West Gives Up Trying To Reinstate Human Rights Monitors
Members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conceded
defeat in negotiations with Moscow through which the OSCE was trying get back
into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, where it says it has documented
human rights violations by Russian forces.
A European Union delegate to the organization's 55-member permanent council
acknowledged that the OSCE's security mission in Chechnya has become "impossible,"
and the United States' representative called for it to be "allowed to close in
an orderly way."
The mission officially expired at the end of last month, but Western members
of the OSCE, which helped fashion a 1996 truce between Russian forces and separatist
Chechen rebels, have been lobbying Moscow to allow it to continue. On Jan. 13,
the body's new president, Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said he
hoped to get the OSCE back into Chechnya, and on Jan. 16, Moscow's top envoy to
Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, indicated that was a possibility.
Yesterday, though, a Russian diplomat snuffed hopes for the mission's reinstatement
by declaring that "there should be no permanent field presence" of the OSCE in
Chechnya. Moscow had previously signaled it would allow the mission to continue
if it were restricted to humanitarian concerns