Thursday, June 07, 2012 -
China on Thursday pledged to provide up to $10 billion in credit to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member countries.
The funding aims to boost growth within the SCO membership, which groups Central Asian states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as China and Russia, according to the Xinhua news agency.
China’s President Hu Jintao made that offer during a two-day SCO summit in Beijing, which wound up on Thursday.
The SCO meeting also agreed to appoint a former governor of Russia’s Siberian Irkutsk region to the post of secretary-general, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. Dmitry Mezentsev will serve in the position from the start of 2013 to the end of 2015.
Mezentsev lost the recent Russian presidential race to Vladimir Putin, who proposed he be given the SCO’s top spot.
Putin, who is representing Russia at the summit of SCO heads, also proposed that the group sets up an anti-terror center to confront what it calls the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism.
“We can achieve success in this direction by establishing a universal center to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, and organized crime in the SCO,” RIA Novosti reported the Russian president as saying.