This poster recently appeared pasted on a street sign near the State Department in Washington, DC.
The run-up to the summit in Astana has been a debilitating and demoralizing process, and the diplomats and NGOs who stuck it out to the end to try to keep waving the Helsinki flag are to be commended. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Astana and was scheduled to speak at an NGO event. All well and good.
Even so, participation in this entire distended fandago has come at a cost, and it has involved some erosion of our principles and some compromise, and a little bit of that frog-boiling-in-water syndrome that OSCE enterprises always seem to involve.
Some observers believe that the U.S., which has long had a cosy relationship with Kazakhstan for energy and geopolitical interests, sold out to Astana last spring when it was negotiating participation of Kazakhstan in the Northern Distribution Network that delivers non-lethal supplies to the troops in Afghanistan via Central Asia. In fact, the U.S. dragged out these negotiations for months, tried to do what it could -- and surprisingly, even deployed President Obama himself to publicly raise the case of jailed human rights leader Evgeny Zhovtis. It's not every day that you use up the chit of having the leader of the Western world raise a single case like that -- and not win it -- but in this case, losing was winning, because it only served to point up to the Kazakhs that Obama himself was willing to take up the rights of an individual, and it only highlighted the unacceptable obstructivism of Astana on the case.
Yet, in the end, the exigency of the NDN overflight needs, energy and trade concerns, and a fear of undermining an organization in which in fact Clinton had renewed U.S. engagement all conspired to create the less-than-moral concession to Astana to hold the summit. According to OSCE, only 38 of the 56 participating states sent their heads of state -- and that's all to the good.
Next summit, in free Minsk in 2020?
Zhovtis was put away in jail on the eve of Kazakhstan's assuming the chair, and kept out of action so as not to influence it -- although he was able to smuggle out some statements and appeals (his last one noted that he had begun to be punished for doing so). It was Zhenya's idea to have Kazakhstan chair the OSCE in the first place, in the belief that it might shine a spotlight on human rights abuses and possibly serve as a spur to improve them.
It didn't.
Turning back on Live Journal hardly counts if one of the main opposition blogs on LJ is still blocked. As the OSCE rapporteur on media has protested, a journalist, Ramazan Esergepov, still remains in prison (his "state secrets" being nothing more than reporting on a criminal case that in a normal country would be open to reporting by the press). And on and on.
When I say our principles became somewhat tattered, I mean that we were forced to paper over the lack of human rights progress and the shocking negligence in responding to the pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan in order to do business with people of ill will, and their GONGOs -- which was one of the most odious features of all these review conferences, spread in time and place over three cities in three months -- and I'm not sure, to the benefit of human rights.
The Turkmen human rights activists who have been coming to OSCE were jerked around, and while some were let in finally in Warsaw and Vienna, some were not, and ultimately none of them got visas for Astana. There was the blunt and thuggish message, regrettably tacitly conceded by being also relayed by Western diplomats, that "their safety could not be guaranteed," i.e. they might have to be extradited back to Turkmenistan on a trumped-up Interpol request from Ashgabat. Shame on them. The Turkmen dissidents have sent out an appeal. Chief among their points is that the OSCE office in Ashgabat has long since stopped trying to promote democracy and is merely simulating it -- if it were doing its job probably, I say, it would be kicked out. And that would be ok, as it could then decamp to Vienna and serve as the office-in-exile until such time as the government is willing to normalize.
The parallel summit -- oops, I mean the...parallel conference did in the end come off, with 177 participants, 59 of whom were from Kazakhstan, and an additional 11 of whom were ODIHR staff (among the guests was -- I'm not kidding! -- Nina Belyayeva, the Russian lawyer and expert on associations (I'll say!) who was appearing in her capacity as an ODIHR expert on NGO law. She advocated that the police and NGOs work together). Of course, quite a few out of the 59 from Kazakhstan and a certain number of others were GONGOs.
At least some of the worst OSCE problems were mentioned -- the killing of journalists, ideas for how to try to gain more solidarity, education, and action for threatened reporters, and the harassment and killing of human rights activists, and how to get better protection for them.
But it must be said: the NGOs compromised in having their meeting in Astana. In part, it was about the things that didn't get said that were "too big" -- the failure of OSCE even to land a police mission in Osh, the failure to cope with the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the spillover and implications of the war in Afghanistan. To be sure, someone raised Askarov's case and at first got an unacceptable response....
