Now the military observers have been released, it might be helpful to clarify their status as an illustration of how both media bias and internet passions on both sides of the Ukrainian conflict obscure the truth. If you think you get the truth on CNN and BBC you are not paying attention. If you think you get the truth on Russia Today you are equally not paying attention.
It is wrong to call the men “OSCE observers” in that they are not on a mission initiated and organized by the OSCE. The casual use of the phrase by almost all the mainstream media is not just incorrect, but culpable in that it gives a deliberate impression of neutrality and authority.
However it is equally wrong to characterize them as “NATO spies”, and they had every right, indeed a duty, to be in Ukraine doing what they were doing. The purpose of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which the Soviet Union was a founding member, is to prevent conflict and improve governance. (I have a dim recollection that some but not all of the Soviet Socialist Republics, including Ukraine, were individually represented when it was first founded as the CSCE. Ukraine, and of course Russia, has certainly been an important member since it became the OSCE in 1994).
I should say I strongly support the OSCE. Those who claim it is an American or neo-con front have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. I was invited to give oral evidence to the OSCE on extraordinary rendition, which I did. That contrasts with the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who conducted an inquiry into extraordinary rendition and refused to accept either written or oral evidence from their Ambassador who had just been sacked for blowing the whistle on the subject (Don’t you love Jack Straw and New Labour). The OSCE do a lot of good work on protecting the Roma, and recently rebuked the French. Their election monitoring work is first class – if only the UK government would allow them into Scotland.
A key OSCE treaty is the Vienna Document on Military Transparency of 1999. Under this document, member states notify each other of their forces’ dispositions, and any member state can send verification missions of military officers to any other member state three times a year.
This is not some obscure or obsolete clause which was being used to justify extraordinary snooping in Ukraine. It is a mechanism in permanent operation. Russia, for example, sends military observers around UK and US installations all the time, and vice versa.
The whole point of the agreement is to make sure people know and are comfortable with where other people’s weapons are and what they are doing, so as to avoid wars starting by misunderstanding. This is especially important in times of heightened tension. So in times of escalating tension or unusual military activity, the agreement specifically allows for increased activity and extra missions to ensure people understand what is happening. Plainly the disputes for control of Ukrainian military bases and their weapons were precisely the kind of situation where missions were called for. So the observers not only had a right to be there, they had a duty.
can we not continue in the spirit of the OSCE rather than calling each other fools? surely personal antagonism and berating did not get the OSCE where it is today.
That is, if one is interlectually capable of doing it……
I advise all to re-read the Mr Goss’s post at 15h05 and note how slyly he attempts to divert away from Craig’s theme – the OSCE – into his usual anti-American rant : the pretext this time being US membership of OSCE.
He truly deserves his nickname of the “Insolent Squatter”!
Nevermind
Look, I know you’d rather cut your tongue out than say a positive word about me but I know that you deplore deeply Mr Goss’s (and Mary’s) silly and wilful ignorance on the subject of OSCE. There does come a point in some of these discussions when you have to give the donkeys a well-deserved drubbing.
(My apologies to any real donkeys reading this)
Do not try and be silly now by telling me what I do and do not deplore, when your use of donkey speak, in doing so, does only increase the overall braying.
end of, gonna plant some asparagus crowns now.
H. I don’t normally waste my time replying to you but as you jeered at John’s mention of Afghanistan as an area of operation by OSCE I gave you Ashton’s words. Can you see the words AFGHANISTAN and UKRAINE mentioned.
I love the ‘Craig and I’ bit incidentally.
Anyway with all your advertised negotiating skills, why don’t you pop over to Kiev and Moscow and sort it all out.
Nothing to say about the sensible Sir Tony Brenton I see.
I will not be answering back. You like leading people up garden paths.
“Sir Tony Brenton, former UK ambassador to Russia, assesses the situation in Ukraine.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ygr3x”
___________________
Well, Tony Brenton has his line on Russia/Ukraine etc and is regularly trotted out by the BBC to present it (which, incidentally, should please the Maries and Gosses as a demonstration of the BBC’s impartiality). But there are other equally distinguished former ambassadors to Russia who have a somewhat different take on developments. Example Roderic Lyne.
“Should the OSCE get sufficient funding from financially astute countries, to enable other countries who cannot afford the requiered rigmarole? well at least those countries who are in the spotlight of the OSCE?”
Nevermind, thanks for the earlier link, showing how it is harder for poorer countries to get representation on the OSCE.
Please ignore comments from the one who does not know whether or not he supports torture or whether or not he is a Freemason. You’ll get no sense from that source.
