October 27, 2003

Briefing of the

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

WASHINGTON : 2004

108th CONGRESS Printed for the use of the

1st Session Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

OSCE Police-Related Activities
COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE

234 Ford House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515-6460

(202) 225-1901

csce@mail.house.gov

http://www.csce.gov

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

ii

HOUSE

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey

Chairman

FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania

ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama

ANNE M. NORTHUP, Kentucky

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland

LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER, New York

ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida

VACANT

SENATE

BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL, Colorado

Co-Chairman

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon

KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, Texas

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

BOB GRAHAM, Florida

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

LORNE W. CRANER, Department of State

VACANT, Department of Defense

WILLIAM HENRY LASH III, Department of Commerce
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ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR

SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE

The Helsinki process, formally titled the Conference on Security and Cooperation in

Europe, traces its origin to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finland on August 1,

1975, by the leaders of 33 European countries, the United States and Canada. As of January

1, 1995, the Helsinki process was renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in

Europe (OSCE). The membership of the OSCE has expanded to 55 participating States,

reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

The OSCE Secretariat is in Vienna, Austria, where weekly meetings of the participating

States’ permanent representatives are held. In addition, specialized seminars and meetings

are convened in various locations. Periodic consultations are held among Senior Officials,

Ministers and Heads of State or Government.

Although the OSCE continues to engage in standard setting in the fields of military

security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian concerns, the Organization is primarily focused on initiatives designed to prevent, manage and

resolve conflict within and among the participating States. The Organization deploys numerous missions and field activities located in Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the

Caucasus, and Central Asia. The website of the OSCE is: <www.osce.org>.

ABOUT THE COMMISSION ON SECURITY

AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki

Commission, is a U.S. Government agency created in 1976 to monitor and encourage compliance by the participating States with their OSCE commitments, with a particular emphasis

on human rights.

The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments of

State, Defense and Commerce. The positions of Chair and Co-Chair rotate between the Senate and House every two years, when a new Congress convenes. A professional staff assists

the Commissioners in their work.

In fulfilling its mandate, the Commission gathers and disseminates relevant information to the U.S. Congress and the public by convening hearings, issuing reports that reflect

the views of Members of the Commission and/or its staff, and providing details about the

activities of the Helsinki process and developments in OSCE participating States.

The Commission also contributes to the formulation and execution of U.S. policy

regarding the OSCE, including through Member and staff participation on U.S. Delegations to OSCE meetings. Members of the Commission have regular contact with parliamentarians, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and

private individuals from participating States. The website of the Commission is:

<www.csce.gov>.
OSCE POLICE-RELATED ACTIVITIES

OCTOBER 27, 2003

PARTICIPANTS

Page

Elizabeth B. Pryor, Senior Advisor, Commission on Security and

Cooperation in Europe ............................................................................................................ 1

Richard Monk, Senior Police Advisor, Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe ............................................................................................................ 2

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OSCE POLICE-RELATED ACTIVITIES

OCTOBER 27, 2003

COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE

WASHINGTON, DC

The briefing was held at 2:00 p.m. in Room 485, Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, Elizabeth B. Pryor, Senior Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation

in Europe, moderating.

Participants: Elizabeth B. Pryor, Senior Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Richard Monk, Senior Police Advisor, Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe.

Ms. PRYOR. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I think we will go ahead and start

here.

My name is Elizabeth Pryor. I am the Senior Advisor with the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which I think most of you know more familiarly as the

Helsinki Commission. To my right is Mr. Richard Monk, who we are delighted to have

with us today.

I am going to go ahead and say a few remarks on the record on behalf of the Commission and then turn it over to Mr. Monk, and then we will open it up for questioning.

Having an effective police force is essential to every society, but is a particular challenge to those societies recovering from conflict or undergoing transition to democracy.

Some states must attempt both at the same time.

I think today’s tragic bombings that we have seen at the police headquarters in Iraq

are an extreme example of the kind of pressures law enforcement officials face in unstable

societies.

Those of us who follow the OSCE and the situation in its participating States have for

some time recognized the vital role of the police and the need for reform in many countries. Police and other law enforcement or internal security forces have too often been

used to keep undemocratic regimes in power, violating human rights in the process. In

Southeastern Europe, they were often used as a tool of brutal ethnic cleansing in the

1990s.

Much to its credit, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe pooled

the resources and expertise of its members to monitor, train and reform the operations of

police officers in such situations. Its successes are particularly well known in Kosovo,

where a new force was started virtually from scratch. It has also fostered police reform in

southern Serbia and in Macedonia. The goal has been to turn the police from a force that

controls people to a service that provides citizens with a degree of security and safety that
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they can sense and appreciate. In addition, the OSCE also seeks to enhance police effectiveness in combating terrorist networks and organized crime.

Countries facing major problems, including poverty, organized crime and trafficking

in weapons, drugs and human beings, need particularly effective and professional law

enforcement agencies. The national police forces in many of these countries, however,

suffer from inadequate training and resources to tackle serious criminal activity.

This work is important and by no means easy.

First, the quality of the programs and projects may only be as good as the quality of

the personnel the OSCE states provide.

Second, in states where the rule of law has yet to sink into the culture, there may be

a tendency for police officers to view effectiveness in combating criminal activity as more

important than respecting the rights of its citizens.

Third, in some countries, and in states of Central Asia in particular, there is a larger

problem of repressive regimes that will control the police and seek to use them to their

own ends, no matter how professional individual officers may otherwise be.

No one is more qualified to speak on this topic than is Mr. Richard Monk, who has

been the OSCE’s senior police advisor since February 2002. Following more than 30 years

of police work in the United Kingdom, Mr. Monk has spent much of the last decade at the

international level, including one year as the Commissioner of the United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Richard Monk will speak today on the latest work of the OSCE’s strategic police

matters unit, which he heads. We understand that though programs in Southeastern Europe continue, the OSCE is now shifting its focus to Central Asia and the Caucasus.

In the summer of 2003, police reform projects in Kyrgyzstan and Armenia were initiated, with prospects for activity elsewhere in the region.

Those implementing reforms face the challenge of introducing concepts like community policing, interviewing and interrogation techniques, and crime analysis in countries

where police have traditionally been used to repress society, making it part of corrupt

and undemocratic political systems.

So we would like to welcome Mr. Monk.

We look forward to hearing your comments.

Mr. MONK. Thank you very much, indeed, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I come with two colleagues. I bring with me Tim del Vecchio, who is a U.S. police

investigator, with a lifetime career, like mine, in policing, and who has joined me in Vienna, but has the responsibility for investigating and preventing crimes, rather a wide

portfolio. We hope to bring him or acquire for him some more resources.

Nevertheless, if after I have spoken, there are specific questions that I think are

more appropriately dealt with by him, then I am going to ask him to respond.

Sitting next to him is Andrew Carpenter, who is my Executive Officer. Andrew deals

with a lot of the relations between our unit and the delegations in Vienna. So he is probably more aware than I am about some issues—the political and the institutional—that

we have to step past to try and get some clarity into what we are doing.

I am pleased that policing has, I think, become much more of a topic for discussion

and for critical analysis than it has been in the past.

My experience in this goes back to a time when I was assisting the International

Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and, particularly, advising the military on what you do

and do not do in the process of arresting persons indicted for war crimes.
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This came as a little bit of a surprise to the military, that, indeed there should be any

rules other than to survive. But there are.

But, subsequent to that, I was—as you have already heard—in Bosnia as the Commissioner of the International Police Task Force. The response by most countries was, “Well,

let’s get policemen out there. There appears to be a need for policing,” but not much thought

given to the skills and the priorities and the qualifications of those police officers—not

surprising, really, because if you look at Dayton, it was Annex 11 that set up the International Police Task Force. Annex 11 is the last annex.

So I think I could be forgiven in thinking it was a bit of an afterthought, particularly

when you realize that Annex 8 actually dealt with the preservation of public monuments.

I think things have changed, quite substantially. That is a result of the lessons that

international peacekeeping missions have learned.

Hitherto, again, all as a result of the United Nations’ efforts.

But there was a requirement, really, to look more at what the police did and report

on it, than to change what the police did.

The issue, since then, has been how to get some process where the lessons learned

can be transferred to those countries who are asking for assistance and particularly would

like some assistance where dealing with crime issues—the sort of issues that we are constantly being critical about and on.

So in the Balkans, you have countries that have come out of conflict and you have got

the OSCE establishing four missions with a policing element in each one: Croatia, Serbia

and Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Kosovo has already

been mentioned.

We have learned quite a lot as a result of that. They are different.

Indeed the new countries that have emerged from Yugoslavia actually prefer to be

different, and that is quite an issue, because it makes far greater sense to have some sort

regional relationship among these countries if we are ever going to be effective against

crime.

It is crime that drives a lot of the economies in these countries.

As you already heard, the OSCE is now swinging its attention far more to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In the Caucasus, three countries—Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia—with whom we

deal and have missions, policing has been invited to assist those governments with the

problems as they see them. Certainly in Central Asia that is true of four of the five Central

Asia states.

So let me tell you something about how we work, what we are trying to do, and with

quite meager resources I think fairly successful, but could be much more so if we could

only excite more interest and more commitment from the states who make up the OSCE.

One issue that inevitably dogs us is not the assessment of needs, but instead to be

told that there is a bit of a problem somewhere and a sum of money could be found and

might somebody write a project to deal with it.

That belongs to the past. I would like to see that buried forever, because it just does

not work. In the past it has meant that we have spent much money on what I call hit-andrun projects—projects that have grand titles and clearly have very desirable outcomes

implied in those titles. But if you think you are going to change the way police officers

think and the culture in which they work by a three-day or a two-week intervention, you

are not. You have got to change the mode of thinking. You have got to change the entire

culture.
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But you have also got to recognize that the countries we are talking about are incredibly poor, or at least the police are certainly in a situation where they are poor. Most of the

countries that I have mentioned, police officers do not earn a living wage, a living salary.

