The State Department is about to send a delegation organized by Michael McFaul, special assistant to Obama and senior director for Russian affairs at the National Security Council and Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to Russia to discuss prisons and migration.
If they don't change their script fast, they are in danger of setting up another freak show on Fox News as the State Department did with the China dialogue. This will not be the fault of tendentious conservatives, but the fault of Obama's very badly constructed human rights policy, that simply has to change if he wishes to be credible and be elected for a second term.
The terms of reference for this trip go far below the achievements we made in the Soviet era when Richard Schifter was the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. The bilateral meetings with Russians did not have any topics that were considered "too hard," as McFaul did in pre-anticipating Russian objections needlessly and taking the soft option originally, until ultimately he did manage to get "prisons" accepted as a topic -- one wonders if in the Soviet era, prisons and prisoners were accepted as the primary topic and reason for having human rights commissions in the first place, we had to wait in the Russian Putin-Medvedev era to discuss "our mutual stereotypes" (!) first before getting to the hard stuff.
In the Soviet era, the meetings were only between officials on both sides, and were off the record, but there were extensive meetings with NGOs and victims or families before and after the meetings in both the U.S. and Russia. That at least avoided any moral equivalency problem. There was no false-equivalency notion that the U.S. brings into meetings with Soviet officials NGO experts on the American prison system, and then expects that the Soviets will bring in Russian NGO experts of the same sort of independence. There was no kind of illusion there.
Later, under Yeltsin, both U.S. officials and NGOs and their Russian official and NGO counterparts met in round tables, although the U.S. lost an opportunity by not maintaining a bilateral human rights dialogue that could have been far better institutionalized with far better ground rules by now. Hence, this hybrid we have now in which Americans who are very criticial of their own government and even litigate against it can come with U.S. officials to talk about prisons, but on the Russian side, there is asymmetry -- either no NGOs at all, or only those NGOs who agree to certain restraints in the name of cooperation.
The problem isn't just Posner raising the Arizona immigration law in a human rights discussion with the Chinese -- as if you put pressure on a state's law you don't like by getting Communist world leaders who preside over the torture of their minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs to pretend you have a common cause. This is part of a larger, crafted policy whereby American officials are supposed to listen and learn and set a good example, and only talk about our own shortcomings. While a policy that works for academics and some NGOs that specialize in "citizen's diplomacy" or "peace-making" and trying to keep their access to wobbly soi-disant liberals living under abusive regimes, it's disastrous for a government expected to uphold standards and push back against encroaching repression. It's also a policy that's not working -- the Obama Administration cannot claim any big human rights victories, even on an individual case.
The problem was visible even starting last year at the Moscow summit when Obama raised the Khodorkovsky case, albeit awkwardly, saying the new charges were "a bit odd," yet claimed the grave due process violations were Russia's "internal affair". The problem was visible in Astana when Obama strangely said to Nazarbayev, the Central Asian dictator who hails from the Soviet period and shuts down the Internet and independent newspapers, that we are "working on our democracy, too" and had a top aide say we are taking "historic steps" to improve. The problem is visible with the wimpy policy on Egypt, as George Packer has explained. It's visible when State Departments go all over the world and claim they are in listening mode and won't "lecture" -- and then articulate torturous excuses about why they aren't raising torture. In Kyrgyzstan, torturously, McFaul has developed a dual-track position -- but it came very late in the tumultous events there, and is still packaged as a "we won't tell you how to do things we'll just set an example" approach that overlooks the vital role of public diplomacy in support of basic human rights principles.
So this misguided script needs to change pronto, and human rights missions have to re-establish the sort of grip they had under the Carter and Clinton administrations, if the current officials don't see Bush as a model. And that means very frankly speaking out about a country's human rights wrongs when in that country; not making false moral equivalency posturings as happened in China; and publicly meeting with human rights advocates in that country regardless of whether they are recognized by their government.
