Speech by First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Vesna Pusić at the 21st OSCE Ministerial Conference

Thank you, Chair.

I also want to start by thanking the chairmanship in office and you personally, Your Excellency, Mr Burkhalter, and your team for what you have done under circumstances that you couldn’t have foreseen and predicted, but you conducted this organization to, I would say, a new prominence in international relations.

Croatia aligned itself to the statement delivered by the European Union and I would like to make some additional remarks in my national capacity here. I would actually like to talk about the promotion of participation and position of the rights of women; I would like to talk about the group of wise men and women that will promote the OSCE vision; I would like to talk about the role of OSCE field missions and the need for them to additionally focus on deliverables, I would like to talk about the OSCE’s possibility to fight for the rights of ethnic, racial, religious and sexual minorities… But I will not talk about that because there is this huge “elephant in the room”, and this is the situation, the low intensity conflict or low intensity war going on in Ukraine. And I will briefly stake a few points that I think might be a new starting position or issues that we need to look into.

One is the Minsk Protocols, the Minsk Agreements. Everybody’s talking about it, everybody seems to support it but they’re not working, they’re not being followed and they’re not being applied. And it sounds a little surrealistic that we are all here in this room, everybody who needs to agree is in this room, and we don’t know how to approach this issue. So I think that the starting position should be to look into the issues of the Minsk Protocols and see whether we want them to work and whether this is doable or we’re giving up and need something else.

The second point is the low intensity conflict or low intensity war in Ukraine and Russia’s violation of the Ukrainian territorial integrity – something that we have to take into account; we have to deal somehow with this. We need an action plan, a strategy for implementing ceasefires in Ukraine.

The third point is the refugee crisis, something that isn’t being mentioned too much. Half a million people formally registered but probably many more are out there in the cold.

The fourth point – the economic situation in Ukraine, something that we mention occasionally but could be the make-or-break for the future of Ukraine.

And finally with this conflict, the visibility and importance of the OSCE has risen, but so has the responsibility of this organization – it is been increased with the conflict in Ukraine and I would say the conflict between Russia and the West.

The OSCE monitoring mission is slowly being transformed into a kind peacekeeping mission, a form of deterrence, but we have to see how to go forward with this mission. And finally, even after wars, and I speak from personal experience here, there is always a political solution. And this political solution is always achieved through talks and by talking.  It is better to start sooner than later.

Thank you very much and I wish the Serbian chairmanship in office and even-handed approach and all the success.