Now some in the audience will already have heard this mentioned several times.

I am going to keep on mentioning this, because we are not going to change much

unless we address that issue. How do we do whatever we do with people who are wide

open to supplementing their income from other sources?

If we are going to carry out this assessment of needs, although I will be lucky enough

to talk to a minister, to hear from the minister what he considers to be the issues—and in

Central Asia all the ministers tell me it is about drugs, it is about political and religious

extremism—eventually we step through that to it has got to do with the relationship

between the police and the public, that relationship is not good.

What is never explained to me or even mentioned is corruption. But he knows that I

know, and he knows that I know he knows that is one of the most substantial issues.

He may indeed be part of it. Difficult to believe in some cases he is not. We will find

that there are police officers throughout this chain of command who actually do rely upon

a source of money that is passed up the chain. Police officers in some of these countries

actually buy the job of police officer—they buy it—and to get a senior rank—you buy it.

Well, where on earth do you think you get your money from to do that when, as I have

said, you are on, you know, $35 a month?

A story told to me by the French head of the OSCE center in Tajikistan was that he

used to give two police officers $20 a month for standing outside the OSCE center. They

were assigned to the OSCE, but he actually, in a rather nice touch, said thank you very

much, and for $20, that’s whatever.

One of them left. He met this man again, and the man explained to him—this police

officer explained to him—that with the $20 that he had been given month after month, he

had actually saved up and he had bought the rank of lieutenant—that’s the equivalent, if

you like—he bought this rank.

But as a lieutenant he had a responsibility to clear up crime and meet a quota. To do

that there, really the only way that you demonstrate in that country that you have got a

solution to a case is a confession. If people would not confess, well, you have to make them

confess.

So, it was the ambassador’s largess that had now turned this man into a tormentor.

The ambassador, you know, described this to me, and mentioning with heavy irony,

you know, what he had managed to produce—rather than he thought that 20 dollars was

going to his family.

Well, it seems ludicrous to think that we could even start to operate with police

service like this or a police force. But it is not.

Unless we actually start to get right involved, deeply involved with police, then we

are not likely to make the changes that we all want to see come about.

So the next step, as far as I am concerned, and the way that we work, is after a minister has explained what are the needs in these countries is for me to ask somebody like

Tim, who manages the crime portfolio, to find experts from a number of other countries

and to look at particular aspects of that country’s policing.

We use as a base model the notion of a police station, just as here you would go to a

precinct and it covers a particular territorial unit, if you pick the right area, you will be
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able very easily to discern how much of policing relies on a number of specialties and how

much the police officers in that country or in that police unit, understand policing.

Now we are making judgments against our own policing, but, nevertheless, there are

some common themes to policing which are not going to surprise anybody. It is by asking

experts from other countries to come and help us make that assessment and work with

experts from the host state that we begin to discover the depth of the problems that they

face.

As you have heard, I was appointed a year ago. Last February I spent until the following November convincing the 55 participating States within the OSCE that they should

give me some more resources in order to do this job.

I have now got four police officers working in the unit. They each carry a separate

portfolio of responsibilities. I have mentioned crime. I have a Swedish superintendent

who manages the uniformed policing issues, what you see out there, the visible policing

on the streets. I have got a Russian colonel who manages police training.

I have a French colonel who looks at police-military, police borders, and police liaison with the Action against Terrorism Unit. We do not get involved in terrorism, but what

we provide undoubtedly is of value to anybody who has that work to do.

So there are four police officers now with their spread of portfolios.

Now, I have a program coordinator, too, and he is also Russian. So I have got two

Russians now. You can begin to see the value in a sense of having these people, because

their progressive ideas are exactly ours, but they hold a credibility with their contemporaries in these countries. They will actually have the opportunity to talk to their contemporaries on a one-to-one, sometimes an opportunity that is not given to police officers

from outside.

That is enormously valuable, because they can sell their credibility. The police officers, senior police officers, who after all have been police officers for 30 years or longer,

will start to open up. They have worked in a regime, they have worked in the Soviet

Union, they have worked in a system that my colleagues will recognize immediately. They

have also had to work in a different environment, the environment of a country that is

trying to establish its own identity, but is very suspicious about external aid and assistance, and particularly the influence of its neighbors.

As we progress this in-depth assessment, we are also trying to find out who else is

doing what. That means going to embassies, it means going to the U.S. Embassy, German

Embassy, Swiss probably there. Somebody will speak for them, representing the E.C. U.K.

may be on the ground and so on.

I am also looking to talk to international organizations, NGOs, particularly people

who have a lot of information about this. I have talked to some NGO representatives who

tell me horrific stories of torture and the sorts of suffering which prisoners have been

exacted to in police detention, and I believe every word of it. It is what do we do about it.

The next step is to formulate what we think our programs—the programs of technical

assistance or almost all technical assistance. But my reasoning is, if I can deliver, and it is

all of our interests, a technical assistance program to combat crime, because make no

mistake about it, as drugs flow through these areas, the money raised from those drugs is

here in Washington providing legitimate business the opportunities to cover criminal

enterprise.

It is in my country. It is in France, in Germany.
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Organized crime is now generating fantastic sums of wealth every year that are going

over into legitimate business. It is to such a degree now that I like to say, or I describe it,

that the powerful do not govern and governments are not powerful.

As we started to do this work, the next issue is to formulate these projects in a way

that is relevant to what that country’s got to tackle. I will do that with a minister I will do

that with the senior police officers.

So we have got personal knowledge of who else is doing what and then we try not to

tread on their toes and get them alongside us. Then we will look at some of the things that

are pretty fundamental to a police force.

But police service comes much later. If you like, part of this modus operandi is to

make a statement—and I have done so—that within 6 months of starting it, we must—

must—carry out an independent evaluation.

So I say that, because I want the Permanent Council, the 55 participating States and

delegations, to see precisely what we are doing, what we are getting out of it and whether

you are getting value for money.

So I want somebody who can test our system, test the process if you like, and test the

content. I do not doubt somebody’s going to be quite critical of the way we have done this,

but we are learning every step of the way. Unfortunately, we are having to learn lessons

where I suppose in a way we have made assumptions or we just have not spotted some

problems that were there.

Kyrgyzstan is the first country in Central Asia that we have gone to. There are reasons for that, not the least of which is that it seemed to me it was the Kyrgyz police and

the minister who were more open than anybody else that I talked to—they listened to

people from outside and responded to that.

I have been, and to my shame, deeply impressed by some of the intellectual energy

and vitality in that country by people—the way they have expressed the problems that

they have.

I have also been impressed by some police officers I have met, who are not ThirdWorld thugs as we care to believe. There are some professional police officers, very proud,

and I think quite embarrassed by the lack of equipment and skills that their police officers

currently possess.

We can do better. For not much of a investment, we can do a lot better.

So we started in Kyrgyzstan, and as I say there are about seven or eight projects

They are technical. They have to do with the way that they investigate crime. But the

relationship also with the public is important.

So a community policing project is one of those projects. Another one is actually to try

to provide an emergency call service for that country. Here, you can ring the police. You

dial 911. In Kyrgyzstan, you cannot do that. It is time to think about things like that.

Now we need to bring in policing experts from countries, countries in the OSCE who

will have a greater credibility with Kyrgyzstan than possibly coming from the U.K. or

America or Canada.

Nevertheless, I am equally not going to overlook that in these countries, and in the

countries of Western Europe, that we will have expertise and we will have a way of policing which does lend itself to problem solving in these countries, and particularly when

you are trying to change people’s thinking.

But it all comes back to, “Minister, what’s your vision?” because unless the minister

takes ownership for this, it is difficult to see how any of this is going to be effective. So I
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need first to get his support, a measure of understanding, and then I need really to look

for and search for political support for what we are doing.

In Kyrgyzstan, particularly, one thing that we had not realized was there was considerable hostility to the government, and even more so as a result of the riots in March a

year ago, when in Aksy there were a number of protesters who were shot dead by the

police, six in all.

I am not going to comment on that in specific terms, because lots of other people have,

and I still do not believe that the truth of the issue has ever come to light, but we can all

speculate on what happened that day, on what we know. Not speculation, but a fair assessment, in my opinion, I think supported by the police officers that I have talked to in

Kyrgyzstan, is that undoubtedly the police possess no training whatsoever, no notion of

how to deal with public disorder. I am presuming that they had been given clear instructions by members of the government not to allow this crowd to move on and it had to be

stopped.

Now, there is a way in which you can deal with that. Certainly most police resources,

at least in our countries, understand how you do deal with, in fact, prevent public disorder. It is part of a skill, a tactic.

It actually does not happen on the road, it happens days, weeks before, because you

get into a relationship with NGO groups, you talk and you listen.

You keep talking and you keep listening and eventually they will come—and I hope—

tell you what their problems are and what they want to do. Then you manage it.

If conflict does break out, as indeed it does, then you have to know how to manage it,

using only the minimum level of force to overcome it, not extreme force.

But of course if police officers only have AK-47s, then it is highly likely that they will

use them, particularly if somebody says, “Get their guns.”

Now the police officer in question has a real and immediate dilemma because if “get

their guns” happens, does he get shot?

Again, we do not take AK-47s or lethal equipment into riots. We hold our reserves,

clearly, out of sight, and try and depress the level of threat that occurs. What you try not

to do is to at any time make a confrontation.

So there is a lot that we could do, and I have absolutely no doubt that if the Kyrgyz

police have had the training that I hope they are going to get from us, this would not have

occurred.

That is what one of the projects is going to deal with.

What I had to deal with—and I am still to a certain degree having to deal with—is

that there was stiff opposition from some of the political groups to the OSCE, first, bringing in public disorder training, accompanied by pieces of equipment that they thought

entirely inappropriate—which the police will be trained in.

