US State Department. Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov and Secy State John Kerry, March 7, 2013.
As we know, before the Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov came to the US last week, Sarah Kendzior did her best to convince us that it was pointless to raise human rights problems with him, and Human Rights Watch nevertheless came up with a whole concrete list of what they wanted Secretary of State John Kerry to raise.
Mike Posner, the outgoing Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, recently criticized his fellow NGOs, now that he had been on the other side of the table from them, as needing to become more concrete in their proposals and focused on policy to reduce abuses rather than merely documenting human rights violations.
I think the human rights industry would still do well to keep documenting because there really are wars over the facts, especially on strategic countries like Uzbekistan, and because the US government does really keep resisting doing even partially the right thing due to geopolitical constraints and exigencies. Especially when there's a system in place to give military aid or not depending on whether there are mass human rights abuses, you have to play the game of documenting, naming and shaming and not getting sucked into partial "solutions".
Why can't we document human rights, guys?
Oh, dear, I remember the CATO Institute essay of 1979 that spoke of "the endless chasing after human rights violations," i.e. the-then infant human rights monitoring industry that seemed to endlessly document, publicize, name and shame, but never effect the kind of systemic changes of democracy and free enterprise that CATO and others would see as pre-requisites for getting human rights results. Then, we had 30 years of democracy movements and colour revolutions and regime changes and Arab springs -- and then everybody went "off" democracy again because it didn't have enough rule of law, you know, human rights. As Democracy Lab's latest sour-on-democracy piece lets us know.
So Human Rights Watch does come up with a list of concrete proposals, but it is based on documentation. To be sure, some of it is the sort of "be good! right now!" stuff that always sounds so ridiculous, especially when it's selective. And when Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire essentially say, "Your democracies turned out crappy! You must have the rule of law right now! Stop, thief!" it also seems kind of, well, hortatory. Where are those concrete proposals that Mike Posner so desperately wanted? In fairness, there are some in the Democracy Lab piece of the incremental USAID-style "rule-of-law" program variety, like "let's make Georgia's notion of plea-bargaining more like the West's" or "let's praise Georgia for amnestying officials with non-violent offenses from the previous government even if that's not quite the ROL per se". And...that's just it. The things to do in these countries still under Russia's shadow with creepy intelligence agencies from the Soviet era often amount only to those little incremental steps.
But having concrete proposals and the human rights rather than the democracy focus means you do have to keep documenting, and keep exposing, and keep saying "be good!" about things like child and adult forced labour in Uzbekistan, and it is absolutely perfectly fine to propose as a policy to the United States that it stop giving Tashkent a pass on this. After all, the US has laws -- it has the trafficking statutes that require the US not to do business with countries using slave labour. And it has a whole system where countries get automatically downgraded in their status if they don't follow the proposed reforms -- often easy things like at least sign laws or at least make task forces, the sort of anodyne stuff that multilaterals and governments come up with.
Yet the US doesn't do that with Uzbekistan, but gives it a pass for the simple reason that we need it due to the war in Afghanistan -- to get supplies in, and more to the point now, to get soldiers and expensive war equipment out. So here we all are, this won't last forever (past 2014?) and we need to just keep asking and not worry about the futility. Remember, "For us, there is only the trying/the rest is not our business?"
So what happened?
Well, there was a photo op, then secret talks. Then the noon day press briefing. And a query:
QUESTION: Can we get a readout on the Uzbek Foreign Minister meeting, specifically on any human rights issues that Secretary Kerry would have raised?MS. NULAND: Well, as Secretary Kerry said himself in the spray before the meeting, we always raise our human rights concerns and our view with the Uzbeks that the more progress they can make in democratic rights, human rights in Uzbekistan, the more stable and prosperous and secure the country will be. I’m not going to get into details of the bilateral other than to say, as we always do, it came up this morning.
I checked with the US Embassy in Tashkent on Twitter, noting that this read-out was rather scant. Answer:
@usembtashkent@catfitz not much to share at the moment. pls follow our website postings and/or tweets.
