Euro-reporters, Belgium
June 30 2005

OSCE’s future

Written by Brussels journalist David Ferguson
Thursday, 30 June 2005

“What the 55 States of the OSCE need to do is to rediscover a sense
of common purpose in addressing issues that are common to them all. I
hope that the recommendations contained in this report will help to
work towards that end,” says OSCE Chair-in-Office, and Slovenian
Foreign Minister, Dimitrij Rupel. An all-male ‘Panel of Eminent
Persons’ today presented a 32-page report on strengthening the
55-nation security Organization.

The report, entitled ‘Common Purpose’, comes just ahead of a meeting
in Washington of nearly 300 parliamentarians from the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (1-5 July). Since enlargement
of the European Union in May 2004 to include Central European and
Baltic states, as well as Cyprus and Malta, pan-European and regional
organizations like the Council of Europe and the OSCE have been
forced to consider major rethinks.

Other pressure came from Russia. The Kremlin earlier this year put
pressure on the OSCE by holding up payments to the ~@168 million
budget. The spat with Moscow was less about money but more about the
30-year old OSCE redefining itself as a democratic quality assurance
authority. OSCE election monitoring in Georgia and Ukraine, and
complaints about rigged Belarus polls, were seen by the Kremlin as
allowing pro-Western opposition parties sweep to power following
rigged elections. “Russia wants to make a point. It wants less of
human rights and human security and more focus on military, economic
and environmental issues,” Dutch ambassador to the OSCE Daan Everts
told the International Herald Tribune.

For Russian Duma deputy Leonid Ivanchenko, the OSCE has engaged in
too much finger-pointing only at former Communist countries in
Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “Out of 20 OSCE missions functioning
today six operate in the Balkans, five in Central Asia, three in the
Caucasus, and six in Eastern Europe,” notes Ivanchenko. “There is not
a single mission west of Vienna – as if there exist no Northern
Ireland, Cyprus, the Basque Country or Corsica with their problems.”
Too often, Ivanchenko feels, the OSCE fails to criticize abuse of
human rights and democratic freedoms in the US or other Western
members of the OSCE.

Ivanchenko’s views, together with those of other OSCE
parliamentarians, were handed over last Friday in a report on the
‘Future of the OSCE’ by OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President,
Florida Congressman Alcee L. Hastings to OSCE chair Dimitrij Rupel.
One of the rapporteurs with views diametrically opposed to those of
Ivanchenko was Flemish MP Pieter De Crem. “During the last decade of
the twentieth century, the Balkans were the OSCE’s main area of
operation,” states De Crem.

“Now that other institutions ~V the UN, the EU and NATO ~V are
increasingly involved in reconstruction, state building and security,
we feel that the OSCE could increasingly shift its attention and
resources towards areas where the OSCE space, the former Soviet Union
and the Muslim cultural spheres meet and overlap each other: Central
Asia and the Caucasus,” continues De Crem, whose report will also be
discussed at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Washington.

Like many of the other 300 OSCE parliamentarians, De Crem also wants
more democratic accountability from the OSCE chair and secretariat in
Vienna. “We not only need the willingness of the executive branch of
the OSCE to accept that the PA, like any parliamentary assembly, asks
the OSCE-chairmanship and the OSCE-agencies to justify its actions on
a number of policy issues, but also to give the PA the appropriate
instruments to do so,” he notes.

De Crem also wants a debate on whether the name ‘Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe’ is too euro-centric. “Given the
Cold War background of the Helsinki initiative and the CSCE~Rs initial
quality of meeting platform for NATO and Warsaw Pact states, and as
long as the OSCE~Rs operational focus was on the Balkans and
Southeastern Europe, the emphasis on Europe in the OSCE~Rs name made
sense,” he writes.

“Almost one and a half decade after the demise of the Soviet Union,
the OSCE groups eight member states that are technically situated in
Asia and one key player, the Russian Federation, that is genuinely
Eurasian,” continues De Crem. “Moreover, the southern ex-Soviet
republics border the Middle East and face situations that are
increasingly infulenced by developments in the latter region.
Therefore, we could consider whether after 30 years, ‘from Vancouver
to Vladivostok’ reflects a Atlantic-Eurasian more than a strictly
European cooperation.”

OSCE parliamentarians’ meeting in Washington will be addressed by top
officials including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and OSCE
Chair-in-Office, Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel. Also on
the agenda are issues ranging from anti-semitism, gender equality,
election observations, Nagorno-Karabakh, the continued Russian
occupation of Abkhazia (Georgia) and Transnistria (Moldova), human
trafficking, and democratic rights.