ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) — After two days of protracted wrangling, the high-profile OSCE summit fizzled out acrimoniously in the early hours Friday morning, leaving the trans-Atlantic rights and security organization adrift without a clear mandate for the future.
Inability by the delegates at the 56-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe summit to reach a clear consensus on a future agenda for the group could doom it to irrelevance.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev nonetheless praised what little consensus had been reached, calling the summit "a historic event for the entire OSCE community" that would forge new ties between Asia and the West.
In one notable development, however, the former Soviet republic of Belarus announced at the summit Wednesday that it is give up all its weapons-grade uranium, adding new momentum to anti-proliferation efforts.
The OSCE was born in the 1970s to nurture rapprochement between Cold War enemies; along with European countries, it includes the United States, Canada and former Soviet Central Asian republics.
Since the 1990s, divisions among OSCE members have largely consisted of differing views on how to balance the group’s activities between boosting stability and promoting human rights and democratization.
Initially, the stated agenda for the summit was to look at ways of improving coordination on boosting stability in Afghanistan, which borders three OSCE member states. That concern appeared gradually superseded by efforts to draft a summit document that would enshrine the values of the organization as it moves forward.
Amid intransigence from Georgia, which has expressed outrage against Russian resistance to posting an OSCE mission in the country, delegates debated the details of the summit declaration well into the night.
Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 after the tiny Caucasian nation launched an attack on its breakaway province of South Ossetia. An OSCE observation mission in the country suspended operations in June 2009 after Russia applied its veto.
The final summit declaration was limited largely to generalities about the need for the organization to reaffirm its adherence to its historic principles — a largely unambitious position that indicates no real breakthrough was reached.
Numerous delegates vocally condemned failure to adopt a concrete plan of action for the future and inability to make any progress on Europe’s numerous frozen conflicts, once the declaration was adopted.
"Hopes by some EU governments that the summit would bring some impetus to the OSCE were quite unreal," said Michael Laubsch, director of the Bonn-based Eurasian Transition Group.
Over two days of speeches, several Western leaders repeatedly emphasized the need to step up efforts in the human dimension — a popularly used term in OSCE meetings that covers democratization, media freedom, minority rights, rule of law, education and election-monitoring.
Many former Soviet states, including Russia, bridle at the organization’s apparent constant effort to use rights issues to undermine their own legitimacy and international standing. Moscow has led the front on tilting the group toward concentrating more on security.
"Russia considers it important to increase the contribution of the OSCE in international efforts to counter new challenges and threats such as terrorism, drug trafficking and other cross-border organized crime," the Kremlin said in a pre-summit briefing.
In bringing together countries resistant to swift democratic reforms with nations seeking to boost the role of human rights on the international arena, the OSCE is inevitably mired in bitter antagonism.
"We have been fighting attempts to water down the human rights and the democracy component of the OSCE, because in our view that is fundamental part of our concept of security," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told The Associated Press.
"There are some regimes that are unhappy about this, but in our view this is part of being in the OSCE," he said.
U.S. hopes of ensuring nuclear material does not fall into the hands of terrorists were lent a momentous impetus Wednesday, when Belarusian Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov announced that his country would give up its stockpile of material used to make nuclear weapons by 2012.
The United States has said it will provide technical and financial help to enable Belarus to dispose of its highly enriched uranium stocks.
