Miliband Stresses on Need for Int’l Observers in S.Ossetia

In his address to the OSCE Foreign Ministerial Council in Helsinki on December 4, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said that it was important for the organization to re-establish its military monitoring activities in South Ossetia, “because independent monitoring is the only way for the ceasefire agreement to be fully assessed.”

“I hope in that context all of us around the table will take time to at least read the summary of the report from the ODIHR about the situation in South Ossetia and its surrounding areas,” he told the Council, referring to the report by OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights – Human Rights in the War-Affected Areas Following the Conflict in Georgia.

Miliband then continued by citing the report: “Some displaced persons appeared to have been pressured by the Georgian authorities to return to their former places of residence in the areas adjacent to South Ossetia before conditions were in place to guarantee their security.”

“But it also says that within South Ossetia many villages close to Tskhinvali, which were predominately inhabited by ethnic Georgians were nearly completely destroyed,” Miliband continued. “It [the report] says that in Akhalgori area population lives in fear following the influx of the military personnel and in the areas adjacent to South Ossetia, many ethnic Georgian villages were systematically looted and burned.”

“Those are grim and dangerous words… that we have to take seriously, because they’ve been written by the people who have done a serious work on the ground and if we don’t take these words seriously, then we are not doing justice to the words that, I suppose, brought us together,” Miliband said.

He also told the OSCE Foreign Ministers that “whatever the origins of the events, we believe that military reaction of Russia was disproportionate.”

The German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said in his address to the OSCE summit that a quick agreement on “a viable mandate for the OSCE’s work in all of Georgia” was needed. “For us, this specifically, includes Georgia’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity,” he said.

Eka Tkeshelashvili, the Georgian foreign minister, told said at the summit that ceasefire in Georgia was “fragile” and called for international monitors’ to be allowed inside South Ossetia. After that is achieved, she said, “international police and peacekeeping missions” needed to be put into place “to make sure that security and stability on the ground is sustainable.”

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