The Diplomat’s Managing Editor Catherine Putz had a recent conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Lesslie Viguerie about the state of relations.
the United States and Kyrgyzstan hit a serious bump in bilateral relations. Less than a year after U.S. and NATO forces vacated the air base at Manas (June 2014), the U.S. State Department decided to give Azimjan Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek Kyrgyz political prisoner, its 2014 Human Rights Defender Award (he died in a Kyrgyz prison in 2020). Bishkek expressed its frustration by denouncing a 1993 bilateral cooperation agreement (BCA).
Cooperation continued, absent the BCA, but in the ensuing years the two sides repeatedly said they were working on a new agreement. Last year, both U.S. officials and the Kyrgyz president hinted that a new BCA was near.
The Diplomat’s Managing Editor Catherine Putz recently had the opportunity to interview current U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Lesslie Viguerie in Bishkek about the status of the BCA, possible evasion of sanctions on Russia via Kyrgyzstan, the state of media freedoms in the country, and a host of other critical issues in the Kyrgyzstan-U.S. relationship.
Obviously, we’re continuing with the wide range of cooperation across many fields, democracy and human rights being some of the more interesting areas, but also public health and energy. Kyrgyzstan plays a good role in C5+1, which we’re encouraging.
But no, the BCA has not been signed yet. Our perspective is that they’ll sign it when they’re ready to sign it, and we can continue to cooperate with Kyrgyzstan even without the BCA. But frankly, the BCA opens many more doors and would allow us to expand that level of cooperation which we want and which the Kyrgyz say they want.
So we’re waiting, but we’re not stopping.
Source : THEDIPLOMAT
