The first day of December 2010 marked the start of a long-awaited high-level event for all members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The outgoing OSCE Chairman – Kazakhstan, which is expected to pass the presidency on to Lithuania in less than a month’s time, hosted on its soil the Summit of the Heads of State and Government. There has been no such gathering in the history of the Organization since the Istanbul meeting of 1999, the conclusions of which drafted at the sunset of the previous century are widely regarded to no longer be in tune with the current political, military and economic situation in the OSCE area.
The Astana Summit saw the attendance of 38 heads of state and government, 1 vice-president, 7 deputy prime ministers, 14 ministers and multiple high-ranking officials of OSCE Member States as well as partner countries, including South Korea, Japan, Australia and Afghanistan. On November 30, Kazakhstan’s Minister of foreign affairs Kanat Saudabayev, speaking at the meeting of the Bureau of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Astana, outlined the prevailing objectives of the Organization’s short- and medium-term evolution.
He stressed the need to enhance arms control and confidence-building measures by updating the 1999 Vienna Document adopted by the OSCE Forum for Security Cooperation in Istanbul; paid special attention to the stabilization of Afghanistan; reminded of the need to strengthen the OSCE’s capacity to forecast, control and mitigate conflicts and crisis situations, and urged to ensure ethnic and religious tolerance. Saudabayev also recalled the significance of the rule of law and human rights for the development of stable and democratic societies, underlined the importance of environmental safety and spoke about boosting the OSCE’s effective collaboration with other regional organizations and groupings.
Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who opened the Summit on the next day, proclaimed that European and Eurasian security has become indivisible and that, unlike in the first two periods of the OSCE’s development, this notion is now applicable to the whole landmass from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. The rapprochement in Russia-NATO relations, as was noted by Nazarbayev, is a clear manifestation of this ongoing transformation. In his welcoming address, the Kazakh leader suggested increasing the number of the OSCE’s “baskets” to include financial and economic security, heavily undermined by the world financial crisis, as well as energy cooperation and stabilization of currency markets.
In Nazarbayev’s view, it is of utmost importance to start working on the implementation of a new reserve currency to make the world financial system more stable and predictable. Another proposal voiced by Nazarbayev was to set up the OSCE Security Institute in Astana in order to tend to the need of early conflict prevention. Kazakhstan’s President also spoke about the possibility of organizing the OSCE Environmental Forum as well as elaborating a special “Water and Law” sectoral program to make it possible for interested parties to resolve existing water disputes and establish efficient water-sharing mechanisms.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon noted Kazakhstan’s successes in promoting the idea of a nuclear-free Central Asia and urged all countries to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty adopted in 1996 but not yet ratified, as well as the UN Security Council’s Resolution No. 1540 on non-proliferation. Nazarbayev, in turn, stressed the need to continue the rehabilitation of the former nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose next stop in Central Asia was Bishkek, praised Kazakhstan’s involvement in both Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and reiterated America’s unswerving support to further democratization and civil society development with the participation of local NGOs. Positive assessments of Kazakhstan’s chairmanship were later given by Hamid Karzai and Roza Otunbayeva. Despite the fact that Armenia and Azerbaijan both pledged the non-use of military force in the Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute and the calls of the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for a peaceful settlement in Transnistria, the Summit participants witnessed a number of unexpected comments in breach of the relatively compromise-oriented environment at the venue.
Thus, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko deplored the ambiguity of the OSCE’s election standards and complained about the absence of fair energy cooperation, referring to frequent criticism about his handling of popular votes and Russia’s bargaining around the issue of gas transit. The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan unsuccessfully appealed against North Korea’s recent provocations against its southern neighbor, and Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev urged to work out common conflict prevention procedures, citing Georgia’s 2008 war with South Ossetia as an “undeclared aggression from Tbilisi.”
The Summit ended with the signing of the Astana Declaration which reflected the achieved consensus on a number of topical issues but also passed over some controversial topics, such as the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia inside Georgia. n’s Caspian Sea neighbors acquiesced to build a pipeline on the seabed at the Caspian Summit in Baku further strengthens Turkmenistan’s position to diversify its energy export routes apart from its already existing gas pipelines to Russia, Iran, China and the envisioned TAPI to Pakistan and India.