Mary
” H. I don’t normally waste my time replying to you but as you jeered at John’s mention of Afghanistan as an area of operation by OSCE I gave you Ashton’s words. Can you see the words AFGHANISTAN and UKRAINE mentioned.”
__________________
What is your point, exactly (with the above and with your original LONG post about Ashton??
Yes, I saw the words Ukraine and Afghanistan. Ukraine is an OSCE member and as far as Afghanistan is concerned Ashton was speaking at the OSCE Ministerial and it is not terribly strange that she should throw a flattering (but in practice meaningleess) reference in OSCE’s direction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are trying to defend Goss’s howler, where he complained that OSCE had not intervened in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and other non-European countries. But it’s not by cutting and pasting those 20 lines from Ashton’s speech that you’re going to be able to do so. Gamma minus, must try harder!
That said, what exactly is the point you’re trying to make by quoting some of Ashton’s speech?
Gamma minus, must try harder.
“If you think you get the truth on CNN and BBC you are not paying attention. If you think you get the truth on Russia Today you are equally not paying attention.”
This is from neither of those sources but shows quite clearly that MSM does not tell the truth. The Guardian and BBC come in for presenting misleading and inaccurate news. What actually happened in Odessa yesterday was that the pro-Russia protestors who were occupying union premises were burnt to death by the neo-Nazis who brought down the legitimate government of Ukraine. MSM has no shame and the news from Russia Today is much more accurate.
http://nsnbc.me/2014/05/03/odessa-massacre-pushes-ukraine-edge/
Goss
You seem to be unhealthily obsessed about Freemasons. How else to explain your persistent questioning on whether or not I’m one?
Did you know that both the Soviets and the Nazis were pretty down on the Freemasons? Question of mindset, I suppose 🙂
Craig; can we really know whether or not the OCSE observers are spies. They are comprised of NATO member Nations.
Are they de-briefed? Hmmmmm.
“The Guardian and BBC come in for ‘criticism’ . . .” it should have read.
Mary, I wonder if the ‘tacit torturer’ ever reads his comments to see how stupid they sound, as impartial observers might do, like the new people who came to the blog yesterday. They must think who is that stupid twat who criticizes everybody but never adds anything constructive! In fact when you think about it he is himself a torturer with his cutting tongue and comments aimed to cause hurt. (:
Goss
I’m perfectly happy to have impartial readers make up their minds about the stupidity or otherwise of my posts – as I’m sure they do with yours.
They may also perhaps draw their own conclusions from the inability or unwillingness of certain posters to defend their points of view under questioning and challenge.
eeeehhhaaarrrr
Ben
Of course they are from NATO countries. Just like its the Russians who are doing the same job inspecting in the UK, and not the Danes. I think you’ll find the Russians don’t do a lot of inspecting in Belarus.
Are they spies? Well, they are openly and explicitly gathering information on the military and security situation. They obviously keep their eyes open, but as they are declared military personnel they don’t make the best spies.
Germany is now covertly breaking by the misuse of OECD the assurance that the West gave Moscow when it negotiated its reunification – i.e., NATO would not expand to the east.
Craig; Switzerland is Non-NATO, and using observers from a neutral country might have allayed understandable fears.
Do you suppose they understood the boiling point in the Ukraine might be augmented by NATO participants, in spite of OCSE’s good reputation?
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/05/those-military-observers/#comment-455744
That would be the Roderic Lyne of Chilcot fame I suppose. Known to you I assume. No good quoting BLiar acolytes on this blog Mr H.
Another FCO messenger for our evil EmPyre.
‘Sir Roderic Lyne, another inquiry panel member, was British ambassador to the Russian Federation from 2000 to 2004, while Blair was prime minister.’
The best one can say of him is that he isn’t Gilbert or Freedman.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/does+blair+know+iraq+inquiry+members/3497547.html
Script…. The Case of the Missing Report.
Sir John Chilcot enters left, walks
around the room, looks under the
cushions and scratches his head.
Sir John Chilcot, shakily… ‘Now where did I put the Chilcot Inquiry report? Oh dear me, where is it? I just can’t find it. It must have been thrown out with the recycling. What shall I do?’
Ben,
I am struggling with the cause of your incomprehension. The OSCE agreement allows member states to inspect each others’ military facilities, mutually, so everyone knows what is where and wars don’t get started by accident. So the Russians, for example, visit and study the American’s nuclear and conventional systems, all the time. Would it give the Russians more confidence if the Swiss did it for them? Err, no.