Very soon the meetings will start in Moscow and Vladimir, and here's what I think has to happen:
o The U.S. delegation must speak with a very clear and unambigious voice both to officials privately and to the media and public publicly about human rights issues in Russia -- murder of human rights advocates and journalists, torture and deaths in prisons, discrimination and violence against migrant workers and make it very clear that issues of mistreatment of immigrants and prisoners and racism in America are not equivalent to these grave issues in Russia.
o Ideally, the U.S. delegation should meet with leading human rights advocates in Moscow before they leave for Vladimir, hear their concerns, summarize them and agree to take them in to the meeting with Russian officials for reading and comment. I understand that such a meeting is planned, but it's very important to publicize it before and after, to give the names of those who attended, and to offer to set up other meetings during the trip with the delegation, or later with Embassy staff, with any other interested appropriate groups, especially from cities outside of Moscow where conditions are far worse.
o Ideally, the U.S. delegation should bring with them into the official meeting a bona-fide independent Russian expert on the Russian prison system -- or three. My understanding is that a respected Russian expert on migration issues will be participating in some meetings, but it's not clear if the Americans will be sitting in all meetings with officials with genuine counterparts by their sides, or only with officials and GONGOs. They need not to worry about modalities, niceties, protocols, and do the right thing here -- most of what foreigners are good for in these complex situations is validating the domestic critics who are not taken seriously or even harmed.
o In Vladimir, a tourist town with its twin, Suzdal, they will be taken to a prison, one which did have dissidents kept in it in the old days, but since then has been renovated. It's a set-up, repeating many such trips of naive foreigners over the years being shown a Potemkin Village; I'm a veteran of one such attempt myself in Perm where we kept trying to see the political prisoners and had one hauled away from us. Such a caper has to be kept very minimalized -- an hour, not a day -- or the occasion has to be used not to be impressed with Russian maneuvering, but to try to demand some separate meetings with prisoners under Red Cross rules (no prison administrators present).
o The delegation should avoid making joint statements with their Russian hosts, wasting any time negotiating what is inevitably mutual pablum, and avoid making any statements of moral equivalence between the two situations.
o The delegation should ask very explicitly and publicly about *Russian* human rights problems -- not just speak about American issues --and report on the results of the answers or non-answers, in a news conference at the end of their tour, about the responses to the issues handed to them by Russian NGOs, as well as cases like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned businessmen who recently declared a brief hunger strike over unjust conditions and who has faced numerous procedural violations in his case. And surely the U.S. must ask about the progress of investigation and prosecution for the murders of journalists, lawyers, and other human rights activists -- including the U.S. citizen and Forbes journalist Paul Klebnikov.
Regretably, the State Department is coming not with experts on Russian prisons who might raise all the myriad issues besetting the still very Soviet system, but coming with American prison experts who may be fine in their own setting but who might flounder and find "translators' false friends" in Russia and gush about our own issues not only to officials who could care less, but officials who will exploit this wilful naivete to distract from their own crimes and tell victims desperate for remedy in Russia that they should shut up because America is terrible, too. Americans are fretting now whether Obama will remove Miranda protections for suspects. A Russian in pre-trial detention especially in the North Caucasus has to worry more about whether they will remove his fingernails.
Can this accident-going-somewhere-to-happen be rerouted? While a different approach to promote the legitimacy of domestic human rights activists and an end to the impunity over their persecution would be in order, I doubt, given the track record of the McFaul-Surkov Commission, this will happen. Too many personal careers have been invested in installing this buddy approach, and too many hands on this believe that they are backed up in what they do by even independent interlocutors in Russia. That's what makes it so insidious. That's why I questioned the strategy of having one of these Russian human rights leaders irrelevantly raising Guantanamo with Obama, when at home he was struggling against issues like a harsh NGO law that would put groups like his out of business. With the smear attacks on Posner on Fox and the right-wing blogs now, and the sense that you can't criticize Russian liberals who are under fire, there's a great sense of self-righteousness among the human rights crowd now who are really living in a bubble. This stuff is tone-deaf for the average man and really engenders suspicions. What we need are not people who can shuttle between capitals talking in bilateralized or globalized platitudes about our common flaws, but people who can help ensure that truth-tellers in Russia are not killed. That's our mission here.
