Paramilitaries from CIS countries are being drilled to take part in sabotage and terror acts against coalition forces. These are certainly alarming facts. "As we know, purposeful and smoothly planned terrorist training is going on in Afghanistan to plant terrorists in other countries," said the minister. Recent dramatic developments in Uzbekistan had come to illustrate his point, he added.
Last May's popular unrest in Andizhan, major Uzbek city and provincial center, were masterminded in Afghanistan. "The information we possess on that score is reliable enough. What took place in Andizhan had been plotted in Afghanistan.
"An armed paramilitary force that represented the Taliban and other [violent] Islamic organizations had long been preparing to invade Uzbekistan.
"That is why, as an all-round investigation of the Uzbek events is underway, the following questions are to find an answer, first of all-who arranged the riots, how and with whose help," Ivanov said to the Council.
As official information circulated by Uzbek authorities has it, the Andizhan Region was the site of many terror acts and bandit attacks in the night of May 12 and throughout the next day. 173 died in the terror acts.
Russia is greatly concerned about the overall situation in Afghanistan, the minister stressed to the conferees. Anti-government groups remain active, and violence by the Taliban, the Islamic Party of Afghanistan and Al-Qayeda is not subsiding.
All that is going on against a background of Afghan ethnic minorities dissatisfied as before, and ambiguous political developments related to preparations for an election to parliament's lower house. The situation hampers efforts to normalize life in Afghanistan and promote its emergent statehood.
Present-day international and Afghan official efforts against drug manufacture and trafficking do not suffice to cope with it, Ivanov warned once again.
"As we see it, international forces ought to do more to combat drug manufacture and traffic," he said.
Current attempts to establish democracy lack due consideration for local specifics and ethnic customs and traditions, and so do not promote shifting Afghanistan-as any other country, for that matter-to peacetime arrangements, Ivanov stressed.
