meeting for the summit in Almaty tomorrow.

The CICA, a forum aimed at increasing security in Asia like OSCE, was first proposed by Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the 47th UN General Assembly in 1992. Its 17 members include Azerbaijan, China, Afghanistan, Palestine, India, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Thailand and Turkey.

The US, Australia, Indonesia, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Ukraine, Vietnam and Japan are represented as observers at the CICA. The UN and OSCE have also observer status in the forum.

The first summit of heads of states of the CICA member states took place in 2002 in Almaty. Azerbaijan’s Prime Minister Arthur Rasizadeh attended that summit.