OSCE “REFORM” — OR A NEW LEASE ON LIFE?

Documents of the OSCE’s 2004 year-end ministerial conference, Vienna and Sofia,
December 1-8; Interfax, RIA-Novosti, December 9-12

By Vladimir Socor

With two weeks remaining from the OSCE’s 2004 budgetary authorization,
Moscow threatens to block adoption of the 2005 budget unless the
organization introduces Russian-proposed “reforms.” Those proposals
seek to: boost the OSCE’s role in the military-political and security
sphere, where Russia can and does manipulate the organization;
emasculate the OSCE in the democracy sphere, where the organization
can and does operate independently of Russia; and curtail overall
Western influence in the OSCE by restricting extra-budgetary funding
of the organization.

Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, Deputy Minister
Vladimir Chizhov, and other officials pushed those proposals forcefully
at the OSCE’s year-end conference in Sofia on December 6-7, and
continue to do so afterwards. Moscow argues that OSCE activities are
doubly imbalanced: functionally, by focusing selectively on democracy
issues while neglecting all-European military-security issues; and
geographically, by focusing on political developments in post-Soviet
countries while ignoring what Moscow describes as flawed elections
and human-rights violations in Western countries and their new allies.

The “reform” proposals target three OSCE institutions and processes:
the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights
(ODIHR), which specializes in monitoring elections throughout the OSCE
area; the organization’s field missions; and its budget-formation
procedures. Russian officials continually refer to reform proposals
advanced by the presidents of eight CIS countries in their July 3 and
September 15 collective statements to the OSCE. At the Sofia year-end
meeting, however, only Belarus acted as a convinced supporter of
those reform proposals.

The joint Russia-Belarus proposal calls for tasking ODIHR to: take into
account the work done in the CIS on developing election standards; use
those standards, alongside Western ones, in working out a “common,
uniform set of criteria” for OSCE-CIS appraisals of elections;
increase the proportion of CIS countries’ representatives in ODIHR
election observation missions; finance election observation through
the OSCE’s unified budget only [i.e., disallowing Western countries’
contributions; these do not require Russian approval, whereas the
unified budget does].

Russia and Belarus gave the OSCE until June 30, 2005, to introduce
these changes, and the organization’s Permanent Council to adopt
new political guidelines for OSCE/ODIHR election monitoring in line
with those changes. In a similar vein, the statement by CIS Executive
Committee Chairman and Executive Secretary Vladimir Rushailo called for
“coordination” of OSCE/ODIHR and CIS election observation missions,
with a view to issuing “joint assessments” of elections. As is often
the case, Russia spoke on the collective behalf of the CIS without
reflecting a consensus among those 12 countries. In the end-game
negotiations on the draft final declaration, Armenia proposed inserting
a positive reference to developing a common OSCE-CIS set of election
standards. Armenia had similarly lined up behind Russia and Belarus
in accepting the fraudulent election of Viktor Yanukovych as president
of Ukraine.

Had such “reforms” been in place, OSCE/ODIHR could not have ascertained
the electoral fraud in Ukraine, would have joined the Rushailo-led CIS
monitoring mission in blessing the fraudulent returns, and would have
been prevented from deciding — as it did at Sofia — to send and fund
observers to the repeat runoff in Ukraine. To “reform” the OSCE’s field
missions, Russia proposes to: restrict the missions’ extra-budgetary
funding, which mostly consists of above-board contributions by
Western countries to local pro-democracy activities; confine the
scope of missions’ activities to socioeconomic projects requested by
host countries’ authorities; limit the missions’ mandate to one-year
renewable terms, subject to the host government’s agreement each time;
and increase the proportion of representatives of certain CIS member
countries in OSCE field missions. The organization’s German-led Minsk
Office was “reformed” already in 2003 along these lines.

