Fact-Finding Envoys in Crimea Face Hostility

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/world/europe/fact-finding-envoys-in-crimea.html

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UNITED NATIONS — As the United Nations sent an eight-member human rights fact-finding mission to Ukraine on Friday, an envoy with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said she had faced noisy, threatening crowds chanting pro-Russian slogans in the Crimea regional capital of Simferopol earlier this week and had been forced to cut short her visit.

The envoy, Astrid Thors, the O.S.C.E.'s high commissioner for national minorities, said that her team had been able to hold some meetings in Crimea, as planned, but not others. Word spread that she was in the city. Crowds gathered. She said she could not see if they were armed. Her team decided to cancel the rest of the meetings and return to Kiev.

Ms. Thors said she could have faced the predicament that confronted a senior United Nations diplomat, Robert H. Serry, earlier this week, when he was chased out of Crimea by unidentified gunmen.

“There was a risk the same could happen, that our movement could be hindered by the crowds,” Ms. Thors said in a telephone interview from her Amsterdam office. “We took precautionary principles. We shortened our stay.”

Mr. Serry, who flew from Simferopol to Kiev, was scheduled to leave Ukraine this weekend, the United Nations said. The assistant secretary general for human rights, Ivan Simonovic, is in Ukraine now. A spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Martin Nesirky, said he hoped the United Nations diplomats there would be allowed free movement throughout the country.

In her four-day mission, Ms. Thors said she could establish that there were no imminent threats to the rights of Russians, nor to Ukrainian Jews. “They don’t feel their existence is threatened by other communities,” she said.