Yet a key reason the Obama officials and some of their groupies in the international human rights movement can revive and perpetuate this old lefty discredited approach from the 1960s-1980s is that they come across various interlocutors in Russia, some actually independent and credible, who say "Don't rile our conservatives. They're like your hawks. Don't get them started by insulting them. We need cover to speak on these issues -- let's phrase it in terms of global issues we all share. That will be more persuasive."
This is a powerful message when it falls on the ears of people who have the Obama buddy policy to implement -- and it makes it sound like you are saving lives and preventing liberals from being crushed when you talk only about your own country's problems. This argument was highly persuasive for Posner in the past in working with China, when his organization Human Rights First chose to work with sophisticated liberal lawyers in the capital, some of whom spoke good English and had studied abroad, and who wrote carefully-coded push-the-envelope pieces in official "liberal" state journals rather than more extreme, loud-mouthed provincial dissidents who only got themselves jailed for their pickets and frank wall posters. And indeed it's fine if people chose a variety of forces to work with in a tough situation like China, and each to his own -- as long as those who chose the softer approach do not deny the right of those chosing a harder approach to act, and do not play the insincere card of "McCarthyism" if they are reproached for their accommodation.
What we are seeing unfortunately with the Russian-American vectors is that a kind of international justice jet set is organized whereby seasoned operatives in and out of government with professed liberal values say "leave the driving to us," and view the scruffier people outside the conference hallways with their pickets and shouts as "ineffective".
The problem in Russia is sometimes describe as "nizy ne mogut a verkhi ne khotyat" ("those at the bottom can't, and those at the top won't) -- or to translate into modern lingo, grassroots activists are weak and lack capacity and sophistication to make their case; those at the top have absolutely no interest in really instilling human rights remedies.
When I discussed this problematic trip with a Russian human rights colleague, and expressed the idea that the Americans should really bring with them into these meetings a competent and credible Russian expert (or four!) on these issues, the kind of people who can't get recognized by their government or are even harassed, she dismissed the idea out of hand.
"They will only bark," she said. And I know what she means. Some of the bravest and most bold demonstrators who are prepared to go out in the cold and picket about the violation of the Constitution are good at shouting, or good at simple slogans, or good at enduring prison sentences, but they are not good at making constructive proposals in bureaucratic working commissions with dull white papers.
Even so, there are so many qualified, educated, English-speaking people in the human rights movement in Russia today, in the official bar association and even who have held office in the government, who can be called upon. It is simply a lack of political will not to come into a meeting with them -- or at the very least, hold a press conference with them afterward. We set the bar high when we insisted 20 years ago in going into meetings with Soviet officials at the Party's human rights commission designed primarily "for export" that we bring our real counterparts -- despite official objections and indignation.
"See, the Soviet Union didn't collapse," I told one such official after we brought the former jailed writer Lev Timofeyev with us into one meeting. "And it will never collapse!" he thundered. I wish I could say he was entirely wrong...
There is a pall that comes over the will in these settings, and it's unfortunate when such lack of determination becomes justified by invoking the advice of people like my colleague concerned about "barking". Such Russians are indeed under enormous pressure, they risk even being killed or having their children harmed, they strive to find a way to survive. I sympathize with that stance, and I don't ever ask anyone to be brave heedlessly.
Yet those with American passports in hand who are leaving in a few days can be brave, and need to speak out. Russia is more brutal today for human rights activists than it was in the Soviet era of the 1970s-1990s during "detente" and the Helsinki talks. When you look at the difference between serving a 3-5 year term in labor camp or exile for writing samizdat, where you at least are fed and emerge with your limbs intact, and being beaten so severely your leg must be amputated and you can't talk, you almost wish for the Soviet Union to come back again. Under the custody of the Soviet state, at least the lumpen incited by Soviet propaganda to hate you couldn't harm you. Now they can. And officials don't care.