” The OSCE agreement allows member states to inspect each others’ military facilities, mutually, so everyone knows what is where and wars don’t get started by accident. So the Russians, for example, visit and study the American’s nuclear and conventional systems, all the time. Would it give the Russians more confidence if the Swiss did it for them? Err, no.”
Yes I am dense and need it spelled out, craig. Why wouldn’t Switzerland, a non-NATO OSCE memeber be less preferable for inspections in Ukraine?
‘why WOULD they be less preferable…’
At no time was the Ukraine individually represented in the CSCE. You may be thinking of how both the Ukraine and Belarus were founder members of the UN, alongside the USSR. No other SSRs were.
The story runs that Stalin feinted a push for having 16 seats at the UN: 1 for each SSR plus 1 for the USSR (although in this account the Karelo-Finnish SSR seems to have been forgotten about somewhere along the line). This was a feint because the US needed the UN far more than the Soviets did, and Stalin was playing hard to get. I’ve heard that US diplomats even believed he might have trouble getting the proposal through the Supreme Soviet! Then, from the dimwitted US point of view, the wily Soviets were outwiled by the wily US side when the latter suggested that sure, Stalin could have 16 seats if Truman could have 49: 1 for each of the then 48 US states and 1 for the US. So the pushy Soviets were made to settle for a measly 3. Ha ha. If you’d believe that, you believe anything.
In actual fact, the UN was of little importance to the USSR, and they couldn’t really have cared less whether they had 16 seats, 3 seats or 1 seat. The US needed a Soviet presence in the UN more than the Soviet leadership itself did!
The big Soviet concession had already been made in 1943, when the Comintern was dissolved as part of the same development which put a Soviet presence at Bretton Woods. The law of value was officially declared to operate in the USSR – oh, and the USSR adopted a national anthem for the first time. Previously they’d used the Internationale.
So the UN was founded and the US empire then advanced its interests on the other side of both oceans, often under UN colours, such as in Korea.
Craig; Please try harder to address the pertinent questions, rather than protecting your flank. Really. It’s disappointing.
Ben
Craig seems to have given up, and I am not sure that anyone is still reading this thread, but for what it is worth the reason that the Swiss cannot do it on someone else’s behalf is that the deal all OSCE countries signed up to was that countries have a right to make inspections themselves. If Russia thinks that US tank movements in Germany are suspicious, Russia is allowed to send its own military intelligence officers to see what is going on. Russia does not have to worry about finding an acceptable third party but is allowed to go right ahead and do it. This degree of military transparency was thought by the OSCE participating states to be essential to building mutual confidence. The whole point of the exercise is to gather intelligence. If a country now decides to limit the right of inspection, why should we trust them? Russia knows it needs the system to work and does not want to be forced to give up its rights in favour of the Swiss. So it is not surprising Russia has intervened to make sure the system carries on working. Russia is not going to propose handing the job over to anyone else even if the Swiss wanted it.
” Russia knows it needs the system to work and does not want to be forced to give up its rights in favour of the Swiss”
Tim; Thanks for that.
Obviously, as Craig suggests, I am dense. Please explain how having the Swiss (non-NATO OSCE) would be more objectionable than having NATO countries conduct the observations? Really. I am missing something here.
Tim; Found the matter myself. http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/117163?download=true
“Following an official invitation from the government of Ukraine, the OSCE/ODIHR has established an Election Observation Mission (EOM) to observe the early presidential election scheduled for 25 May 2014. Ms. Tana de Zulueta has been appointed Head of the OSCE/ODIHR EOM. The mission consists of 18 additional core team members based in Kyiv, and 100 long-term observers (LTOs) deployed throughout the country. The core team and LTOs come from a total of 27 OSCE participating States.”
The decision was made by Kyev. How convenient for the West.
Ben
No – that Mission is an ordinary OSCE Mission, not the Military observers. Russia has, as I understand it, been demanding that the election is observed by the OSCE so Russia would have been furious if the EOM had not been invited.
The whole point of the “Vienna Document” military inspections is that an Invitation is not needed. As Craig points out, the Russians can (and do) turn up unanounced to examine NATO military installations. As to why the Swiss cannot be trusted do it on someone else’s behalf. It was Lenin I think who said “trust is good, but security is better”.
OSCE are primarily Elections observers, correct Tim? Were they prepared for a military role? So if not invited, what harm to bring in a Non-Nato Nation who is registered as OSCE member, like the Swiss. I seem to be going in a circle with this. 🙂
Again, the trust-issue would imply Non-Nato is more trustworthy.