Kyrgyzstan's president threatened Wednesday to expel U.S. troops if the United States does not agree by June 1 to pay more for stationing forces in the Central Asian nation.
About 1,000 troops are stationed at an air base set up in December 2001 at Kyrgyzstan's main civilian airport near the capital, Bishkek. Most are American but there are also small French and Spanish contingents.
The facility is used as a transit point for troops going to or coming from Afghanistan and is a base for tanker planes that refuel military craft in Afghanistan.
"Kyrgyzstan reserves the right to consider ending the agreement" on the deployment of U.S. forces in the ex-Soviet republic, where they are based for operations in nearby Afghanistan, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said on state television.
He said the government could terminate the agreement if talks on new financial terms of the U.S. military deployment do not end successfully before June 1.
The U.S. Embassy had no immediate comment.
Bakiyev's statement sends a worrying signal to Washington, which lost its other base in former Soviet Central Asia last year when Uzbekistan expelled U.S. troops following Western criticism of the government's bloody May 2005 crackdown on demonstrators.
It also comes amid Russian concern about the U.S. presence in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan also hosts a Russian air base, 12 miles east of Bishkek, and last summer a regional security body led by Russia and China called for the United States and its allies to set a date for the withdrawal of their forces from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Bakiyev, who is scheduled to pay an official visit to Moscow next week, said that "our partners in regional and other organizations have expressed certain concern over the presence of a U.S. military base on Kyrgyzstan's territory."
Later Wednesday, he warned of unspecified "foreign forces that consider Kyrgyzstan as a sphere of their interests and want not our economic development, but our dependence on them."
"We cannot depend on any country," he said at a meeting with opposition and civic leaders.
Bakiyev was quoted in a newspaper interview in February as saying that Kyrgyzstan sought to increase U.S. payments for the base from $2 million to $207 million. It was unclear what time period the amount referred to.
U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on Monday said Washington was "ready to provide a higher compensation for the base," but did not give figures, the Akipress news agency reported.
Bakiyev came to power after a March 2005 uprising drove out President Askar Akayev, who had led Kyrgyzstan since the latter days of the Soviet Union.
The U.S. Embassy has been critical of Bakiyev's government for holding up promised democratic reforms and failing to fight organized crime.
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