That has now moved to there should not be any international support for the police in

Kyrgyzstan, so long as the people who were responsible for the deaths of those protesters

remain unconvicted. They should be prosecuted and convicted. Now this is hardening off.

I cannot do more than talk to these groups—talk to whoever is of this view.

There are not now as many people.

But what I have done—and by a circuitous route—persuaded the president that there

should be allowed two members of this NGO community that has an active interest in

policing, that they be admitted to the state commission on police reform.
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The president has set up this Commission. We have—the president and the foreign

minister of the Netherlands who currently chairs the OSCE reached an agreement by

which, yes, two members of the NGO community should be allowed—indeed I hope will

play an active part—in that state commission.

I have also said we ought to allow two members of the NGO community—not the

same, let’s have two more—who could come and be part of our program committee.

So as we talk about what we are going to do in policing, I think it will be a bit dull,

because it is going to be a sort of technical program, committee, but, nevertheless, it just

shows transparency. I am sincere about that.

I am much more committed to the notion of people from the NGO community having

an input into community policing in the Pervomaisky district in Bishkek, which is the

model police station that we are working on. I had thought that my biggest obstacle was

likely to be the Minister of Interior and the Deputy Minister of Interior. I still think they

are going to need persuading of this. But instead of which, I have had to deal much more

with some political opposition to actually ever being a member of this group.

I do not want to set up the NGO forum—the NGO group from which these representatives are chosen. I do not want to do any of that. I want the NGOs themselves, as you

would be in this room, I hope, be interested parties to agree among yourselves that this is

a reasonable idea, actually to elect whoever it is should go on these various committees,

and, I hope, ask your representatives to come back and talk to you about, well, this is

where we are going, this is what they are doing, and so on.

Because the next step is, if we talk about policing in a country like Kyrgyzstan and we

decide we have got to change their culture, then that is highly threatening. But, please,

can we make sure the police are part of this dialogue, because as we frequently find in our

own countries, we set off with grand plans at reorganization, we actually do not share it

with the people whom we are trying to reorganize. They stiffen their opposition from day

one.

So let us get them on board. Let us talk to our police officers who are, after all, a part

of that community.

I think then the next step is to consider how this exchange of information deals in a

slightly broader context, because you are actually deciding how you choose to live.

What does society want to look like in 5 years in Kyrgyzstan? Now we are deeply into

the politics. I need the dialogue to be continued at a political level. But it is driven by what

people want, what people like and what people will tell the police they want.

So it is an opportunity to actually take quite a step forward in double-quick time

actually to address some of these issues. But at the moment it is focused in Kyrgyzstan. It

could provide a very useful model for the other states.

I have gotten a clear request from Kazakhstan and from Uzbekistan and particularly

Tajikistan to get on with some work there. There are other issues that look as thought

they might slow me, certainly as far as Tajikistan, that have nothing whatsoever to do

with Tajikistan. It has to do with the European Community that has a large sum of money

and declares that it will look after Central Asia and the security borders in these countries.

Just by making a statement like that means that all the delegations in any way Europe or Europe-plus, E.C., E.C.-plus, say, well, we are not going to pay twice.

So I have to go looking for the money to support what I think, on the basis of our

assessment, we ought to be doing Tajikistan, and it will suddenly grow more difficult than

ever it was.
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We have also started work in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Different altogether, different

levels of responsiveness. But one of the things that moves us along is credibility of the

police officers that I am able to find. Whether they come from Sweden or Russia or America,

but they are credible experts. They have an integrity.

Our chairwoman today has already just intruded that point. It is a very important

one. If we send police officers who in any way misbehave or do not have the integrity or

credibility that is so important here, we will do untold damage.

I will bear them a grudge for life, because they have so undermined all the work that

we do and that some of my colleagues and hard-working police officers have put into these

peacekeeping missions and into these missions that we are trying to form now.

But if we can get hold of the experts that we need and they have this credibility with

their counterparts, then we can I think much more capably influence people to say, “Look,

you are going to have to start changing your prisoner welfare regime. You’re going to have

to start making substantial changes in the way that you do detain people, the way that you

question people.”

I think we will get listened to, because we’ll be—by that time—well and truly embedded in their thinking.

Now, that may seem naive. I am not kidding myself that it is going to be other than

more difficult than I have described. But I do honestly believe that we would not be very

effective unless we take this course of action and work from the inside out, because over

the last 10, 11, 12 years, I have not seen much progress made by people being criticized

from the outside.

So I am going to sort of take the lead. Then I hope I can open the door to some international groups, NGOs, who can come and help that process. That is the next step.

I have already alluded to it, because I am going to have an NGO forum, and there is no

doubt we could get some support from the international groups for it.

But if I have got the right police officers as well, police officers who have had to deal

with conflict in societies—in their own societies—and I have had a fair experience in that

in my own country and it is been experience learned through an extremely violent time in

the inner city—then they will know what worries people, what anxieties people have, and

how you do, you manage that. That is going to be an example for the local police.

What I am talking about is very much a long-term program. The program for Kyrgyzstan will last about 18 months. That is about as far as I can push the OSCE at the

moment. But for 18 months, I am talking 5 years, I hope it will be 10, I hope that other

countries will come in and take a more direct interest in that country. I am hoping then

that the E.C. may decide that by that time it is ready to look at the Central Asian states,

and with substantial sums of money support the work that will have been carried on by

then.

So I hope that gives you a sort of feeling for what the OSCE is doing in terms of

policing. But it is only policing. I have not touched on judicial reform and penal reform, as

they are vital to this process I have to say I think they are lagging behind.

Ms. PRYOR. Thank you very much. That was extremely thought-provoking and complete, and I think it will help us to ask some interesting questions.

Before I turn it over to people from the floor, I wanted just to follow up on some

things you had said about corruption. It seems that, no matter what other reforms you

make, you come up against this wall, where, if you have a society where, as you described

it, the economy is based on criminal activity or reinforced by criminal activity, and if you
10

have a police force that is not only in a cultural sense, used to buying favors or engaging in

criminal activity, and coupled with a low pay status, how do you, assuming you have got

the ear of the minister, as you said, assuming that there is a certain will to change, what is

it that you need to persuade them to do? Is it to raise the salary level, in just practical

terms; is it to start a whole reeducation program on how they view their job; or is it some

of all of these things?

Mr. MONK. It is certainly some of all those things, plus a few more.

The minister is not necessarily the person who will be most effective in this case. I

mean, one thing you need to say, of course, is you realize there are a lot of police officers

who really are not police officers, and you could get rid of them. Well, that is all very well,

but if he gets rid of 40 percent of his police strength, in many cases he is turning people

out onto the streets who will very quickly become his opponents. They will very quickly

also get into crime, because they actually know quite a bit about it. So there can be a

reluctance to do that.

But there has to be some thought given to this, because the police forces in some of

these countries are excessive, the ratio is far beyond what we would think is acceptable.

But the other thing is, while this work is being flagged up to the communities, you

have the World Bank, you have a number of aid organizations that exert economic muscle.

This is where they need to understand the message. Programs have been started in the

past allied to law enforcement that have, on the basis of conditionality, said, “We will give

you this, in return for which your behavior needs to follow the following.”

Where I think we will be more successful is again, as I say, long-term but working

with police officers who, at the ground-floor level, can be supportive and professionalized.

That is what they are looking for. They have to live; but at the same time, high wages are

not the reason that a lot of people go into policing, or, for that matter, public service; it is

actually being able to succeed and get some sense of achievement out of it.

I have met police officers in Kyrgyzstan and Armenia (and particularly I can think of

some there) for whom what will give them the highest sense of achievement is actually

getting somewhere, being able to make a difference. If we can produce the skills and the

equipment to help them do that, that is something. We do come in with some good ideas,

but it is a bit ad hoc.

I spoke to some people—again, going back to the issue of a specific area of crime, the

people in Armenia who were about to take a number of Armenian police officers, I think to

Switzerland, but to talk to them about corruption and money laundering. Well, that’s fine,

but what happens when they get back to Armenia? What—? “Well, then they would be

aware.”

I kept pushing this question until I think the person I was speaking to began to see

that there was not much change inevitable because these people did not even have a chair

or a table to sit at.

So we have got to be a little realistic about this. I mean, we can make changes in their

life-styles with quite small levels of investment. That investment is better done if it is

part of a coordinated program, which at the moment I am afraid it is not.

Ms. PRYOR. Is there no coordination between international agencies? When you say

that it is not a coordinated program, is that...

Mr. MONK. It is a bit speculative. I mean, in some cases it works, because I will recognize Tim—and Tim represents another agency and we will start talking. Then we will

very quickly agree on the dynamics and what we should be doing.
11

But I think up to now, there has not been sufficient awareness of doing a very indepth assessment to begin with—what’s the policing needs requirement—and do it with

the host state experts, because as you are doing that, you are listening to what really are

their concerns and their problems, and they will share that.

I think if some organization is Commissioned to do that—and I think the OSCE probably now can do it more effectively, because I can call on police officers from 55, 54, the

remaining 54 permanent States, and I can choose, with the help of the ministry—the local

ministry—who would be most acceptable, but, particularly, who has got the professional

skills.

But we keep finding that another organization has appeared on the scene, is doing

something along these lines, and we did not know about it, even though we may have

made a call upon them.

We have a sort of list of organizations that we go and talk to every time we go into a

country. The U.N. is one, IOM [International Organization for Migration] is another, and

so on. We work our way down the list, and we make sure we go around and call on the

embassies. The Russian embassy is certainly a place to go. That has, by itself, paid off

dividends.

But in terms of international organizations, ICRC and others, we have been surprised

to learn that they have a police program. We have really not known about this.

So it is a question of holding our hands up, saying, “We are here and we have got field

missions, but we are going to do policing. Can you, please, just get in touch or let us know?

I am not going to tread on your toes, I am not going to steal your copyright or manuals or

anything else, but if I know what you are doing, then I can try and stitch it into what we

are doing, and thank you very much.”

