Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
06USOSCE246
2006-06-12 16:17:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Mission USOSCE
Cable title:  

WHITHER GOEST OSCE: A DEPARTING PERSONAL VIEW

Tags:  OSCE PREL 
pdf how-to read a cable
VZCZCXRO5979
PP RUEHDBU RUEHFL RUEHLA RUEHMRE RUEHROV RUEHSR
DE RUEHVEN #0246/01 1631617
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 121617Z JUN 06
FM USMISSION USOSCE
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 4009
INFO RUCNOSC/ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY COOPERATION IN EUROPE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 USOSCE 000246 

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/12/2016
TAGS: OSCE PREL
SUBJECT: WHITHER GOEST OSCE: A DEPARTING PERSONAL VIEW


Classified By: USOSCE Political Counselor Bruce Connuck, for reasons
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 USOSCE 000246

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/12/2016
TAGS: OSCE PREL
SUBJECT: WHITHER GOEST OSCE: A DEPARTING PERSONAL VIEW


Classified By: USOSCE Political Counselor Bruce Connuck, for reasons 1.
4 (b)(d)

=======
Summary
=======


2. (C) OSCE is doing very valuable, if often unheralded,
work in a broad range of areas of importance to the United
States. As an organization it was extraordinarily successful
in adapting to the dramatic changes in Europe throughout the
1990's, reinventing itself as an action organization doing
concrete practical work rather than remaining focused on
establishing overarching norms and principles. While OSCE's
election-monitoring activities and efforts to help resolve
post-Soviet conflicts like Transnistria, South Ossetia and
Nagorno-Karabakh have rightly risen to public attention and
attracted the appreciative interest of policymakers, it is
OSCE's less visible day-in, day-out practical work on
democratic capacity building, development of civil society,
and post-conflict stabilization and reconciliation that may
prove its most enduring legacy.


3. (C) But, success in the past does not ensure continued
success. For a variety of reasons, many of the conditions
that made success possible in the 90's have changed, often in
ways that decrease prospects for future success. In this
observer's view, the organization's ability to perform
exactly those functions of greatest interest to the United
States is under threat, and in fact has already been eroded.
It is not at all clear that, looking ahead 2-5 years, OSCE
will still be the vibrant organization that it is today,
doing "real" hands on practical work to further democratic
transformation. That is not a foregone conclusion, and
OSCE's value makes it worth fighting hard to preserve. But
with the dual constraints of the consensus rule and shrinking
resources reducing our options, the U.S. and its allies are
increasingly fighting a defensive battle to preserve what we
value -- and bit-by-bit losing it. Absent significant
changes in approach to OSCE by Russia and several other CIS
states, in this observer's view we may well be confronted in
the not-too-distant future with making a choice between
maintaining an organization that primarily talks in Vienna
and does little work in the field, or deciding that C/OSCE

has run its natural course and should be wrapped up. End
Summary.

========================
There's a Lot to Love...
========================


4. (C) Little that OSCE does is dramatic or
headline-grabbing, but much of its regular work on democratic
transformation, promoting tolerance, and post-conflict
reconciliation and stabilization is making a genuine
contribution to the creation of a more stable, democratic
Eurasia. In the Balkans, Caucasus, Ukraine and, even, in
parts of Central Asia, OSCE field missions are helping
societies develop the governmental and non-governmental tools
to carry out their own transformations and to take their fate
into their own hands. Over the past fifteen years, OSCE has
gained recognition as a leader in developing programs, and
providing expertise, in such critical areas as electoral
system and judicial reform, civil society development, and
inter-communal communication and reconciliation. More
recently, OSCE has become an increasingly valued source of
expertise for transforming the police forces of former
authoritarian regimes into modern professional forces suited
to democratic societies; for highlighting the appalling
problem of trafficking in human beings and developing tool
kits for both the victim protection and law enforcement sides
of the issue; and for focusing attention at the most senior
levels of governments on the growing problem of intolerance
within societies related to religion, ethnicity and migration
issues. It is worth stressing that OSCE began serious work
on the latter issue -- largely instigated by the United
States -- before it became a front-burner headline issue in
Europe in the wake of the Danish "cartoons" problem.


5. (C) OSCE has also played a critical role for over a
decade in seeking peaceful, negotiated solutions to the
separatist conflicts in Moldova and the Caucasus. Its Minsk
Group has been the international community's lead in
mediating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and OSCE field
missions in Chisinau and Tbilisi have been the main western
"foot in the door" in efforts to resolve the Transnistrian
and South Ossetian conflicts. Absent OSCE, Georgia and
Moldova would have been left basically one-on-one at the
negotiating table with the Russians and separatists.


