ICRC President welcomes strong partnership with OSCE

VIENNA, 25 October 2001 (OSCE) - The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, today underscored the strong partnership of his organization with the OSCE, in particular with regard to field operations.

"If some of our challenges can be met more easily in the OSCE area than in other parts of the world it has quite something to do with the existence of the OSCE and its activities", Mr. Kellenberger said. "Your Organization takes the concept of interacting institutions really seriously, and you are convinced of the mutually reinforcing nature of interaction between Organizations and Institutions".

Speaking to the 55-nation OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna, Mr. Kellenberger gave a detailed account of the interaction between the two Organizations in those eight regions where both the ICRC and the OSCE have established field presences.

"23 per cent of ICRC's planned operational expenditure for this year ... relate to member countries of the OSCE. Two of them - the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Russian Federation - are among the ICRC's ten major operations in terms of engaged human resources and planned expenditure", he said.

The ICRC President addressed in particular the close co-operation of the two Organizations in the northern Caucasus, Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia, Kosovo, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. "Complementarity is the key", he said, "no duplications, and no gaps either".

The ICRC President warmly welcomed the adoption in November 2000 of the OSCE Document on Small Arms and Light Weapons. "The comprehensive set of actions envisaged in this document, when implemented, will contribute to reducing the immense human costs of the easy availability of small arms and light weapons", he said.

Mr. Kellenberger also used the opportunity to express his hope that all OSCE States Parties to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons would support an ICRC initiative to establish a mandate for a group of governmental experts to begin negotiations on a new protocol on explosive ordnance of war. "Such a protocol should address a variety of issues including the responsibility for clearance of unexploded munitions as well as the provision of technical information to facilitate clearance and to warn civilian populations of the dangers", the ICRC President said.

Speaking about the issue of persons unaccounted for - a core part of ICRC's mandate - Mr. Kellenberger reminded the OSCE, with its important role in the field of conflict prevention, that it must be particularly sensitive to this issue. "People unaccounted for remain a reality for countless families in all situations of armed conflict and internal violence and continue to do so long afterwards. This is a tragedy for families and often becomes a handicap during the peace process and transition period", he said.