Even that approach has not entirely been successful.

Ms. PRYOR. What I would like to do is open it up to questions from the floor right now,

and I would like to ask you to come to the mike if you have a question, even if you have a

follow-up question, so that our transcribers can hear clearly.

Please, state your name and your affiliation.

QUESTIONER. I have a question that would draw a little bit on your experience in Bosnia.

I am wondering what the role of policing and international involvement, such as the OSCE’s

in policing, is in the immediate post-conflict situation. Thank you.

Mr. MONK. I think I might know what you are alluding to.

One thing I was asked to do after Bosnia was to be a member of the panel, the U.N.

panel on peace operations, which reported—and that report is now known as the Brahimi

report because Lakhdar Brahami was our Chairman—it was the first time policing had a

voice at that level.

There were nine of us on the panel and the other members had all been SRSGs, Special Representatives of the U.N. Secretary General, in areas of conflict around the world

or had held very senior posts within the U.N.

My argument, my proposal, which was not difficult to convince my colleagues of, was

that policing should be far more engaged, as conflict indicators became apparent, that

there had to be, on the basis of all the lessons we should have learned and could have

learned from past peacekeeping missions, considerable work done to think about “what

if?” It is the, “What if this goes wrong? What can we do now to stop the conflict? What

should we do if conflict arises? Then what, in post-conflict situations, must the police do?”
12

My view again is that police have to be very closely working and planning with the

military I will also say—and I have said this and said it in regard to Kosovo—we should be

there or certain police commanders must be on the ground, in theater, from day one, and

we should be on the shoulder of the military commanders, to remind them of what the

long-term goals are. We need to involve the military very much more in a way that will

help to clear the ground for policing and for law and order.

Because what we have seen recently is that we’ve so-called called an end to conflict,

but what is outstanding now is threatening to defeat us, yet we have not sufficiently thought

about the peace.

Policing plays a very important place in this.

Law and order matters enormously.

One of the things that Paddy Ashdown has spoken a great deal about since becoming

the E.U. Special Representative and the OHR Special Representative in Bosnia is, as you

know I discussed some time ago, to avoid this election’s hysteria that breaks out, what we

have failed to do is look at law and order, and in some way, begin to create a safe environment.

Then comes the next step. But unless you attend to that, you will end up legitimizing

people who themselves have a criminal background or criminal intent. You have got double

the problems now, people who do not have any credibility with ordinary people who have

to endure the evil that they have previously perpetrated. So law and order matters.

Where do you get your information from?

Well, this is where you start thinking about it, before the conflict. I would have hoped

that we would have been in touch with police officers in some countries in Asia. I would

certainly hold that up as something that we could have done better in Bosnia. Speak to

your police officers.

Yugoslavia, after all, was very proud of its police force. It did have a prominence in

European policing. But somehow we never used the police officers who were there on the

ground. We never actually gave them support while all this conflict was going on.

There is no reason why we could not.

We sent missiles into Belgrade, and after 78 days of sending missiles there we have

managed now to destroy 80 percent of the criminal records in Serbia which is singularly

unhelpful.

We have destroyed their communications infrastructure. It is all having to be rebuilt.

The year is 2003, and Belgrade and Yugoslavia and parts of it now have almost been reduced to a Third World status.

It is an enormous burden on the other countries, and it is an enormous burden on law

enforcement.

So I think policing, law enforcement, has to be part of in any way the planning, trying

to prevent conflict. Through the conflict period you must be consulted, you must have

police officers looking at this. Certainly out the other side, police have got to be on the

ground from day one, active, with a clear plan and objective into the future, a future program, which I hope informs more the political objectives for that country.

Ms. PRYOR. Additional questions?

QUESTIONER. I apologize. I was a couple minutes late. So if you addressed this at the

beginning...

Mr. MONK. I did.

QUESTIONER. ... refer me to the transcript.

[LAUGHTER.]
13

I am wondering if you can say something about your relationship with the OSCE’s

Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw; and also if the geographic

differences—you’re sitting in Vienna and they are sitting in Warsaw—complicates that

relationship? Thank you.

Mr. MONK. Yes, I will. No, regrettably, I did not cover that point.

Let me deal with the second part of your question first. It does definitely impede.

Although we can talk about e-mails and pick up a telephone, it is not the same as face-toface contact . What I lack is the opportunity, as do my colleagues, to sit down with other

colleagues in ODIHR, in Warsaw, and to talk through some of these issues.

Now, in some matters there is not likely to be much that ODIHR will help with, but

on others, where we are beginning to look toward civil society reform, yes, of course, there

will be.

What I can remember saying when I went to Kyrgyzstan is, “You know, who here

represents ODIHR?” The answer was, “Well, nobody.” At that stage, “Yes, well, we used

to have somebody here, but they left about 2 years ago.” So, well, what a pity. But now you

have to find the local representative, who will then refer to ODIHR, and you find that

their line of communication is via e-mail, not this person-to-person relationship that really matters.

So ODIHR is an arm of the OSCE, an institution of the OSCE, with whom or with

which we will definitely be working much more in the future and are already in particular

working on trafficking, with regard to trafficking.

In fact, Tim can tell you more about that either publicly now or afterwards. But he

and a representative in ODIHR, who as I said, have become virtually inseparable. So it is

something that we are very keen that they should understanding the policing view on.

There is a tendency to believe that, well, if we do not consult everybody all the time,

then we have got something to hide. Well, it is not quite like that.

In policing, I mean, some of us have worked in the community for a considerable

period, we are pretty clear about how you involve civil society. In some cases, it is better

that it is a police officer talking to people in the community than anybody else, because

you are, after all, the person who is going to have to deliver.

So I am trying to make sure that not just me, but some of my local, you know, Kyrgyz

colleagues come and talk to the NGO community. But we could certainly do with some

support the other side, people who will say, “Look, give them a chance, and let us listen a

bit more to what is going on.” But for that I have been, I have to say, more supported by

people who are on the ground representing their agencies.

The U.S. Embassy has been one of those agencies, if you like, who has given me a lot of

support, have pointed out where the problems are and have more realistically helped me

with dealing with them, introducing me to some people who have been immensely hostile

to policing, but at least I have got an introduction, and there was nobody from, at the time,

ODIHR to help me do that.

QUESTIONER. I have several questions relating to how all the policing work that had

been done in the Balkans may affect future work that is done by the OSCE.

First, you refer to the police officer or experts in law enforcement that you’re provided with. As we know, in Bosnia there were many problems with this. Sometimes they

were not physically fit, could not drive four-wheel drive vehicles. Sometimes they got into

criminal activity themselves, including the trafficking of women.
14

As you expand your programs and put more people out into the field, do you get a

chance to vet the people who are given to you in the OSCE framework, to make sure that

they are truly experts and also understand the situation they’re getting into and will set

the good example that you would like them to set when they get out there?

The second question is—you have these technical programs—I do not know if they’re

seminars, conferences, whatever—I would like to hear a little bit more about what, concretely, you would do in these programs with Kyrgyzstan, Armenia.

Will you have the ability to follow up on them? Does the understanding you have with

the host government allow you to actually engage in any monitoring or reporting on how

the things that you are trying to teach them actually get used out into the field, particularly if a problem does come up, or do you simply have to provide the technical expertise

and then hope for the best on their part—a little bit on the follow-up, if you could address

that.

Thank you.

Mr. MONK. Well, on selection, it is not an issue that we are very alert to, but in the

past, we have had police officers, so-called, appear in these missions, and they have caused

untold problems.

But it is easier, I have to say, with the OSCE, because, as we select officers, first of all

to help us with the assessments and then to help us, actually, deliver the programs, there’s

two ways they can come in.

One is on the basis of a secondment by their country, in which case they go through a

quite rigorous system of selection, that, first, requires them to show what their general

qualifications are and then their mission-specific qualifications.

Then we test them on that, and they will be interviewed before they are accepted.

For a contracted staff, it is even more easy to make sure we do not make a mistake,

because it will be the unit itself that will be hiring these people.

We will be, in addition to using all of the seconded criteria, looking at particularly

the qualifications, the experience—we probably will be having police officers who are

coming to the end of their policing career, about to enter to retirement. There will be

enough opportunities to know about these people, and although some may have international police experience—not all will—they will be recruited for their expertise in a particular subject.

We want them to stay a period of time, and that will, again, give us an opportunity, I

suppose, to see how effective they are. But I have no worries at all that with the staff I am

working with, who are all so alert to this, and with the delegations with which I deal, that

we are not going to make the same mistake as I have seen in the past.

The other thing is, we are still only dealing with very small numbers. It is not like

recruiting for a U.N. CIV-POL [Civilian Police] mission, where we suddenly need 100, 150,

200 officers.

We are, at the moment, in the countries in which we work, looking for ones, and twos

and threes, and we can manage that.

But these are the projects I can give you. Well, I will give you some of the headlines,

and I would not go into too much detail, but I am happy to tell you more afterwards.

But one is improving the quality of crime investigation.

One thing that is missing there is crime scene groups. They really do not have the

capacity to do crime scene examination. That is quite a loss, because the investigation—

though carried out in the academy, the training for that sort of thing is—is done on the
15

basis of skills that are getting a little bit old-fashioned. They are doing it in rooms that are

not adequately fitted out.

But they still—and certainly when it comes to operational policing—do not have the

equipment, which we take for granted. It is one project. They need to be shown how to

deal with it and what to do with that information from crime scene search.

Another one is actually improving our police capacity for drug interdiction. Now, the

reason we are doing that is not because the OSCE does drugs—I always make that point.

I give it to the U.N., to UNODC [United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime] to do that.

But the U.N. has not got money at the moment to manage the work it would like to do

in Kyrgyzstan. We have come to an agreement that we will start this off with a project

based around the crossroads of drugs in Kyrgyzstan.