I personally think it would have been more honourable to have the meeting outside of Kazakhstan, and on better terms -- without GONGOs and without Kazakh government officials taking up the scarce air time.
I saw in Warsaw that the "professional human right diplomats" led by Yuri Dzhibladze were going to compromise on dropping the "summit" from the name of the activity (in the everyone people kept calling it that anyway), and later wasn't surprised to see them conceding the Kazakh government's lame excuse for the peremptory cancellation of the hotel booking. (The Kazakhs produced a convoluted letter claiming that the hotel was forced to drop the bookings because it had reneged ostensibly on a previous understanding that the Foreign Ministry would handle all bookings due to the scarcity of space -- a fairly fake excuse, since a premise of Kazakhstan's bid for the summit was that they would have ample space for thousands of people).
In an article for Vremya Novostei, Arkardy Dubnov, the Russian veteran Central Asian correspondent --for the first time I can recall seemed to...chew his words. That is, this journalist who can narrow his eyes and write scathingly of the governments of Eurasia suddenly seemed docile before the propaganda of a "dialogue-oriented" NGO leader. He merely reiterated the kind of well-meaning generalities that NGOs trying to get visas and trying to hold events in an oppressive country inevitably tend to speak in, perhaps not even consciously -- that the OSCE is the only organization that NGOs can turn to (of course they have the UN, too, where they often get better traction on specific issues like torture, in fact); that this is a platform for those who don't have a voice whose voices are "amplified" by the well-meaning helpers abroad (this time mainly Russians and Europeans, not Americans), etc. These are admittedly subtleties -- but it sets up an uncomfortable dynamic. Something was wrong because the Kazakh ambasadors were praising this meeting -- it added luster to their image as "tolerant" (tolerance of political ideas and open discussions now being a new facet of that tolerantnost' that used to mainly deal only with ethnic groups and races).
It's not that the NGOs caved, exactly, so much that they conceded the bad faith of the Kazakhs on several points merely by going forward with the meeting. The conference went from a planned 250 or so, down to a 150 due to "lack of space" -- in the event 177 came. The organizers were forced to let in a bunch of the GONGOs -- it was the sake for of legitimizing their phonyness that the Kazakh government had worked so hard (the support for a lot of them may simply dry up once the chair-in-office term is over). That's demoralizing, because a firm position on exposing and criticising the fakeness of the GONGOs is vital to the health and decency of the NGO movement -- and because of certain Euro lefties (Netherlands Helsinki Group) and Civicus (remember Durban), regrettably, not sufficient sterness was displayed on that question.
(It is much like the Soviet era -- in order even to meet with independent peace groups who were counterparts of Western peace groups, we had to accept the constraints of the Soviet Peace Committee controlling the venue and sometimes the participants -- but that was debilitating, and it did undermine the movement's goal, and not everybody who walzed with Zhukov emerged with their integrity intact. So it was important to set boundaries and set benchmarks.)
Eroding the Independent Space
Worst of all, the parallel organizers were forced to give the floor to Amb. Madina Jarbusynova, the Kazakh diplomat who represented the chair-in-office at the review meetings, who made a number of shockingly aggressive and outrageous interventions in Warsaw that I witnessed.
One evening, she stormed into a side event organized by the independent newspaper Respublika to inappropriately demand the floor; later at another evening briefing she berated the alternative conference organizers for not clearing everything with her government, even accusing them of "violence" for daring to book a hotel room (!).
Regrettably, the Civicus leader, just as Civicus in Durban, compromised with power, and instead of demanding that as in past OSCE summits, the NGOs could book the rooms they wished and convene the meetings they wished with as many participants as they could pay for, and invite whom they pleased (as we did in Moscow even in the Soviet era), she dociley accepted the limitations -- "for the sake of the cause". The organizers were prepared to call the whole thing off if they didn't get the booking -- but the Kazakh government cleverly avoided a scandal by giving them something -- but it was less than desirable, small in number, with GONGOs and officials unnecessarily present.
No one was really around to point that out by then, because those who couldn't get visas or couldn't afford the trip peeled off, and the rest were worn down, and happy to have at least something.
In Astana, from this account, anyway, Madame Jarbusynova appeared to have become what is known in the trade as sholkoviy ("silken") and spoke of the importance of this (by now rather tamed) group having their say.
Is it Better to Go and Speak Out?
It has to be said: In these kind of incrementally worsening situations, NGOs always imagine that it is better to go and "speak out" even in reduced circumstances. They imagine themselves making hard, but necessary decisions, bravely carrying the flag, and so on.
