Chinese President Hu Jintao, at the invitation of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, arrived in Almaty on Friday to attend the second summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), which is to be held on Saturday.

The following is a brief introduction to CICA:

CICA is a mechanism aimed at uniting Asian countries and strengthening their relations and cooperation, in a bid to stabilize and safeguard the region.

The initiative on convening CICA was put forward by Nazarbayev at the 47th session of the UN General Assembly in 1992.

CICA currently comprises 17 members -- Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Iran, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

Nine countries -- Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, the United States, Ukraine and Japan -- have observer status in CICA.

International and regional organizations, including the United Nations, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the League of Arab States, and Central-Asian Economic Community, also participate in the work of CICA.

The territory of CICA participants, with a total area of 38.8 million square km, makes up about 89 percent of all the territory of the Asian region and 72 percent of the territories of the Eurasian continent. There live more than 2.8 billion people, accounting for 45 percent of the world population.

Since October 1992 when Nazarbayev put forward the idea of creating CICA, the development process of the organization has passed two stages and is presently on the third stage.

During the first stage, several meetings of experts of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Asian countries were held. The expert concluded that the disagreements existing in the region should not become an obstacle to the creation by the countries in the region of the common approaches to the problem of security and cooperation.

The main result of the second stage was a meeting of the foreign ministers of CICA member states on Sept. 14, 1999 in Almaty. The foreign ministers signed the first official document of the Conference -- the Declaration of the Principles, regulating the relations between CICA member states. The document became the important promotion of the initiative on creation of the multilateral mechanism of security and cooperation in Asia.

The third stage began after the meeting of foreign ministers in Almaty on Sept. 14, 1999 and culminated at CICA's first summit on June 4, 2002. The most important result at the summit was the signing of CICA's principal document -- Almaty Act.

On Oct. 22, 2004, a two-day meeting of foreign ministers of CICA member states was held in Almaty, at which the Catalogue of Confidence Building Measures (CBM), the Rules of Procedure and Ministerial Declaration were adopted. The documents summarized CICA's two-year work since the 2002 summit.

CICA's current plans are to further develop the body's process, through a series of senior officials and foreign ministers meetings as well as head of states summits which will convene on a four-year basis.

Source: Xinhua