[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 72 (Friday, June 10, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 10, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        KEEPING THE CSCE USEFUL

  Mr. DeCONCINI. Mr. President, many articles have been written and 
pronouncements made in recent months about the future security order in 
Europe and the former Soviet Union. Fancy phrases such as 
``interlocking institutions'' and ``European security architecture'' 
have been used repeatedly, masking the uncertainty of the experts who 
toss them about and the policymakers who draw inspiration from using 
such phrases.
  The area faces a fundamental dilemma--how to make newly independent 
governments and newly powerful movements play by the rules of 
civilization when there is uncertainty what those rules are and whether 
world powers, particularly the United States, are willing to enforce 
those rules when they are broken. This uncertainty has brought us war 
in the Balkans, war in the Caucasus, bloody civil conflict in 
Tajikistan, just to mention a few of the areas in conflict.
  So long as this dilemma persists, lasting resolution of the crises in 
the region is unlikely. Some small and promising beginnings in 
preventing conflict, and in helping local citizens live together, have 
emerged, I am proud to report. Some of these have come from the efforts 
of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE], or 
Helsinki Process. Its High Commissioner on National Minorities monitors 
and promotes solutions to national minority-related tensions in several 
states, notably the Baltics. Although they have not been given 
sufficient resources or political support to facilitate resolutions to 
crises, its missions report on and work to ease local tensions which 
can blow up into international conflict and, indeed, has in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina. Training, legal assistance, and seminars work to educate 
officials and activists in human rights standards and implementation, 
promoting harmonious societies to prevent conflicts. These are the 
kinds of activities that our citizens understand and support in this 
country. We are based on that rule of law and that kind of a system. An 
international organization with such a pragmatic focus is a good 
investment for the United States and we should continue to support the 
CSCE.
  However, some CSCE states are less interested in the efforts 
themselves than in promoting to have grand designs for the future and 
sometimes expansion of their territories. The temptation of strategies 
and architectures is always with us; but they mean nothing to the 
everyday people caught in the crossfire of ethnic hatred and economic 
deprivation.

  I would urge this administration to keep this in mind as it responds 
to the latest initiative for CSCE, put forward by the German and Dutch 
Foreign Ministers last month. Their view of the future for CSCE 
involves increasing the powers and centralization of its bureaucracy, a 
step which has had disastrous results at the United Nations and which 
this Congress is still trying to reverse; passing off more CSCE 
activities to that same overburdened and overbureaucratized United 
Nations; and pursuing arms control initiatives conceived at the end of 
the cold war and negotiated, continuously but with diminishing returns, 
ever since this occurred. We have to be careful, and I hope the 
administration pays heed to this suggestion.
  The CSCE can accomplish more for us than providing employment for 
diplomats and window-dressing for national inaction. The United States 
should take the lead in presenting initiatives that would make use of 
CSCE's experience on the ground, broad membership, and comprehensive 
mandate to work for peace, democracy and stability. These might 
include, and I cite these as examples because planning for CSCE's 
Budapest Review Conference is at an early stage: support for the 
activities of the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for 
efforts to build democracy and guarantee human rights in the Bosnian 
Federation; education programs on international humanitarian law, to 
prevent the recurrence of the kind of repulsive violence we have seen 
in the Bosnian conflict; and more attention to the human rights issues 
so often at the root of conflict. Efforts to prevent and resolve 
conflict would be more effective if states worked out common approaches 
to the problems of peacekeeping and self-determination. The United 
States, which does not always give CSCE the attention the organization 
deserves, should act to prevent it from becoming a shadow organization, 
suited only for grandiose but empty gestures.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.

                          ____________________