Share.
Okay.
Senior U.S. officials need to make clear to the Uzbek government that to avoid sanctions it must agree to allow the ILO to monitor the harvest this fall. The ILO is the most competent international body to determine the true scope of the problem and to begin working with Tashkent on a serious plan to address it.
It's good that a very clear call has gone out to make the condition for the prevention of a downgrading essentially the invitation to the ILO to inspect the harvest -- seriously, not as just some dialogue in the capital, but having experts go out to all the regions.
There's some faint notion this is gettable, because the Uzbek government already quietly works with UNICEF to allow UNICEF to do some sample monitoring and make some recommendations -- although this is very hushed up by UNICEF, Tashkent, and governments -- and in any event is not a substitute for serious labour conditions monitoring such as the ILO does.
But while it's great that the focus has finally been brought more forcibly to bear publicly on the Obama administration by these largely Obama-supporting groups, the US isn't the leading actor in this drama. Uzbekistan, Russia, India, China, Pakistan are. We need every single one of them for our other drama involved in getting the troops out, especially Russia
So I think NGOs and the Soros gang need to step up much more comprehensibly in a full-bore, comprehensive agenda on Russia-US relations, not just Uzbek-US relations. More direct and international focus and coalition building is needed on the ILO. But since they tend to always fall back to doing American things more than any other, here's what they simply must do: They need to call on Obama not to go to the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg coming up -- and there is reason to do this because Putin dissed Obama by not coming to the US to the G8 meeting last year, but sending Medvedev instead.
It's a no-brainer, easy to do, costs nothing, and is an awareness campaign. Mr. President, don't go to Pitir because the human rights violations for which Russia is responsible abroad and at home are so great, that you should not lend them your luster as leader of the free world.
For extra credit, overcome the usual reluctance to rain on the sports parade and call to boycott the Sochi Olympics -- or call on Obama not to lend his presence to that jamboree, either. He need not go. He can send Kerry. This is how you build the Wall of Shame around Russia that needs to be built.
They need to make a coalition of groups -- cite Syria first and foremost because Russia is the greatest factor in supporting mass crimes of humanity there; they need to cite Russia's own abysmal record citing the Magnitsky List; and they need to cite the Caucasus crimes which are massive -- more than 400 disappearances even by the state's own admission; and then they need to cite things like Russia's purchase of Uzbek cotton; Russia's army bases in the region fraught with human rights violations such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, etc.. The stakes are too high, the abuses too large to keep pulling punches, giving Russia a politically-correct or timid pass, and focusing with the avidity of safe surrogacy on the US. "Blame America First".
I've been critical at times of the Cotton Campaign, where I myself worked for two years, because it has tended to focus on reachable Western targets with fears of litigation or media negativity, like garment companies, and not focus on the actual buyers of most of the cotton, like Russia, India, and Pakistan -- or the international bodies where Russia and Uzbekistan are a member and need to be challenged in that context, like the ILO.I'm glad to see this call for more work at the ILO, but it still has the feeling of the "buddy approach" or "working with" Uzbekistan -- as if it had good will! as if it were going to do that! -- instead of pressuring it to change directly.
I've also felt that a campaign that always seems to focus on the #firstworldproblems of buying a dress at H&N or not (we can't really be sure if Uzbek cotton is or isn't in their supply chain) and evil corporations was more about the left's eternal fascination with undermining capitalism by seizing on its sins than about human rights. There was also the lesser focus on the actual monitors in Uzbekistan, who, like the tiny cotton pickers, earned a fraction of the salary of Western campaigners, and the unjustifiable position of focusing only on children as being cuter -- although it's a problem for adults, too. I felt this campaign just wasn't really grasping the nettle.