Again, we will be using a little bit of crime analysis, or crime intelligence, software

that will help them profile times of day, people, vehicles, and so on, and be a bit more

selective and accurate about where they target, how they target. Then with a group of

drugs dogs provided by the Turkish Government, we hope we can at very modest costs be

effective. Then we will move this.

But it is showing them how to do a bit of problem solving on their own behalf. That

will form the basis to be developed by the UNODC as it comes into the much wider strategy in funding.

We are going to, as I have mentioned, set up of a modern, efficient emergency call

system, which does not currently exist and a center.

We do want to set up a core of a national criminal investigative analysis system. In

other words, managing operational information. Not much use is made of it. Although,

they do collect information, which really is just to show what criminal ratings are and

what they are clearing up, but they are not using information in a way that will help them

defeat crime or deal with it as it goes through their area.

We certainly, as I have mentioned, will be using this Pervomaisky police station for a

pilot introduction of community policing methods.

That is where I am going to rely very heavily on the senior police officer there and the

police officers in that station, for which I have agreed with the Kyrgyz Government that

not one of the police officers in this police station will be changed in the next 18 months.

So whoever they have got there now, including their senior officers, will remain there

for 18 months, because that is the test. Is it working? Is what we are doing making a

difference. Because a community does not change that much, and if we keep changing

police officers, you see can it is pretty valueless.

In fact, that is one of the things that I am afraid even in the United States and in the

U.K. we keep on learning and forgetting. We keep rolling police officers through. They

never establish the trust and confidence which long-term you need to do. That’s one of the

lessons they’re going to particularly have to learn.

We’re going to strengthen police capacity in preventing conflict and then managing

public disorder, and that’s very specific, and I have mentioned something about that. Then

all these things point to revised training methods in the police academy, so actually restructuring the police academy and the police academy curricula will be part of this. That

will enable us to start work on senior management training, which will come in as part of

and related to this.

What we’ll follow next as a result of these projects, is that we will find the lines of

communication to police headquarters are not good, we will find that police headquarters
16

would not know how to manage a lot of what is then generated as a result of these changes,

and we will have to start working our way along those communications line.

That now means that the ministry itself—already discussed with it—has got to think

of a way of migrating all the lessons that it learns as a result of this model police station.

So that’s part of, though not specifically mentioned in this program, but clearly the

next step has got to be, “How are you going to migrate these lessons, Minister?” The next

police station takes this on, and then your academy, senior officers learn a new approach

to this.

So when we talk about the duration, then, no, I am not going to just walk away after

delivering that, because that’s exactly what we’ve done in the past, and it does not work.

In fact I am looking for more and more commitment.

Now, this is where I go to certain countries to either support the OSCE’s way of

dealing with this or I hope will take an even stronger bilateral interest.

So there will be countries—Norway is one that’s been enormously supportive of this,

and it is helped me with training in the academy I am hopeful that it may very well be a

country like Norway that will say, “Look, we’re going to twin our police academy with this

police academy in Bishkek.” As a result of that, then we will start to feed expertise from

us to them and so on, and we might even pay for them to come to Oslo and to see.

Study visits are not a bad thing as long as we know that there is some outcome sought,

and it is not just going to be an opportunity for senior officers to get out of Bishkek and go

shopping in Oslo.

So there is a way of the future. And, you know, all of this plus some indeed is all on

paper, all being thought through. But we must not overwhelm them. Too much, too soon

can, you know, have an effect, and they cannot take it.

And I just want to get into a dialogue. After all, as I said before, it is their plan, it is

their strategy. I just want them to welcome us rather than be suspicious or cynical of what

the objectives are.

QUESTIONER. I work with the Bosnia Support Committee, and I was wondering if you

could explain a bit to me about whether the war criminals that still are at large are affecting your police efforts.

And I was wanting to ask a bit about the apprehension of Milosevic. I just sort of

wanted to get a feel for the idea. It seemed to come after the bombing of Serbia. Was the

bombing of Serbia—I am just asking you a political question—do you think it could have

been done—because Karadzic and Mladic are still at large in Bosnia, would we have gotten Milosevic without bombing Serbia? Are there ways that we can get these war criminals? And who’s responsible?

Because I have spoke with SFOR people, Americans, and they told me that their

American generals told them that it wasn’t their job to arrest the war criminals, that they

were there for peacekeeping. If the war criminals came within their area, and they could

do it, well, then, that was one thing, but they were not there to arrest the war criminals.

So for all these years that I have been working on the Bosnia Support Committee, I

would like to know who is responsible for these war criminals. Just leaving them there, is

it affecting organized crime? I mean, they must, especially Karadzic, he’s a psychiatrist,

he was fooling with people’s minds, he was making people that loved each other, that

married each other, hate each other.

So I would just like you to get into this a bit if you could.

Mr. MONK. You’re actually asking me questions which are quite dear to my heart.
17

Are these war criminals having an influence? Yes. Will we ever actually have any

form of—well, I am trying to think of a society which finally learns how to heal itself and

comes back together again—not as long as these people are at large, no, I do not think we

will.

As regards SFOR’s answer to you, strictly, that’s right. Because SFOR’s mandate is

that they can not arrest these indicted war criminals unless they actually happen upon

them—in consequence of a patrol, they come across them.

Well, we’ve seen that, with a quite liberal interpretation used in the past.

But it is a fact now, that these people still are at large, and have been at large for

some considerable time.

Milosevic was arrested—I am not sure on this point, but you might think that he was

arrested because of this very substantial economic promise that was made to Serbia—and

arrest him and give him to the international criminal tribunal.

On the other hand, some people believe that wasn’t altogether the thing to do—that

the Serbs, being the Serbs—and they have a proud history and that they have, still, their

sovereignty—would it not have been more appropriate for them to arrest him, and for the

Serbian nation to deal with him? Would that have been practical? Would it have actually

happened, because Milosevic, we know, had appointed judges, they were thoroughly corrupt—they were the people who had houses and cars where as the judges that didn’t and

didn’t work for him didn’t have houses and cars anymore.

So what’s the likely outcome, and you might, you know, muse on from what the outcome might have been in a different direction.

But in any case, the Europeans are still saying to Serbia that, “You still need to take

greater steps in this direction, and that direction.”

If you are facing warlords or previously people who were engaged in the crimes that

were committed inside Serbia, who themselves have grown rich and are extremely powerful and influential, and who have a voice in politics, and who still threaten to such a degree that, you know, the prime minister has been assassinated, there is still an obvious

problem in that country.

My question would be, firstly, what steps are we taking to help the Serbs rid themselves of this straitjacket of crime that they currently are having to work within?

Because I still believe some of the significant criminals are effective in this country.

They still thwart what we’re trying to do there. Unless we really do put pressure on the

Serb nation, but help them in a positive way, then I can see this going on and on.

It will be a great sadness if that happens, because Serbia can go much faster than a lot

of the other Balkan countries. It has tremendous potential. There’s some extraordinary,

courageous and wonderful people associated with government and around it who have a

quite valuable role to play in that country’s regeneration I honestly do not think they’re

getting the support that the international community needs to give them.

Time is ticking on. We are still spending money on Bosnia, spending money in some

of these areas, but it is not in a very productive way, in a sense.

So, a rather long, disjointed answer, but there’s a deal of passion in what you say,

which I recognize, and probably not too appropriate for me to get into too much of the

political work. But where crime is concerned and the miserable way people have to live

while negotiating every day what they buy and what they can do and what their children

can do with warlords is just deeply offensive. We are still, I am afraid, allowing that to

happen.
18

Whether that’s happening with regard to the Serbs, or whether there are Croat war

criminals who need to be arrested and there are Bosniacs who also deserve to be arrested.

We haven’t really acquitted ourselves very well.

QUESTIONER. [INAUDIBLE.]

Mr. MONK. The question was do I think the military have to do it. I can only tell you

what the military’s mandate is. But you have to ask yourself who else could do it.

The belief is that the international police can do it. The international police do not

have executive authority in these countries. They just do not possess it.

Frequently I was asked, as the Commissioner of the International Police Task Force,

“Why have you not arrested these war criminals?” Well, I have absolutely no authority to

arrest anybody. In fact, if I wanted to arrest anybody for anything, I had to go and find a

policeman—a regular policeman. He was highly unlikely to step forward and get involved

in this sort of work, because he probably would be shot the next day and certainly his

family would have been taken hostage and probably killed as well.

So do not lose sight of the level of intimidation that exists.

So we come back to planning before we actually go into these areas, do not we? Think

about what we’re going to deal with. Think about how we are going to deal in a conflict

situation. Think about, as we emerge the next side, what we will be confronted with and

how we’re going to tackle it.

War crimes and war criminals are certainly part of it. We knew that, my goodness

me. Now we’ve got an International Criminal Tribunal that has been going on and on and

on all these years, and I think is—you know, I can certainly speak for Judge Louise Arbour—

is immensely frustrated, intensely frustrated by the lack of action that was taken in order

for her International Criminal Tribunal to dispense justice.

QUESTIONER. Hi there. My name is Kevin Angle. I am an intern at the Commission, and

I have two questions for you. The first one kind of jumps off that past question.

In Bosnia, there was an active attempt by the international community to screen a lot

of the police forces, to find people who had potentially committed human rights abuses or

committed past abuses like that.

Would, in Central Asia, there potentially—obviously not initially, but would there

potentially be some sort of effort, again, to find people who have committed abuses in the

past? Because it is hard to trust police who have committed torture in the past or similar

acts of abuse.

My second question has to do with the expansion of police training outside of

Kyrgyzstan, in the rest of Central Asia.

I am interested in what sort of criteria you’d use for selecting countries for future

missions and if, for example, past human rights abuses would factor into your decision of

whether or not to send a mission to another country in Central Asia?

Mr. MONK. As regards the first questions, it will be—remember it is for the government themselves to support this plan of action.

