The Hydraulic Equation

Yuri Dzhibladze, a long-time Russian colleague (I even used to serve on the board of his organization until I took myself off because foreigners were increasingly being viewed with suspicion in Russia under restrictive new NGO laws), took part in the recent Human Rights Summit here, which seems to have been a rather restricted affair, as the participants even got to meet with President Obama. Yuri has published a piece in The Huffington Post making the point that by waffling on Guantanamo and prosecution of torture, Obama is enabling autocrats abroad. Well, in a way, yes, but there are some important distinctions to be made, and I think this was a lost opportunity not only for Yuri, but his colleagues organizing this affair, to deliver a message not just about U.S. wrongs, but Russian wrongs that the U.S. is ducking and isn't addressing in the "reset". So here's my reply to Yuri, still in the moderation queue at the Puffington Host:

You surely managed to pack a lot into your face-time with President Obama, Yura!

And the message is an important one with concerns I share.

But we're already suffering from such a spate of moral equivalencies around the Surkov-McFaul commission and many other Russian-American events lately that I have to ask:

Surely you, as a Russian human rights advocate, could work in not only the issues of Guantanamo and the military commissions, which are heavily covered here in the U.S. and heavily worked by scores of lawyers and human rights advocates, and ask the same questions about Chechnya?.

Re: "close this base, try the terrorism suspects in a due process in a court of law, do not give in to the growing pressure to adopt statutory regime for indefinite or preventive detention, and ensure accountability for the crimes of torture" -- this is a concept that very much applies to Russia, too -- and as you know, those who try to apply it in Russia, like Natalya Estemirova, wind up murdered for their human rights work, or threatened and prosecuted with libel suits, such as Oleg Orlov of Memorial Society.

Yet our State Department, when it organizes meetings, such as for the recent #rustechdel -- American executives from Silicon Valley interested in helping Russian form its Silicon Valley -- steered the U.S. social media moguls interested in social justice only to organizations working on children's rights -- the safe topics. Very little discussion happened on the topics of Chechnya, torture, the North Caucasus violence as a whole -- let alone problems of NGOs, libel threats, and freedom of the media in general.

Next stop for the Human Rights Defender Summit -- Moscow.

You also seem to be applying what I call the "hydraulic theory of reciprocity" to U.S-Russian relations. Under this hypothesis, every time the U.S. does a bad thing -- invades Iraq, tortures suspects abroad, runs a camp for terrorist detainees, etc. -- an equal and opposite reaction is supposed to happen in Russia, and the authoritarians at least to get invoke the bad thing America does as justification for their own actions. Well, yes and no.

You know better than I do that there are very different substances behind this "hydraulic equation". Whatever its crimes, America has institutions that enable it to find remedies to human rights wrongs, which in any event, aren't at the scale and magnititude that they are in places like the North Caucasus. How many cases have tried to get to the European Court of Human Right just on Chechnya, and how many have actually been adjudicated, but still without remedy in Russia?

Indeed, one of those remedies that these American institutions has found is Obama himself who isn't addressing the issues as fast as we'd all like, but doesn't need to get let off the hook on confronting Russia's human rights wrongs, either, by being able to say that he only hears about American human rights problems from Russian human rights activists now. If you're going to criticize the wimpy "engagement" concept from Obama, give at least a half-sentence of substance on what should be raised in the "engagement".

Yura, you know that the problems in your country with the NGO law, the suppression of media, the murder of journalists and lawyers don't happen because strings are attached to state and non-state actors that are only pulled by puppet-masters in the U.S. as they invade Iraq or Afghanistan. These events have their own dynamics within Russia and occur without reference to the outside world, on "Russia's special path".

I think a different concept of international human rights activism is needed that charts its path between the violations of the East and West without moral equivalence and with a robust understanding of the basics, like the fact that the Huffington Post has no Russian equivalent with as mass readership and influence -- and if it started to, it would find itself offline like grani.ru has at times.