Kazakhstan summit signals ‘rebirth’ of OSCE

THE publicity-hungry Central Asian state of Kazakhstan yesterday hosted the first summit of the OSCE in over a decade, seeking to revamp the organisation’s ability to react to security crises.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged the OSCE needed to play a more dynamic role, but it remained unclear if the 56 member states could agree a strong action plan for its future.

“This summit is a sign of the rebirth of the organisation,” Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who championed the holding of the meeting, said as he declared the summit open in Kazakhstan’s new capital Astana.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe grew out of the forum for dialogue between East and West at the height of the Cold War.

The group aims to prevent conflicts through dialogue and help states recover from conflicts, although the goal sometimes becomes mired in disputes between members and its principle of operating on consensus.

The summit is the first time OSCE leaders have gathered since a meeting in Istanbul in 1999, a gap whose duration has raised questions about the group’s capacities in the 21st century.

OSCE Secretary General Marc Perrin de Brichambaut admitted that in recent years some of its principles had “been neglected” and a “lack of confidence between member states” had limited its ability to respond to crises.

Clinton called for a “forward-looking framework for action” to implement the group’s founding principles.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that the OSCE had to “become capable of acting quicker. We must give it the means to be much more reactive and much more efficient.”

AFP obtained a copy of a draft statement that, if adopted, would outline the OSCE’s role in the future as well as an Astana Framework for Action to boost the security group’s activities.

However, in an indication that a consensus may be tricky to find, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would reject any declaration containing a reference to a “conflict” in Georgia.