To be sure, recently, now under new management, I saw this campaign do its first really successful media campaigns -- first around the evergreen of Gulnara Karimova's antics, which is low-hanging fruit, but also the harder nut -- getting mainstream network TV -- CNN in the US -- to finally pick up the story and do it right -- featuring the children, the monitors like Elena Urlaeva, the success of enlisting some corporations, and then need to get Uzbekistan itself to do more and for those countries buying to be part of the pressure on them. This is one of the best things ever done on the largest state-run forced labour program in the world
I don't say these campaigns are easy or that trying to move ILO resolutions isn't sometimes futile. I just think the problem of Uzbekistan is fundamentally not about Western corporations and their evils, even if they contributed, or about using "soft law" such as the OECD (I think that action was a flop because it silenced NGOs from their critique while reconciliation arrangements were made with corporations that weren't really that culpable).
I think the problem with Uzbekistan is fundamentally about the Soviet past, the dependency on Russia (for the first time now we see the remittances mainly from labor migrants in Russia are higher than the income from cotton, see?) and not about evil Western capitalism or venal Western governments. The eternally popular Western NGO focus on these actors means that it becomes "about itself". The lefty labour and cause groups that populate this campaign could never bite down hard and blame state socialism for Uzbekistan's problem and advocate a free market -- that goes against their religion. You always feel with this analysis that if Uzbekistan stopped using child labour, and paid the workers a living wage to hand-pick cotton in the fields, the left in the Western world would be happy to now buy the results of their labour for their infants' cloth diaper program, rather than worry that these toilers couldn't live a life of lattes and ipads such as they enjoy themselves -- and which they can enjoy more of if they go and work construction in Moscow.
Meanwhile, what's the real solution? Because even if a million girls don't buy their Gap shirts or whatever, it won't matter.
The labor migrants could be doing the work that children are performing for free or for pennies, but they can't make a living with such back-breaking work so they go abroad. The Uzbek government has wised up and put out less kids visibly in the fields and made their teachers, policemen, soldiers, factory workers etc. work for free -- which was always just as bad and the campaign always should have focused on that too, but opted for the cuter kid angle.
But what the real problem back of all this is, is communism and Soviet-style control of the market. Farmers cannot sell their cotton on an open market. They have quotas which they turn over to the government, and the government sells it. They get loans for seeds and supplies -- but they can't meet the payments or even get the loans. They are in a double bind, can't meet quotas or meet loan payments and use child or day labour as a result. If you suddenly mechanized this industry more, the way USAID is busy trying to do, you exacerbate the situation by depriving some families of that teenage labour and soldier labour that they really need to supplement the remittances. You also screw the farmers over as less of them are needed. Where are you going to put all those people, USAID? In prison, as suddenly "Islamic fundamentalists" as the government has done with about 5000 or more of their neighbours?!
This is not an easy nut to crack, but the ideology that focuses only on Western perfidy or US government hypocrisy and not Russian complicity is really wrong. Yes, it's hard to focus on Russia. Nobody lets you do it. When you try to do it, everywhere in the world, you are told that you are an evil war mongering anti-Islamic imperialist blah blah. Of course, it's not your military that killed the overwhelming majority of people in Afghanistan -- it's the Taliban. So here we all are.
It's a muddle and not easy but you have to keep hitting hard on it and not get caught up in what the State Department or the Registanis say fretting about realisms. They take care of themselves without you. There really isn't any reason the US can't change their trafficking rating and downgrade Uzbekistan. They can compartmentalize the realtionship because we all know that business really doesn't mean that much.
I also think that the key to this is labor rights and the ILO and that more effort has to go back into that venue, as frustrating as it is, mainly simply trying to line up all the delegations of friendly countries, trade unions, and employers for the eventual vote that you will eventually get on the Commission of Inquiry or other relevant action. Only a labor rights approach -- as distinct from the more hypothetical hate campaign on evil corporations who buy exploited cotton -- will more directly save victims of trafficking and forced labor and the remittance workers in deplorable positions, especially in the nearer abroad like Kazakhstan -- and that means slogging at the UN and OSCE even though this is a long proposition. What else is there?