I don't see it that way.
I always say: if nothing else, you can refuse to confer legitimacy on those who are not legitimate. They crave legitimacy -- and regrettably, that's what they got out of this summit, from both governments and NGOs -- and they shouldn't have.
Governments have to go to these functions. NGOs have a choice not to.
The Kazakh government is not a legitimate government because it is not freely and fairly elected and it brutally suppresses dissent and civil society; therefore we should avoid legitimizing it by making it seem as if it is a valid interlocutor in a "dialogue".
Never forget that the eventually successful "dialogue" and the round table between Solidarity and the Polish government in the 1980s came AFTER Solidarity was registered as a trade union, not before. First, legitimacy. Then, dialogue. And no legitimacy of governments that won't legitimize their interlocutors
I believe that the minute that NGOs learned that the Turkmens were denied visas, they should have refused to come and denounced the Kazakh government until they were issued -- and held an alternative conference in Vienna if they weren't -- for that, and other reasons. Indeed, given the constraints on space (only 150) and the odious factor of having to include the GONGOs (because there was no good way of leaving them out once they were on Kazakh territory), and the governments officials from the get-go, it would have been better to convene the event in Vienna.
After all, NGOs had three review conferences to say their piece, and had said their piece, although with difficulty, given how the Kazakh government packed the meetings with GONGOs and obstructed the Turkmens by doing nothing with Ashgabat raged, forcing the weak general secretary to try to handle the issue. It's not as if the "NGO message" somehow needed to be heard qua message; what was needed was for NGOs to act like NGOs and do normal NGO things -- independently. In the setting of Astana, that was not possible.
Disorienting GONGO Presence -- and Beaucratification of NGOs
There's a pall that is cast over meetings like this when the GONGOs can get in, and disorient and distract and dilute the agenda. Not surprisingly, the Internet GONGO leader Shavkat Sabirov, for example, was allowed to rant about the lack of criticism of human rights in Western Europe, as people kept focusing on Kazakhstan (and rightly so). It was he who was constantly agitating in Warsaw about what he wrongfully believed to be some horrible intrusion of privacy involving Obama obtaining access to all our i-phones (he was luridly taking as law something that is merely a proposal, being strenuously resisted by the ACLU and others, and is very far from becoming a law -- um, what, the Kazakhs, who control the telecoms, even the commercial ones, don't have access to cell phone calls on demand?! Please).
Others were calling on the group *still* not to claim they were a parallel summit, and not to collate and pass on their recommendations to the official summit. To be sure, that sort of exercise has a lot of the feel of being at the little kids' table at Thanksgiving instead of sitting up at the big people's table, but it's still worthwhile.
Regrettably, instead of just focusing on getting the special rapporteur on freedom of association, or at least on human rights defenders, and setting benchmarks for states to meet on freedom for defenders and journalists with an action plan on how to advocate it, the group -- which isn't necessarily representative even of all the groups active in observing OSCE, let alone all NGOs in the OSCE space -- the bunch set about trying to perpetuate and nearly-statify itself by proposing having a permanent advisory council of NGOs attached to the chair-in-office, or have some other mandated permanent NGO *something* attached to an OSCE *something*.
Bozhe upasi -- God forbid. NGOs should not be coopted in this way, nor should some of them be arrogating to themselves the dialogue-oriented (DONGO), watered-down approach in dealing with the chair-in-office. We don't need NGO advocacy, and the appeals of numerous NGOs which are very disparate and with a great many issues to deal with -- to be funnelled through just a few professional cadres. No. The chair-in-office has to work out liaison procedures for all NGOs, not just a few pets, and the review meetings and seminars are adequate institutions already for NGOs to interact with OSCE without having to reify NGO bureaucracies like this.
Yeah, I knew things were not as stellar as they could be when the first tweet out of that ghastly Pyramid thing about the third and final review conference was that international NGOs were not sufficiently transparent and accountable.
Sigh.
That means they were being speciously attacked because they criticize topics like torture in Central Asia. I'm among the biggest critics of the industrial human rights complex and the justice jet-setters, trust me on this. Look up the salaries of some of these folks on the Charity Navigator. Even so, I recognize the bad-faithed basis of posing the problem of NGO transparency in a place of absolute despotism and capricious whim (see Wikileaks).
No, the summit is most definitely less than the whole of its parts, and we have lost our way by "engaging with" Kazakhstan.
We are all a little poorer for it.
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