6. (C) Many of the areas of OSCE activity described above
are, of course, also the focus of other organizations' work,
and of many national bilateral programs, as well. It is

USOSCE 00000246 002 OF 004


unarguable that duplication, even competition, occurs at
times. That said, there are many places where OSCE has a
unique combination of both presence and broad mandate that
cannot be matched by others. Its lack of rigid structures
has, in the past, given OSCE the flexibility to respond both
to changing circumstances and new opportunities in ways that
more formal, perhaps hidebound, organizations find difficult.
And, as a multinational organization, OSCE has the ability
to marshal input and funding from a broad range of donors for
common projects and thus enabling activities that would be
difficult for any single donor, including the United States,
to do on its own.

========================
...But Not Everyone Does
========================


7. (C) Unfortunately, it is almost exactly the list of
things that the United States and western Europeans most
value in OSCE that gives the most heartburn to the Russians
and some other CIS and Balkan states, though the specific
likes and dislikes vary even within that group. Briefly, the
main formal complaints boil down to:

-- "Interference in internal affairs" when criticisms are
made of countries' human rights practices or lack of
commitment to democratic transformation;

-- "Imbalance" between the almost constant commentary and
criticism and OSCE Institutions' attention devoted to
participating States "east (and south) of Vienna," while (in
their view) human rights and democratization problems in many
established democracies allegedly get ignored;

-- "Imbalance" in the significant attention devoted to OSCE's
Human Dimension, in contrast to that given the
Political/Security and Economic and Environmental
Dimensions;" and

-- OSCE's lack of formal legal status and more formal and
rigid institutional structures, that allow too much autonomy
to Institutions and field missions and a lack of
participating State control (i.e. veto power) over many OSCE
programs and activities.

Less openly stated as a motivation, of course, is Russia's
compelling interest in preserving maximum control over and
influence in its "Near Abroad." OSCE is increasingly viewed
by Moscow as a "tool" of the U.S. and EU for expanding their
own influence in the CIS and for undermining Moscow-friendly
authoritarians under the guise of democratic transformation.
The incumbent authoritarians naturally share Russia's
interest in preventing "color revolutions" on their own
territories.

=====================
The Real (OSCE) World
=====================


8. (C) The real question for U.S. policymakers is: "If we
like OSCE just the way it is, why can't we just say no to
attempts to change it? Why engage at all on so-called reform
issues" being pushed by Russia and other OSCE detractors?
Unfortunately, OSCE's reality is that it takes consensus to
maintain the status quo, much more than it takes consensus to
change it. There are two compelling facts of life dominating
OSCE today:

-- The requirement for consensus for every formal OSCE
decision on every topic; and

-- The increasing unwillingness of many participating States,
including many in the West, to finance the organization's
activities -- even those they may like.


9. (C) Over the past 5-6 years, there has been a growing
readiness of participating States to veto, or threaten to
veto, activities of which they disapprove. This is done
either in discussion of specific substantive or procedural
decisions, or through the budget approval process. Both the
budget and the extension of OSCE field mission mandates must
be approved, by consensus decision, every year, and the
process is becoming bitterly contentious and acrimonious.


10. (C) Notable casualties of the process, despite intensive
efforts by the U.S. and allies to prevent them, have included
termination of OSCE's presence in Chechnya at the end of 2002
and of the Georgia Border Monitoring Mission at the end of
2004 -- both due to Russian veto. (The Russians, in turn,
point to the termination of the Estonia and Latvia field
missions at the end of 2001, over vehement Russian
objections, as the precedent setter for vetoing mission
mandate extensions.) We have also seen the conversion of the

USOSCE 00000246 003 OF 004


mandates of a number of field missions from open-ended (not
subject to periodic consensus extension) to limited duration
mandates subject to regular renewal and, therefore, veto.
The latter development has led, in turn, to many mandates
being renegotiated -- at the insistence of the host state --
in an effort to bring mission activities more directly under
host government control and supervision. In most (not all)
such cases, the impetus has been an authoritarian regime's
discomfort with field mission efforts to promote civil
society and democratic transformation.


