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OSCE’S YEAR-END MEETING: QUIET SURVIVAL THROUGH MINIMAL RELEVANCE
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 2 Issue: 219
By:
In the likely event of its adoption, the draft ministerial declaration of the OSCE’s
upcoming year-end conference is already setting a record on two counts: brevity and
irrelevance. The year-end political declarations (and documents attached to them in
some cases) traditionally serve as the main yardstick for the success or failure of
the ministerial conference, of the OSCE itself for the year, and of the
organization’s Chairmanship.
In most years, the final declarations were lengthy, comprehensive, and ambitious
documents. However, an increasingly aggressive Russia confronted the organization
with the dilemma of either giving in to Moscow’s geopolitical agenda or giving up on
issuing year-end declarations. The OSCE resolved this dilemma by sacrificing Georgia
and Moldova to Russia at the 2002 Porto year-end conference, then by standing up
half-way (and amid agony) to Russia at the 2003 Maastricht and 2004 Sofia year-end
conferences. There, only Russia’s winner-take-all intransigence prevented
compromises. Those two conferences failed to result in political declarations,
largely because Russia threatened to veto the position of most participant countries
on three interrelated issues: the conflicts in Georgia and Moldova and the Russian
obligation to withdraw its forces from those two countries under the
OSCE’s 1999 Istanbul summit decisions.
While the Maastricht and Sofia “failures” were in fact blessings in disguise,
because another Porto would have spelled the OSCE’s end, many felt that another year
with no consensus-based declaration in 2005 could be irreparably damage the
organization. Moreover, Russia used its veto to block the adoption of the
organization’s 2005 budget, then lifted the veto under an implied threat to use that
power again in 2006, unless the OSCE “reforms” itself to Moscow’s prescriptions on
international security and democracy standards. Thus, after three consecutive years
of shattered conferences and amid budgetary blackmail, the OSCE’s most influential
players have decided to turn the 2005 year-end conference into an exercise in sheer
survival.
The draft declaration reflects this overriding priority: institutional survival, at
the risk of courting irrelevance and at the cost of forfeited credibility. That risk
and that cost seem, perhaps logically from a bureaucratic perspective, preferable to
another agitated year-end conference with no final declaration and a sword of
Damocles hung by Moscow over the organization’s budget. The United States and
European Union are behind this cautious approach: both look with concern at the
prospect of the OSCE’s demise, though neither would identify Russia as the source of
their concern.
Thus, the year-end draft declaration marks a dramatic downscaling of the
organization’s declared ambitions, compared to earlier years. Even so, certain items
in the document ring particularly hollow. For example, the opening paragraph pays
homage to the Helsinki Final Act in the context of international security and
stability, ignoring the ongoing breaches of that Act in the Black Sea-South Caucasus
region. Forcible border changes, mass-scale ethnic cleansing, de facto annexation of
territories, and the stationing of foreign forces on other countries’ territories
are conveniently not mentioned.
The draft declaration would “support OSCE conflict-resolution efforts,” but shies
away from assessing the organization’s track record in that regard because the
record is too discouraging. It reaffirms a commitment to secure borders in the OSCE
area, ignoring Russia’s termination of the OSCE’s Georgia Border Monitoring
Operation (BMO) this year. That failure also caused the OSCE to lose the opportunity
of leading the Moldova-Ukraine border assistance mission, which the European Union
took over after watching the OSCE’s passive acceptance of the BMO’s termination.
The perennial issues related to frozen conflicts and the Istanbul commitments are
squeezed within a three-line paragraph that is the only bracketed paragraph, its
final wording yet to be agreed upon. It fails to name Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan,
Armenia, or Russia; it abandons even the routine OSCE language on territorial
integrity, inviolability of borders, and other basic principles; it mentions the
Istanbul commitments without naming any longer the country that undertook those
commitments and to whom the troops belong; and it avoids uttering the words
“withdrawal” or “forces,” although earlier OSCE documents spelled them out and even
added reinforcers (e.g., the orderly, undelayed, internationally observed withdrawal
of Russian forces).
This paragraph, if adopted in its present form, would again sacrifice Moldova. The
draft wording “welcome[s] the significant progress made toward fulfillment” of those
commitments,” a phrasing applicable to Russian forces in Georgia, but clearly not in
Moldova, where nothing has been withdrawn for about two years. By failing to make
that distinction (apparently because they decided to avoid naming countries in
deference to Russia), the drafters are failing to hold Russia accountable to that
part of its obligations, implicitly creating an impression of Russian overall
compliance with the Istanbul commitments.
(Draft Ministerial Declaration, OSCE Vienna, November 18)