As we develop police capacity, we will also develop police institutions, one of which

would, after all, be internal accountability. How do you demonstrate, both internally and

externally, that you take seriously standards of behavior, performance, ethics, policing

ethics, policing principles?

It is very much going to be part of the future if you are reforming a police service, or

changing a police force into a police service, whether you use those terms or not, but that’s

where you’re aiming for. Accountability is certainly going to be part of that.
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So it is for them to do.

Where do I go for people to help them do it? From countries with an experience and

a culture that will help them deliver in a way that’s acceptable and credible. So I can think

of countries—Hungary, Estonia, and some of the European countries—Eastern European

countries—that have been through a process—Slovenia and others—that have actually

made the transition very successfully. If I can appeal to those countries to provide me

with police officers—I do not need large numbers to begin with. I am not staffing a U.N.

peacekeeping mission.

What I am doing is gradually setting up programs of change. So I am looking for that

one or two police officers who now will particularly work up an aspect of some of the areas

I have talked about, who will show them how to develop crime intelligence systems, but

work with them, modify the system, twist the bits of wire together, put the new software

in, teach them, work through interpreters, test it. Are they effective? Now, where is this

person going to work and how is he going to work and what’s he going to work on? Does

that fit with what other people were hoping he was going to do? Take a much more closer

interest.

If they have got the culture—better still, if they speak Russian, even better if they

speak Russian and have been part of the change which Moscow is undergoing at the moment. No reason at all why I cannot ask the Minister of Interior—and have done—in Moscow to help, not only with training the ground, but also with training in Moscow for these

people.

We cannot impose on the Russian Federation without saying, “We’ll give you the

same sort of support and resources that we hope we’ll give these other countries.”

And I am not expecting to get all this for free.

Here comes the real problem, because, although I can go to some of these countries,

some of these countries find it difficult to raise the finance to send experts, so I have got to

contract them. To do that, I have got to now bid for sums of money in an annual fight with

everybody else which takes place to find the budget that I will need for next year.

So I think finding the police experts is not going to be difficult, because there is a

fraternity, there’s a network of policing now, which exists as a result of the peacekeeping

work that we’ve all been engaged in, but more especially this developing police capacity,

which has been part of international organizations’ objectives for some while, particularly

this one, the OSCE.

Because only a few days ago, I was in the U.N. Headquarters, and they are adopting

this is as their mode of operation. That’s why they’re very keen to learn from us how we do

it.

So I think you’ll find, even in Liberia, when the U.N. goes there, it will not just be

monitoring, which has traditionally been in the U.N.’s mandate. They will look, from the

very beginning, to tackle reform and training.

QUESTIONER. You talked a bit about the strength of organized crime and the weakness

of the state in some of the regions where you’re working. We know that the strength of

organized crime often is through transnational networks. What are you doing or what

kinds of strategies might you have to get cross-border police cooperation? What can you

do when the organized crime networks overlap with the state?

In the Balkans, how do the OSCE missions work with the new EU PM follow-on

policing mission? Would it work better if OSCE had that mission, instead of EU PM?

Thank you.
20

Mr. MONK. Well, in terms of transnational crime, one thing you can start to work on is

your borders, and border policing is important. So there will be areas—unfortunately, I

think it is about 80 percent of the world’s conflict now is intrastate, which means that

countries are fragmenting and the dismal prognosis is that this will continue to happen.

So we will see new countries claiming sovereignty and therefore more borders being

created. This is a massive problem at the moment for the European Commission, who is

announcing larger and larger sums of money, as I have described initially, on Central

Asia, the Caucasus, but especially in Europe, and Europe ... [inaudible], to help it secure

its borders or at least manage them.

That’s something which is going to have to be dealt with but at ground level. You’re

going to have to recognize the problems, and they are country-specific. It is no good saying

we will solve transnational crime and in your sorts of very sophisticated, technical ways.

We need the sophistication, and we need the technical ways. But we need the police officers at the border to understand how to use them. We certainly are confronted with this

quite unbelievable requirement for skills, training and databases, and they do not exist.

That’s one thing.

The other thing is to actually work on basic policing because organized crime and

certainly terrorism, and Tim and I have often swapped these examples, has been thwarted

in the past, quite substantially thwarted as a result of small pieces of information which a

patrolman has acquired or actually generated himself.

I can think of a substantial case in the UK now known as the Yorkshire Ripper, somebody who actually killed and sexually abused a large number of women. He was arrested

first of all by a uniformed patrolman, and secondly by a uniformed patrolman by which

time we learned that this was the man indeed we were looking for. We can relate that sort

of thing to all sorts of other examples.

One thing that we do need to get better is that the people will talk to police officers—

a police officer that they have become familiar with, recognized or even talked to, better

still even more they have actually worked with or talked to in the past in some measure of

confidence. They can actually share with him little pieces of information or concerns. It is

what does a police officer do with that bits of information?

They’re quite telling and useful, and we have to get that into a system and we have to

show police officers then how they create that sort of environment, what they do with the

information.

So transnational crime, it is—just spoken like that seems almost impossible to break.

It is not provided you just follow policing and policing practices that we’ve learned over

time.

There are some eternal verities in policing which will never change and one of them

is exchanging information, and secondly is actually getting it and knowing what you’re

looking for. Criminals have to communicate with one another and they have to move and

they have to transfer their ill-gotten gains.

So another way is, of course, managing the financial aspects of terrorism. The relationship with the E.U. PM, it sits in the middle of four, in fact, five OSCE missions. Would

I be happier if it belonged to the OSCE? Yes, it would make more sense, but then it has a

sort of a stronger and larger commitment.

If I have a concern, is that it would just follow the U.N. Bosnia mission rather than

breaking free of that and really getting to influence, exerting considerable pressure on

those local politicians. The bit that I am always sorry about is that they never from the
21

beginning did what we do now, which is to involve the local police experts in the planning

for the future.

So instead of us coming along again and imposing our ideas even if we think we’re

pretty smart—by now and after 6 or 7 years in Bosnia we really ought to be engaged with

the local senior police officers—we can test out what their motivation and commitment is.

But more especially, we do need to send a message to the politicians in Bosnia that

we’re serious this time—get the books open, show us how these systems are funded, who

actually runs the intelligence service. We need to know about that.

QUESTIONER. My name is Dorothy Taft. I am also with the Helsinki Commission.

In your assessments of the countries of Central Asia in particular, a region where

torture is known to be used quite widely by the police forces, which of the countries in

their own self assessment have identified that as a problem? How do you begin to address

the use of torture among police forces?

Mr. MONK. I do not think any of them have raised this as an issue. It is not likely that

they will at least for a time yet.

How do we deal with it? Probably the way I have described. If I thought the riot police

officers are coming in—and the whole motive behind this technical assistance program is

to point up this is how you behave, this is how you perform as a professional police officer—you actually now have to stop this means, this emphasis that currently exists on

confessions.

It is extraordinary that even though you can send that message to police, the courts

prefer a confession to, say, forensic corroboration of an offense. So we’ve got some work to

do. We’re going to have to persuade judges that there’s another way. So I need, you know,

international judicial experts, I need judicial study boards to be created and so on. It is all

part of a wider prospect.

But I think we can help if we recognize this—and NGOs and international organizations do—and then say, look, if you can find the money, we think we’ve got the door open

now but we’re going to have to change systems for dealing with detainees—as they call

them—and we’re going to have to spend some money on refurbishing a lot of these police

stations or at least try and create a common center where prisoners can be taken or detainees can be taken.

That’s when we start to talk to them about other systems that can be introduced

where somebody has a responsibility for detainees, not least of which is a written record

of how those detainees are managed throughout their time in detention.

You can go into police stations now—and indeed this is true even in Yugoslavia and I

can say, “How many detainees do you have?”, and they cannot immediately tell me. I cannot actually go to one officer who is responsible for these detainees, which is totally unacceptable.

You know, there must be one officer in the station who’s sole responsibility is the

detainees, where are they, how are they being dealt with, what are they being engaged in

at the moment?

It is not to say that they will not be investigated and interrogated and so on and

interviewed properly, but all the things that we know how to do.

Now, there’s no change—I do not care what culture you come from, there shouldn’t be

any variation on that—and that’s the safeguard for human rights.

The next step as I proposed in Serbia, is that eventually you have members of the

local community—NGO representatives—who will appoint two people to visit police sta-
22

tions at any time of the night or day—lay visitors I call them. I can call them something

else. There will be quite considerable resistance to this but not as much as there was, and

particularly if I can show the value of doing this so that lay visitors can walk into a police

station and say, “This is me, this is my certification, my accreditation.”

Now, consistent with whatever is going on there and it does not damage any investigation, they should be taken straight through to the cells to be able to interview and to

look at the conditions in which the detainees are being held and report on it. Then they

should also go back to a public meeting which I hope will be my community consultative

group and say, “We did this on Thursday the 18th and again on Tuesday the 25th and this

is what we’ve found and we have reported on it.” Then it is then for the head of the police

station to say, “This was reported to me. This is the steps I have taken.”

Now, that’s in the future, but that’s where I am heading.

QUESTIONER. Hi. I am Sarah Ozkan with the State Department Bureau of Democracy,

Human Rights and Labor. I just had a question on the vetting process.

Are you able to vet your contractors or experts in the field for past human rights

violations, not just for expertise? Is there a mechanism that you use to ensure that human

rights training is a component of everything that you do in the field?

Also, on complicated issues like trafficking in persons, what kind of mechanisms do

you have to ensure that your field officers are not complicit and how do you ensure that

they know exactly what the consequences are for complicity? What kind of training do you

use to ensure that victims are treated as victims, not as criminals and the like?

Thank you.

Mr. MONK. Right.

The first thing about vetting our experts. Again, try to understand I am not setting up

peacekeeping missions—large sums of people—I am actually going to Sweden to say I

need, or I am going to countries actually and saying, “This is the profile of an expert I now

need.”