11. (C) The budget process is the other tool that is helping
erode OSCE's ability to further U.S. goals and interests.
Even as OSCE has added entire new areas of important activity
in recent years (e.g. counterterrorism, anti-trafficking in
human beings, promotion of tolerance),its budget has
steadily shrunk. The result is that less and less money is
being spread among more and more activities, and the new
activities, which often have broad support, get higher
precedence for funding. For some, e.g. the UK and Germany,
restricting OSCE budgets is an imperative of domestic
financial constraints. Others, like Russia, adamantly insist
on a lower overall budget figure each year for alleged
financial reasons, but also insist on putting the available
money into areas that better "balance" (i.e. that they like)
OSCE's overall focus among the three dimensions. They make
little pretence about that meaning less money for the Human
Dimension. They, and others, also increasingly insist on
conversion of seconded positions (mostly provided by the
West) to contracted ones paid for from the budget. In the
current budget situation, that means that every Euro of
additional personnel costs will come from the hide of
programs and activities.


12. (C) It must be clearly understood: under present
circumstances, the budget debates of recent years are, and
are intended by some to be, a zero-sum game. If the U.S. and
others are not prepared to fight for adequate (i.e.
increased) funding -- including putting in our own share --
we can gradually kiss goodbye to much of what we value here.

===============
What Can We Do?
===============


13. (C) USOSCE has made a determined effort over the past
four years to be responsive to the concerns, where legitimate
(and some are) of Russia and a range of other delegations.
More than any other participating State, the U.S. has
developed and put forward proposals for enhancing OSCE's work
outside the Human Dimension, primarily in the
Political/Security field. The Annual Security Review
Conference was a U.S. initiative that was warmly welcomed by
Russia and many other participating States. The U.S. has
done more than any other delegation to develop practical OSCE
efforts to aid counterterrorism efforts, some that we have
deliberately proposed as joint U.S.-Russia initiatives. The
U.S., with its major push for an OSCE initiative to combat
rising anti-Semitism in Europe, prompted what has become a
major focus of the organization on tolerance issues in the
broadest sense. We have made consistent and intensive
efforts to seek areas of cooperation with other delegations
and to improve consultation and communication with those that
feel ignored or left out of OSCE decision-making.


14. (C) These efforts have paid some dividends in increased
goodwill and, at some key moments, in convincing Russia to
defer pushing maximal and confrontational demands that would
have brought OSCE's work to a screeching halt. We need to
continue these efforts, no matter how frustrating they may at
times be. This is so both because they at times actually
produce constructive results and because we are also fighting
a battle of perception in OSCE.


15. (C) We have to clearly understand that there are many
participating States that are upset about various aspects of
OSCE practice and activities, but which do not want to
destroy the organization. They often sit on a very narrow
rail between giving in to resentment and frustration, and
working constructively to try to find solutions. Bending
over backwards to show our readiness to deal with their
concerns and to appear reasonable and open to new ideas is an
essential element of our broader effort to marshal support
for resisting encroachments on OSCE work of value to us. We
never will turn round those like Russia, Belarus and some of
the Central Asians who view OSCE's activities as a threat.
But we can keep the Southeast Europeans and even some of the
Central Asians on board and engaged by reaching out to them.
The worst mistake we can make would be to write off all the
concerns and complaints about OSCE as being exclusively a
"Russia problem," and thus ignore genuine (and, again, at
times legitimate) concerns of a broad spectrum of delegations.


USOSCE 00000246 004 OF 004



16. (C) It is also essential that we continue our close
collaboration with the EU. For all the occasional ups and
downs, this has, overall, been excellent, and it is an
absolute prerequisite for efforts to defend western values in
OSCE. While U.S.-EU unity in OSCE never guarantees success,
its absence almost guarantees failure on key issues.


17. (C) In the end, however, we must recognize that there
are real and growing limits on our ability to achieve our
goals in OSCE, no matter how creative and engaged we might
be. A small minority of participating States have vital
interests (like literal regime or personal survival in some
cases) that they view as being under threat from OSCE
activities. At the point that any or all of them conclude
that the perceived threat is intolerable, they have the power
effectively to shut down most OSCE activity, though it may
take a full budget/mission mandate renewal cycle to achieve
rather than occurring instantly. If things come to that
point, we can't stop them.


18. (C) While it is not an appealing or positive approach,
in some ways our best, or least bad, strategy would be to
decide what the non-negotiable bottom line for us really is;
fight as hard as possible on every other issue to delay
further damage and avoid getting to our redlines; and to hope
that eventual change in Moscow and other capitals will change
OSCE's prospects for the better before it is irretrievably
harmed. The latter hope is not one to bet one's pension on.

SCOTT