The proposed budgetary “reform” would entail: revising the scales of
OSCE member countries’ contributions “according to their ability to
pay” [i.e., reducing CIS countries’ contributions]; ending or curbing
the practice of extra-budgetary funding of the OSCE in general
[thus cutting the organization’s overall financial resources];
and establishing budget formation procedures that would, in their
practical effect, severely restrict the OSCE’s ability to function
without Russia’s or its supporters’ approval.

Russia gave the OSCE until December 31 to commit itself to proceeding
down this road. “In the absence of firm obligations on this score, we
cannot vote the 2005 budget,” Lavrov and Chizhov both warned. Their
statements and those of other Russian officials before, during, and
after the Sofia meeting strongly suggested that Russia can either
keep the OSCE in business or push it toward demise (“throw it on the
sidelines of history,” in Lavrov’s unreferenced paraphrase of Trotsky),
depending on the extent to which it cooperates with Russian policies.
Such warnings exploit the OSCE’s structural vulnerabilities, fear
of demise through irrelevance, awareness of its rapidly diminishing
raisons d’etre — save election-monitoring, which Moscow now wants to
rein in — and its disposition to give in to Russia year after year in
the military-security sphere as a price of remaining a player in that
sphere. Anxious about institutional survival, and damaged by Russia
perhaps irreparably at the 2002 Porto and 2003 Maastricht year-end
meetings over a wide range of security and democracy issues, the OSCE
hides its weaknesses and failures from public view. It prefers to
paper over the problems, instead of debating them openly and exposing
Russia’s tactics.

At the Sofia meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that the
United States “categorically disagreed” with Russian proposals to shift
OSCE’s focus away from democracy building in post-Soviet countries. The
European Union spoke out in a similar vein. Dutch Minister of
Foreign Affairs Bernard Bot, speaking for the EU’s presidency on
behalf of all member countries, as well as the External Relations
and European Neighborhood Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, both
ruled out any reduction of OSCE democracy-building activities, or a
“rebalancing” of security and pro-democracy goals at the expense
of the latter. Whether this stance, taken in the year-end meeting’s
media limelight, can hold in the non-transparent give-and-take with
Russia. The OSCE’s incoming Slovenian Chairmanship for 2005 sounds
anxious. According to that country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, OSCE
Chairman-in-Office-designate Dimitrji Rupel, in his closing statement
at Sofia, “Foremost among these challenges . . . is the fissure in
relations [between] East and West. As a stark reflection of this
regrettable reality . . . the more we talk of no new dividing lines
in Europe, the more we are confronted with them. I therefore read
carefully the Moscow declaration and Astana address of Presidents
of CIS states . . . a resounding expression of dissatisfaction at
the highest level, which has to be taken into account. I intend to
work relentlessly to address this situation.” Pointing to the urgent
need to adopt the 2005 budget before the end of 2004, Rupel stated,
“Without this, the very functioning of the organization would be
in jeopardy . . . . My biggest concern at the moment is to avert a
political stalemate in the organization.”

If that concern is overriding — and Russian tactics are indeed
designed to make it the overriding concern for the OSCE — then the
temptation may well persist to ensure the organization’s survival
through continuing concessions to Russia regarding the “frozen
conflicts,” CFE Treaty and Istanbul Commitment implementation, border
monitoring, and other security issues, as well as using the OSCE to
reopen ethnic issues in Estonia and Latvia at Russian insistence.
That approach would only deepen the OSCE’s crisis.

Russian duress and for the third consecutive year, the OSCE at Sofia
was unable even to cite its own earlier resolutions; let alone call,
if only symbolically, for their implementation. The organization lost
the final vestiges of its credibility in the security sphere at the
Sofia meeting.

That repeat failure, however, points the OSCE’s way out of
crisis. Election monitoring, promotion of good governance, and
democratic institution building in post-Soviet countries are compelling
raisons d’etre for the organization. It is in the democracy sphere
that the OSCE can bring its comparative advantages to bear. This,
not Russian-prescribed “reforms,” can provide the OSCE with a new
lease on life.