Advancing the Human Dimension in the OSCE: The Role of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

This two day briefing was a response to legislation that called for the CSCE to conduct an analysis of the OSCE’s strengths and weaknesses and to ascertain the feasibility of creating similar institutions in other geographic regions. The briefing was divided into six panels. This fifth panel focused on the Middle East, and framed the discussion on Middle Eastern security as being closely tied to European security by virtue of their geographic proximity. Ambassador Basheer noted several qualitative differences between Europe and the Middle East in terms of the nature of grievances, which in the Middle East often include complicated territorial issues. He noted that NGOs might play a particularly useful role in mediating such conflicts, especially where parties refuse to engage on a government-to-government level. One notable example of this included Israel’s refusal to engage with regional governments on nuclear weapons proliferation. 

This two day briefing was a response to legislation that called for the CSCE to conduct an analysis of the OSCE’s strengths and weaknesses and to ascertain the feasibility of creating similar institutions in other geographic regions. The briefing was divided into six panels. This first panel assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the OSCE model. Helsinki Commission Chairman Chris Smith opened the discussion by pointing to the OSCE’s success in impacting upon multilateral processes in Africa and the Middle East. Most panelists believed that there was a large gap between what the OSCE could do and what its members would allow it to do, especially in areas related to security. As such, they felt that procedural mechanisms were vital to the OSCE because they allowed for the maintenance of equal footing among nations through, among other things, consensus based decision making and rotating chairpersons. An important achievement of the OSCE was, according to the panelists, the linkage between human rights, security, economic, and other issues. They also noted that a key element in the OSCE’s development was the cold war tension, which yielded self-enforcing agreements between states. In this regard, it was pointed out that similar models with non-legally binding provisions might be hard to develop in regions lacking such tension.

Samuel Wise, international policy director of the Commission, addressed the political setting in Bosnia before elections in 1995 and the possibility of having a free and fair environment, especially in regards to human rights like freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. The briefing focused on Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina that is located in the northwest. Since the beginning of the Bosnian conflict, the city was firmly in the hands of the Bosnian Serb rebels until the Dayton Accords placed the city in the Republika Srpska, the newly created Serbian republic. The city and the region surrounding it had a significant non-Serb population (Bosniacs or Muslim Slavs, Croats, Ukrainians, and ethnically mixed Yugoslavs), which was ethnically cleansed on behalf of the Serbian government. While some instances of ethnic cleansing there took the form of subtle measures, the most notorious concentration camps, including Omarska, were in the Banja Luka region. The witnesses – Catholic Bishop of Banja Luka  Franjo Komarica,  Obrad Kesic from the International Research and Exchanges Board, and Diane Paul, a nurse from Baltimore – discussed the city as a scene of apparent differences among Serb political activists with highly divergent points of view. They emphasized that Bosnia’s future hinged on whether moderates or radicals won in the elections in that region.