On the basis of the applications that come forward, then we draw up with the help of

our human resources branch a matrix of criteria and it will be the human resources department in the OSCE who will do all the checks through the delegations.

So I think it is quite likely if you have got a Swedish superintendent who has 25 years

of service and the Swedish government is prepared to put him forward, he’s unlikely to be

somebody who will have committed gross violations of human rights. But nevertheless,

you know, you may say, “Well, that’s all right for Sweden and I am working on that assumption. What safeguards do I have?” ... I must have safeguards because people can slip

through the net.

But I think by the time we’ve met them and we’ve assessed and we’ve asked for, you

know, human resources to do its work it is highly unlikely that the police officers who will

be coming into the system—and it is ones or twos, not whole groups of people—and we can

look up their previous international experience and the word does get around.

So I am fairly confident that we would not be employing people that you need have

concern about. I am looking, after all, for people with expertise, not in the same way that

the U.N. does.

We’re looking for people who are experts in, you know, as I say technical sides of

policing.

Human rights training, that’s up the road. In Kyrgyzstan, the academy already provides it and that’s with the United Nations. So I am not going to jump them. I mean, if
23

that’s what they’re doing that’s fine, but what I do need to do is to assess the value of that

in the field and how does it translate to what needs to change in terms of operational

policing. If it does not do sufficient, then we need to comment on that and it needs to be,

you know, enhanced.

I think the other issue was make sure that our people are not complicit in trafficking?

Well, again I just remind you that we haven’t got that many people at the moment in

the field. But I am absolutely aware of how damaging this can be and how indeed the

United Nations has suffered as a result of having police officers work for it who were

complicit in trafficking.

We have now put trafficking very firmly on our agenda in the police unit and I am

going to let Tim Del Vecchio actually tell you something about that because I have given

him this added burden. We hope to recruit somebody next year who will take over managing trafficking, but trafficking with an offender focus. No, there’s enough work already

being done in the OSCE which makes very clear that victims of trafficking are not to be

seen as criminals themselves. I think all of that has been long established, there’s not

much I can add to that.

What I am much more concerned about is that police officers actually know how to

investigate the crime, because we seem in a way to be working back to front and I wanted

to try and prevent much more than at the moment is being done.

In many respects, the police officers themselves are desperate for advice on how to

investigate these crimes. They do need to be encouraged to get in touch with the NGOs

who manage the victims and they certainly need their voice to be heard at government

level because it is frequently governments’ edicts that say, “Look, these people do not

have a visa, get rid of them. Let’s get them back to their countries of origin or whatever.”

The whole thing starts again, they just recycle the victims. I think police officers—

not all—will understand what victims do endure and this sort of clever intimidation that

rests on them. They also get rather confused about girls that have been trafficked and

then girls who have willingly taken up prostitution, and there is too much of a dialogue

going on there on this issue.

Really, policemen ought to deal with the offenses as they occur. What are we dealing

with here? Are we dealing with prostitution or are we dealing with girls that have been

trafficked? If the clients can find the girls, then so should the police officers be able to find

the girls.

And I would much rather have alternative strategies for convicting offenders than—

other than rests on a victim’s testimony because, at the moment, that seems in most countries to be the only way you get a conviction.

We’ve seen or some of you may be familiar with this infamous case in Montenegro,

where a girl there finally was actually able to escape and find a police officer who knew

what to do, and passed her on to a refuge and the process began. We saw the most hideous

abuses of the judicial process in that country. To my intense frustration, we’ve not yet

dealt satisfactorily, even though there has been an alleged judicial review offered by the

government of Montenegro, which we have certainly not made more use of.

And I was hoping on the basis of that to be able to say to the Montenegran Government, “Well, you have offered the opportunity to work with you on this subject, I am going

to take it. We’ll flood you with people, if necessary. You know, you will become a model in

this area now that you have said that, because you rarely ought never to make the same

mistakes as you have made before, where you can criminalize the victim in the press.” All
24

these things that were done to the victim, to see that was unbelievable, to see that any

country could behave so ...

So there are any number of areas that, you know, we need to talk on. The one thing

that trafficking will teach us, again, is the value of networking that goes on between police

officials or should go on between police officials in different countries.

Tim, do you want to comment on that? You’ll probably have to use that microphone.

But in view of the fact that you have now got this subject and you might be able to explain

where we are and what we’re doing on this.

Mr. DEL VECCHIO. Okay. Thank you.

Well, it is a big topic I do not think we have enough time today or the rest of the

month to cover every aspect of it. But you can only do what you can do.

I know we’re very careful that we give an induction course on all the incoming employees at OSCE and that’s one of the aspects that we do cover is human trafficking, what

is it and do not do it.

On top of that, we also have a code of conduct that you’re informed about. You’re

expected to understand it and you also sign forms indicating that you have understood it

and accept the consequences and the responsibility.

So—now is that foolproof? No. Are there people being people? Will we have things

happen in the future? Possibly. But we’re doing everything that we can do to eliminate

this.

I think a lot of questions like yours are based on some of the things that happened in

the Bosnia mission.

I was in Kosovo for a year, which came later I know from my own experience, when I

was in the training portion before I went to Kosovo, that they were very keen about talking about human trafficking and do not do it—that these places that we know about are

under constant surveillance. You will be photographed. If you’re caught doing something

like that, at the very least, you’re going home. You may even be prosecuted.

So from the time that Richard was running Bosnia to the time I went to Kosovo, there

had already been an evolution or an improvement on how this was addressed. Again,

foolproof? No. I do not think anything is, but I think people certainly are aware of this

situation and everybody is trying to do the best they can.

But as Richard mentioned earlier, I think a lot of you might be confusing these Bosnia

missions and Kosovo missions with what we’re anticipating will take place in Central

Asia and the Caucasuses.

We might be looking at hiring somebody in their late 50s, early 60s who was maybe a

forensic chemist or somebody that worked in latent fingerprint parts of this job.

They might go to a country alone. It is not going to be 500 cops getting off an airplane

and looking for a good time. It is a little different outlook on how we’re going to manage

these issues.

So hopefully, I think, just that aspect alone will probably allay a lot of your concerns

that, you know, the Vikings aren’t going to arrive in Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan and just

tear the town apart. Again, we’re certainly attuned to the problem of—and we’re going to

keep an eye on these people.

I think everybody in these missions is very alert to the situation. As certain establishments become identified as being involved in this, you know, they get on the list and

people do watch them. Again, foolproof? No.
25

What can we do from a police aspect? Well, I know a lot of meetings get held, a lot of

conferences get held and a lot of grand resolutions get passed and we float a lot of beautiful ideas. But then it boils down to does that police department have the capacity to do all

the wonderful things that we expect them to do? And I’ll be very honest with you, no.

They’ll tell you: “I do not have the training. I do not know how to talk to a sex-crime

victim. I never had that kind of training. How do you do that? Oh, you want me to build a

case without a witness? I do not know how to do that. I do not know how to conduct an

undercover investigation. I do not know how to do electronic surveillance. I do not know

how to do controlled buys.”

These are all things that they’re asking for us to provide them. We want to help them

out.

But again, we have trouble getting them money to do that.

I was recently down in Belgrade because they’re trying to put together a human trafficking unit down there. A small group of very dedicated people, two young female officers

in that unit, they are natural-born interrogators. These gals have been out to every human

trafficking incident that they have had reported to them and they have been doing the job

on raw ability alone.

They want to go to a sex-crime school. They want to go to an interview-interrogation

school. You know, right now, I cannot find a method to plug them into something like that,

but they’re begging for it. We’ll be helpful, certainly.

But there’s also the aspect of, this is a very mobile type of crime. Stability Pact says

that all the people that were rescued and identified by NGOs last year, over 50 percent of

them said: “I went through Serbia. I went through Belgrade.”

We’ve identified that as a pass-through point. Should we be focusing on Belgrade? I

think certainly. But right now they have a four-person unit and like Richard says, two

people have a desk, nobody has a lamp. You know, when it gets dark out, I do not know

how they operate unless they bring their own candles in. Nobody has a telephone.

When I got there, I passed out my business card. They didn’t have business cards.

They do not have a telephone. They do not have a fax machine. Bad guys have e-mails. Bad

guys have wire transfers. They do not have a computer. They do not have e-mail.

So how can they network with their counterparts, a Hungarian anti-trafficking unit?

They do not have the capacity. How can they telephone somebody in Moldova? They do

not have the capacity. People in Moldova, again, trying to put together a witness protection organization, an anti-trafficking unit. They just do not have the capacity.

This is where we’re going to be focusing our efforts.

But again, we need the money to do it. We need the political commitment and we

need to identify the experts and get them on the ground. So these are some of our problems.

And I know you’re very concerned about a lot of the horror stories that have happened in the past, but I think now we’re kind of moving into another era on human trafficking I do not think it is going to be so much of a problem where we have to keep an eye

on our experts as it is can we provide the capacity for our partners, for the people that are

going to be on the front lines trying to fight this problem?

Ms. PRYOR. Other questions? Ron, did you have one? I see you moving there.

QUESTIONER. Ron McNamara with the Helsinki Commission. Thank you very much.
26

Certainly, your time here would not be complete if you didn’t provide an assessment

in terms of the support that you have received or would like to receive from the United

States both here in terms of resources, in Vienna in terms of the work there.

You have alluded to the work on the ground in terms of embassies. The United States

does support, I believe, it is through the FBI, the academy in Budapest and a number

throughout the world.

And I wonder if you have given some consideration in terms of how those resources

might be utilized in terms of plugging people in? Another question I have, though, is also

how do you avoid a situation where you sort of professionalize the international expert in

a country like Kyrgyzstan or whatever, who may have participated already in a number of

international projects?

In other words, how do you ensure that the resources are being utilized and the opportunities are being utilized not for a select few or a handful of individuals who are sort

of in that—have been identified by their government as our point people, if you will, for

the international activity, but make sure that there are other opportunities for individuals as well? That’s the first aspect.