I would hope this conversation would not be one in which we have to prove that Russia is worse than the United States. I would hope in this day and age that I wouldn't have to go through that tiresome exercise. One of the key ways in which this dialogue now goes off the rails early, however, is by the statement that "Russia now has less prisoners per capita than the U.S." This truism is meaningless -- if true (we can't be sure Russians count every pre-trial or pre-arraignment detention counted in the U.S., and there are a wider varieties of measures of restraint and lock-ups in institutions like the LTP (incarcation of alcoholics). It's meaningless because there are way more people wrongfully arrested, and much more torture and deaths, as the UN Committee Against Torture has reported.
Let's be clear on the situation in Russia, please -- that goes a long way toward moral clarity here. It is not remotely like the human rights situation in America. Please open up your New York Times and look at this article about the brutal beatings of journalists in the Moscow suburbs -- and this one. Absolutely appalling stuff. This was one of the times when the actual paper newspaper tells this story more starkly than the online version, because you actually hold the full page in your hand and see the bruised faces of the victims and don't just click around and skip the photos. Clifford Levy is to be commended for standing up and telling this story of petty provincial corruption, and the brutal savagery against the online and print journalists and chroniclers who tried to expose it in their own country.
Whatever pressure you might feel is on the media in the U.S., there is nothing like the story of Beketov, in Khimki, exposing plans to run a road through a pristine forest against environmental laws, and winding up so badly beaten that he had his leg amputated and cannot speak. This isn't an isolated case; as Levy explains, it goes on and on and on in all kinds of towns. When you sit in Westchester -- and write your blog about the pollution of the Hudson River, you don't face anything remotely like this. Or for that matter, even if you are an illegal immigrant in Arizona.
And speaking of migrants, there, too, Russia simply vastly differs in scale and magnitude and availability of remedies. More than 60 labor migrants from other nearby former Soviet states, many of them Central Asians, have been savagely murdered by neo-fascists and skinheads who want to keep Russia "pure". We have beatings and even murders of gays and minorities in the U.S. at times -- we don't have anything like this, however, where there are so many cases, where there is never any perpetrator found, where the people who try to raise their voices about such injustices get sent pictures of severed heads left on their office doorstep and get put in death lists -- and get murdered themselves, like my colleague ethnologist Nikolai Girenko gunned down in his doorway in June 2004 for attempting to give testimony about neo-Nazis at a court of law.
We have absolutely nothing like the case of Natalya Estimirova, murdered for her work covering the abuses of the brutal Putin-appointed head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, after her report was published by Human Rights Watch. Take a look at this excellent piece by the Times' C.J. Chivers and watch his chilling video.If you can't grasp the difference between this brutality in Russia, which may feel similar to some Americans working in the civil rights field here, by realizing that the remedies we have in the U.S. are a thousand times more effective -- then I likely won't be able to persuade you.
Or take the case of the protests after miners were killed in an explosion recently -- and the hush-up by Russian federal authorities, the news blackout, and the desperate locals trying to demonstrate to get attention to the injustice. Yes, we have mines that explode too, due to negligence; we have such injustices. But...we cover them in the news. Lawyers defend the victims and their families without being killed themselves. They get compensation.
I hope that the U.S. human rights officials and NGO experts will not start in complaining about the Arizona law without mentioning at least in the same breath that the murderers of their true counterparts, like Estimirova and Girenko, have never been prosecuted.
But that's not likely to happen, given the awful dynamics of this set-up.
"The dog barks, the caravan moves on." The Americans on this road show will likely want to get it over with as soon as possible. Travel in Russia is still difficult; there's no good coffee and Internet connections might be spotty. But let's hope that they will comport themselves like the Americans that have gone before them and been an inspiration and a hope for Russians and not another cause for cynicism. They do not achieve this merely by "setting a good example" and speaking of our own abuses and remedies here at home; they achieve this by standing up for the universal principles by which all must be bound, in a place where those who do so suffer far more.
Ramzan(!) Kadyrov
Posted by: Greg | May 20, 2010 at 10:52 PM