Statement
at the reinforced meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council,
July 17, 1998

On behalf of the Delegations of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine let me take this opportunity to share with the distinguished representatives some of our views concerning the SMC work. The basic positions of our Delegations on the main issues are well known, and we will have a chance to further present them in details in future meetings.

We are satisfied with the work going on in the SMC. Several Delegations have recently tabled documents containing interesting ideas. We would like to express our views concerning some of these papers.

We all have affirmed the OSCE's central role in ensuring stability and security, and in order to provide this the OSCE's capabilities should be enhanced. In this sense the Russian Federation's paper on strengthening the OSCE of May 28 and the comparative analysis of the provisions of the UN, OSCE, NACC on conflict prevention of June 18 are interesting documents.

The Russian paper of April 20 on conflict settlement activities and the US document of May 29 on the OSCE peacekeeping deal with the same issue. The difference in titles indeed means that we have to bring more clarity to the term "OSCE peacekeeping" and other related words, taking into account, in particular, the relevant UN experience. It is necessary to do this so as to avoid the expanded interpretation and sometimes even the misinterpretation of this notion. Our Delegations are going to present a separate document on the OSCE peacekeeping. Today we would limit ourselves to the following remarks.

The OSCE as a regional arrangement under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter is a primary organization for the peaceful settlement of disputes within its region, and its effectiveness for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, including peacekeeping operations should be certainly enhanced. A peacekeeping operation has to include peace enforcement. Peacekeeping forces could be composed of three elements: military personnel, police personnel and civil personnel.

Considering this, our Delegations appreciate proposals on the OSCE police operations tabled by Norway on May 29, the UKIEU on June 12 and the US on June 26. We consider police operations as further strengthening the OSCE tools and instruments in early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Our Delegations support the US approach reflected in President Clinton's May 13 speech in Berlin where training police to support peacekeeping missions was highlighted as a new practical tool for the OSCE to develop.

Our Delegations welcome the Swiss and German contribution to the issue of the rights of persons belonging to national minorities. Our Delegations touched upon this issue in the SMC statement of October 10, 1996.

The question of persons belonging to national minorities is a human dimension issue and has to be settled in the framework of democratic principles guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of all peoples irrespective of their ethnic, religious, racial appurtenance provided that the rights of these persons are preserved, which have to be ensured within the framework of an entire state and in peaceful conditions. The protection of human rights as follows from the Human Rights Declaration contains two elements that are interrelated, namely, the responsibility of those persons to the state and society, and the observance of fundamental freedoms and rights.

Our Delegations find valuable the documents on economic dimension proposed by the Delegations of the Russian Federation on June 4 and the UKIEU on June 19. We believe that economic problems of the countries with economies in transition have to be addressed by the OSCE.

Another important issue is a subregional dimension of security. In this connection we have to note the documents suggested by the German, Polish, French Delegations on May 29 and the Russian Federation on July 14. At the same time, the term "subregional" still needs to be clarified. We take the position that the subregion of the OSCE comprises the whole territory of a State or States located in any region, i.e. subregion of the OSCE area.

Let me also stress that the work over the document-charter should proceed simultaneously with the settlement of the regional conflicts. In this context, we would like to express our support to the Chairmanship's idea to convene a meeting of the OSCE Senior Council on the regional issues. This meeting will have to prepare necessary conditions for the Oslo Ministerial, which will provide an opportunity to see the OSCE landscape in its totality. Without the settlement of the conflicts in the OSCE region, one can hardly imagine that we will ever be able to complete our work on the document-charter. The OSCE will enter the XXI century equipped with the document-charter on European security only when these conflicts are resolved.

In this connection, a few words regarding the possibility of submitting the document-charter to the next OSCE summit. We would like to hope that a document agreed by all OSCE participating States, as well as the basic solutions of the conflicts would be ready by that time. However, if owing to the seriousness of the issues and scope of the problems this document is not ready by the time of the summit, the situation should not be over-dramatized. Nor should it mean that we have achieved nothing. The security model exercise and the conflicts are already on the OSCE agenda. If we genuinely wish to elaborate an efficient document worth to be called a charter, we will succeed only by doing this under peace conditions, in harmony, thoroughly and without undue haste.