The second aspect is, later this week, we’ll be meeting with an agent from the U.S.

Secret Service, who I happened to have met several weeks back. He talked about the work

that he’s trying to encourage in the U.S. Secret Service to put together sort of a rapid

deployment force, if you will, that could be dispatched overseas in the event that there is

a particular case where they could lend their technical expertise and know-how to law

enforcement agents in countries where those capabilities may not exist.

One thought that comes to mind is Uzbekistan is a country of concern to the Commission in terms of the patterns of torture, reports of torture while in custody and also particularly of individuals who have died while in custody.

The Uzbek authorities have signaled to us that they may be serious about trying to

deal with the questions of torture while under the custody of police officials I just wondered if a rapid deployment, something like that might be valuable? Also if participating

States have come to you or whether you have encouraged them to come to your office as a

potential resource for connecting resources that you may not have at your immediate

disposal but that you could somehow put them in contact with and try to mobilize?

Mr. MONK. Let me deal with that one first.

One of the reasons we’re here actually is to talk to the State Department but also talk

to the Department of Justice and ICITAP for example—the organization which actually

deploys policing experts—and to make sure that there is not this overlap and that they

have got people that we could profitably use. We’d be only too happy if they could do their

work, we’ll do ours and we’ll share it and then work out between us, in company with

others, what next.

If somebody else wants to enter the markets, I am always interested to know what

their motive is. Frequently, it is not just based on altruism, that they see a nation they

think is marketable, and the United States is probably the only country that delivers

policing experts through commercial companies. Other countries do it through their governments and there’s a value to that, because we are trying to hold these policing experts

accountable and that’s what’s been missing I think in the past.

Mr. MONK. But then again, what I am more interested in is getting the technical skills

that people possess. A lot of people are leaving the police service. They’re going into private commerce and they’re not really happy.
27

That’s not entirely true, but many of them, they have worked in public service for so

long, that’s the business that they know and they wish, to goodness, that they could carry

on using the skills that they possess and this is the way they can do it.

So I am building up a considerable list of who’s got these people. But we have to, at

the same time, be fairly open and transparent. So again, I touch on your point about can I

be assured that I am not just, you know, using the same people? Yes, I can be, because I am

touching countries—some of them I have never used in the past at all.

It is up to them to come forward with, but you suddenly hear about somebody say

from Estonia, who has done an extraordinary thing, somebody from Latvia say and Tim

goes to conferences, meets people and says, you know, “Deeply impressed with somebody

I listened to the other day. My goodness, he’s absolutely up there, but he’s crying out for

support and assistance. He just needs to know how to do this.”

Now, we cannot immediately say that’s the guy for us, because we’ve got to give everybody an opportunity. But it is just nice to know that they’re there. Police officers are

able to sort of commend colleagues because of their professional expertise.

So many now understand what we’re trying to do. It is actually “policing sans frontiers.” So it is not like the U.N. missions where, you know, the U.N. goes to a country and

the country says, “We’ll send you 30 or 40 or 60 or whatever it is.”

It is not at all like that. We’re actually asking for people to be selected on merit and

we specify very clearly what that is and what the profile is of the officer.

So we think that if we do that, that will also answer, I think, some of your concerns

about the character of the police officer. It is not just police officers that are guilty of this,

getting involved with, you know, brothels and girls that have been trafficked.

I regret to say there are human rights officers who clamber into buses and go off for a

weekend’s sport and a holiday. What are we going to do about that? That’s not even to

touch on the issues. What are we going to do with a large military presence? I can remember a very sobering comment by a Serb police officer to me, which was along the lines of,

“We never had a problem with trafficking until your lot turned up.”

Whether that’s entirely true, I am not sure. But he certainly had a problem then and

we generated much of it. What do you say to the military? My response is: “You do not go

out to brothels. You do not pay for sex.”

Now, you know, there’s going to be serious disagreements between me and some military commanders on that basis, but I am afraid I still hold to that view because it makes it

easy. You do not know whether she’s a prostitute—sorry to go back on the subject—or

whether she’s trafficked. Just because she smiles, hasn’t she been told to smile—I mean,

this is quite ludicrous in my opinion. So we can easily enough deal with these issues.

So again it comes back to, where are we reaching through to? Who are the police

officers now responding to the call? What’s the message that the OSCE is putting out?

This too is described—you know, we’re looking for experts in particular areas, but

through those people and with the help of those people I am also hopeful I can get people

who have a professional integrity which is impressive, impresses the local police officers

sufficiently to say, “We accept the changes that you want to make and that you are now

steering us toward it.” The academy is one of the crucial parts of this, but that’s from the

bottom.

What we need to do is train from the top as well. I have got to change people’s thinking at the top. So all of this is relevant.
28

Now, who else can I go to that they will listen to apart from me? Much better if there

is somebody else in a post-Soviet country who will come and persuade them. That’s why I

am so pleased about the Russians that I have in my unit.

Actually, I think that’s probably—I hope that’s the answer. The United States—no,

the first question—I beg your pardon—on the United States.

From the United States, I hope we will not get hung up too much on the issues of

human rights without understanding what we’re trying to do. By that I mean police officers are frequently—now, the major thing to look at though—there’s human rights over

here and policing has very little to do with it. In fact, the police must be the people to

uphold human rights.

So that’s the basis we’ll work on and we’ll head for, and if I can use organizations

which are more competent than I am to persuade police officers how to take seriously

those responsibilities, I’ll do it.

But I have to say, my strategy is equally to get myself established on the ground. I

have to build relationships with these police. I am not going to be seduced into doing

things or providing equipment to these police forces to enable them more effectively to

intimidate or threaten, coerce people.

I assure you that the training we give is absolutely to prevent that happening, but it

is to make them feel professional. As we do it, in fact, this will be part of that continuation,

we will be addressing ourselves to their professional standards.

We have a long way to go. It is at that point that I shall be turning and looking for

assistance from these other organizations who, I hope, will then understand what we are

trying to do.

So I am not excluding or in any way—you know, I am saying that this is not in any way

part of what we do I do find it unfortunate that—and unfortunately it sticks to, adheres to

some of the international police officers that go. We are made to feel as though we have

not sufficiently recognized the responsibility of police for people’s safety and human rights.

Well, of course we have. If we have not, well, then there is something sadly wrong if

people believe that to be the case. I think most of the people I have got working for me

have that fixed firmly.

I mean, we are as appalled as anybody. In fact, we can be appalled, more so because

we know more about what goes on than probably some people on the outside. But we do

know there are people that I need to talk to, that our colleagues will talk to who have had

a miserable life and are still being threatened by governments and we will respond to

that. It is not always the case that we need to see these people repeatedly to know that it

is a problem. I have just got to view on how we will tackle that problem, which I hope will

be effective fairly soon.

Ms. PRYOR. Is there one final question?

QUESTIONER. Bakhitier Erov, Embassy of Tajikistan.

Recently, there were a number of OSCE expert groups traveling to Tajikistan to assess the project on the strengthening of border security and especially on establishing the

training center for border guard troops of the region.

Mr. MONK. Yes.

QUESTIONER. Where does the OSCE stand on that issue? What is your personal view on

border guard troops of the region? Do you consider them more policing force or rather a

pure military force?
29

Mr. MONK. Well, straight away let me say that one thing that we will be recommending is that you change border security responsibilities, and you take it away from the

military, and you give it to the Minister of Interior. That means that you have to look at

legislative reform and that is one area that we would invite assistance on, so there has to

be a new law formulated. There are people in the past who have done that work, so there

are models to be used.

The difficulty has been that although we carried out this very detailed assessment,

we were stopped in our tracks by the statements made by the European Commission that

it was going to put money into border security of all five Central Asia states.

So I come back to what I said at the very beginning. The European states—to whom I

chiefly go for money—said, “Well, we are not going to pay twice for this. So if the European Commission to whom we contribute large sums of money are announcing their plans,

then I am sorry, we are not going to fund the OSCE.”

Now, I am still grappling with this. I have not given up and I do not propose to give

up, because I do not think the EC is going to get very far very soon whereas we are ready

to go and we know what we would like to do. I mentioned there is the judicial reform, but

I think there is a humanitarian job to be done there. When you see the conditions in which

these conscripts work and are interactive, there is certainly a need for us to do something

about that. The issue there is that we will probably have to train members of the military

to do police work because there would not be anybody else.

So let us be realistic and let us get real about what the issues really are. So that is the

way I would like to go.

What I am trying to do is make sure that the EC at least do not—I cannot say obstruct

because the EC would not think that they ever obstruct anything—but unfortunately the

message they have sent out, and indeed they have accused me of overlap or duplicating

their work when actually I am unaware of any work that they have carried out.

Certainly, they have not done an assessment in Tajikistan which is in any way as

detailed as the one that we have done, and I regret this very much because we did it some

while ago. You know as well as I do once you do it, you raise people’s expectations. I really

do not like failing to meet those expectations, so I am stumped at the political level.

I am seeking and indeed the colleagues back in Vienna at this very moment are making an even stiffer requirement through ambassadors for some clarification on this issue.

So the response is, I am still there, I am still very committed to doing that work. I

think you are going to have to change the law. There are models for that, we can find that

and advise the government on considering that. I think there is going to be the military

who will do policing; ultimately it is for a different force to do it. It is a civil force, not a

military force that will actually look after border management in terms of policing and the

issues that go with it. That is for the future, but right now we have to put resources on the

ground because winter is coming and some of these poor conscripts have no heating.

The electricity goes off—as you know, I am using literally things that are wrong—and

there are things that we could quite substantially help with.

Ms. PRYOR. I would like to thank Mr. Monk very much for being with us today and

sharing so much important information about what sounds like very challenging work.

Thank you very much.

[Whereupon the briefing ended at 3:37 p.m.]
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