As delivered by Ambassador Daniel B. Baer to the Permanent Council, Vienna | September 8, 2014
Because there is no “Activities of the Chairmanship” item on the agenda today, and because you, the Chairmanship, explained some of the activities that are underway in terms of moving quickly to reinforce the SMM (Special Monitoring Mission), I just wanted to take a moment to comment on that important work.
Aside from the strong support that we have for beefing up the SMM, and especially in light of last Friday’s conversation in Minsk, I think it’s really important that we all understand that we need some things very quickly. We need sufficient quantity of personnel on the ground. We need the right type of personnel with the right expertise and with the right protection. We need people in the right places, including Luhansk and Donetsk cities and the surrounding areas, and we need them there at the right time, which is basically immediately. The speed with which the SMM has ramped up over the last six months is obviously inadequate to the task in front of us right now, so something has to be different. So I’d like to take the opportunity to call on all participating States to immediately redouble efforts to furnish qualified monitors in response to the advertisement that was issued on Friday. We all need to dig deep and make sure that we’re putting forward qualified monitors as soon as possible. I think also its worth noting that the current facilities that are available to us may not be adequate, and so we need to think creatively about stop-gap measures, as well as potential modifications.
And I’d also like to take the opportunity to ask the Chairmanship to endeavor to keep participating States apprised on basically a daily basis for the near term of what you’re hearing from the ongoing conversations of the contact group, of what the needs are on the ground, and of how we’re doing towards addressing those needs. By doing this, we can best support the Chairmanship and all interested parties in seeing effective monitoring on the ground as soon as possible.
Thank you.
