up a new investment and export promotion corporation based on the two existing institutions, the KazInvest agency and the Marketing and Analytical Research Center. The corporation’s goal will be to “promote Kazakhstan’s export to other countries and attract investments from abroad for the development of the country’s non-extractive sectors.”

Kazakh Becomes SCO Secretary General

Ambassador Bolat K. Nurgaliyev, one of Kazakhstan’s most seasoned diplomats, officially assumed the powers of the first Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on the first of January.

Nurgaliyev, 55, spent the past decade serving as Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the United States of America, the Republic of Korea, and, most recently, Japan. He also served as Kazakhstan’s Deputy Foreign Minister in the mid-1990s.

The SCO, established in 2001, brings together Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, andUzbekistan. The organization originally started in 1996 as the Shanghai Group of five countries, excluding Uzbekistan, and was focused on mutual drawdown of troops and defusing tensions along the former Sino-Soviet border, stretching from the mountains of Pamir and Tian Shan in Central Asia to the Pacific coast. In 2001, the group changed its name to SCO and set itself the larger goals of fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism and promoting economic and cultural ties. In 2001, it also admitted Uzbekistan as its sixth member, the only country in the organization which does not border China.

Nurgaliyev’s candidacy for the new position of the SCO Secretary General was approved by the six heads of state at their summit meeting last year.

Speaking in Beijing, the location of SCO headquarters, on