OSCE Secretary General, Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, told the organization’s foreign ministerial summit in Helsinki on December 4, that OSCE’s “early warning of rising tensions was ample and regular” before the conflict broke out in breakaway South Ossetia.

He, however, also said that in August, after the war broke out, “we saw only too clearly the limits of all our painstaking early warning and conflict prevention work.”

Finnish Foreign Minister and OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Alexander Stubb said in his address to the foreign ministerial summit that early warning by the organization “was not heeded as almost 20 years of stalled efforts to resolve the conflict boiled over into violence.”

In November, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, suggested that OSCE, which had monitors on the ground, failed with early warning of simmering conflict.

OSCE Secretary General, Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, also said that in the spring the organization’s crisis management mechanisms and procedures were invoked in Vienna and “allowed for in-depth debate.”

“In early July, a group of OSCE Ambassadors traveled to the conflict zone. The Mission to Georgia continued to perform essential monitoring activities in the zone of conflict and to promote confidence building through economic rehabilitation,” he said.