A commentator from RFE/RL on the Russian-American summit said that with the deals Obama and Medvedev made over their hamburgers, and with progress on various topics like Iran, only the chickens could be unhappy -- the chickens that slaughtered and dressed, would be shipped to Russia now that Russia will stop blocking them on various pretexts as we pave the way for Russia to enter the WTO. (Perhaps they didn't want Georgian restaurants to have cheaper sources for tsatsivi and tabaka?)
I'll admit that I'm unhappy with the summit, too, and I'm definitely in the "nothing but us chickens" category.
I had called on President Obama to meet with Russian human rights activists and talk about Russian human rights problems.
He did neither.
He said absolutely nothing about human rights publicly and didn't drop by the civil society summit. In the talks covered by the media, and the limited remarks made at the press conference, Obama didn't touch on anything related to human rights, except, arguably Georgia, a topic about which Obama said he "agreed to disagree" with Medvedev".
For his part, Medvedev pre-emptively and sternly warned in his Stanford speech that Russia would work improvement of its legal system "without any lecturing from outside" (poucheniye was translated incorrectly with the sorter term "mentoring"-- I don't see a full accurate text of this speech yet up online, but I see lots of press accounts and blogs and tweets that completely leave out this very definitive message). The tone and the meaning from Medvedev was clear in the Russian -- he didn't want nor need nor accept any democracy lecturing from America -- the kind of lecturing which, of course, Obama said America wouldn't do any more in his Cairo speech of last year, and the kind of lecturing which he hasn't done, even in terms of invoking the universality by which we are all bound -- and the kind of lecturing Hillary explained last year she wouldn't be doing any more either.
Yet in fact the hot potato of human rights was handed to Hillary, and it was given to her to visit the civil society roundtable, and raise the hard issues, which she did, in one paragraph low down in the 10th paragraph of her speech:
But there is another element to our agenda. By shining a spotlight on the work of civil society groups like yours, we think we can help protect activists whose work can make them a target of abuse and violence. In particular, as I said last year, the United States remains deeply concerned about the safety of journalists and human rights activists in Russia. Among others, we remember the murdered American journalist Paul Klebnikov; the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pre-trial detention last year. We continue to urge that justice be delivered in these cases. We’re committed to working with you to find ways to reduce threats and protect the lives of activists.
This was enough to satisfy some constituents lobbying the administration to care about human rights, and it was enough to convince some press, like the Telegraph, to think the Administration was raising human rights with the Russians.
But it wasn't, and I'll explain why.
I realize it's considered ungrateful and even churlish of NGOs, if there is some token mention of their human rights cause and a pat on the head for civil society from the Secretary of State, to say not enough was done, and the ball was dropped.
Yet it has to be said, for the sake of the cause: human rights were moved out of sight, out of mind by having Hillary Clinton visit this civil society summit, and not Barack Obama, and in fact the entire construct of "the civil society summit" has been all along a device to dilute and distract from the hard-core human rights issues that need to be raised more forcefully if progress on them is ever to be made.
To be sure, it's good that Hillary said the right thing here -- that what the U.S. hopes to do with such meetings is ensure that civil society is protected and not assaulted. All good. Yet the message in the end was muffled -- the text of her speech given after 4 pm came out after Medvedev was already leaving town. Obama and Medvedev had lunch at the burger joint; they went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (business, not civil society); they took a walk in the park to talk nukes and other subjects.
Meanwhile, Hillary was left the task of raising the unpleasant task to a room full of people, some of whom raise it at home in Russia, and some of whom don't.
First, it bears saying about her speech -- which is all we have now for "the Obama Administration's message to Russia on human rights" -- raising cases of dead people is easy -- they're dead already. It's especially easy if Medvedev himself has acknowledged a case, as he has done with Magnitsky's death, and vowed to see justice done -- although it has stalled. It was this case that evoked Medvedev's pledge to change the law about holding white-collar criminals in pre-trial detention (but it's gone nowhere).
Second, the message is not about any people in jail currently whose cases exemplify injustice, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. Some political decision must have been made not to mention those cases or similar ones; who knows what went into it but it is not a good sign.
Third, nothing was said about live human rights advocates who are currently being beaten, most demonstratively, Sapiyat Magomedova, a lawyer working in Khasavyurt.
I had noted that the dialogue Medvedev had with Tanya Lokshina and other human rights activists on May 19 quite apart from the McFaul-Surkov sillyness was a sign that maybe the Kremlin was willing to concede they had to speak to human rights activists. I took it with a very big grain of salt, however, because I wondered if it was merely a new way for the old Moscow Inspector General gimmick to work, siccing human rights activists on recalcitrant local bureaucrats. I also worried what was then going to happen the week after the meeting with Medvedev. And the week after that.
And now we know. Cases like Magomedova's, and Oleg Orlov of Memorial, still facing a libel suit over calling Ramzan Kadyrov to account. Hillary Clinton's message could have mentioned some of this; it was truncated in the interests of Realpolitik. This meeting had so much else to accomplish -- pumping a soft-option message about a new tech initiative, praising McFaul for being " a very longtime supporter of a vibrant civil society in Russia".
How is did it come about that this administration removed human rights from its agenda, diverted it to side events out of the main press covarge, and packaged it with feel-goods?
I've already followed the story of how the policy has been shaped for the last year, but it's also about this Administration not feeling any public pressure from constituencies that it used to feel public pressure from in the past. Quiet diplomacy about human rights cannot succeed if the people inside the process cannot point out the window and say "Help me out here, I have all these protestors on my back about this issue, let's resolve it."
On the eve of the summit, I looked around on the various human rights group websites and I did not find a single appeal to the American and Russian leaders, as has been done in the past.This wasn't likely done out of any conscious plan; sucn an appeal was likely simply wasn't seen as the sort of action that is found "effective".
Amnesty International had absolutely nothing about Russia for the summit. They did a big campaign on Russia a few years ago; they lost interest. Yesterday, I opened one of those cumbersome cardboard box junk-mailers with a pen inside from Amnesty pleading for donations under cover of asking to sign a card of hope for prisoners -- and frankly, I threw it in the garbage. I kept the pen. They should care about the environment more. They don't care about prisoners of conscience; that format of activism has long since been removed from their repertoire, is missing from their website and is only wheeled out as a junk-mail fund-raising technique. If that sounds harsh to you, go look at their website, search for the term "prisoner of conscience" and see what you get -- a fraction of the kinds of cases promoted in the past, and with the main promoted calls to action now focusing on issues, not individuals.
Human Rights First, which has done some very effective petitions for Russian prisoners of conscience in the last year, had nothing on their website directed to the summit, either, although they have an active Russian program focusing on hate crimes in particular. Michael Posner, former director of HRF, is now in the Obama Administration in the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights and Labo.
Human Rights Watch didn't have any special appeal either, but an ominous incident compelled them to do a press release --Magomedova's beating -- on June 21st. Did anyone get this mentioned in the quiet civil society or government talks? Tom Malinowski of HRW was a lead participant in the civil society meeting; perhaps he was able to raise it.
Freedom House which has declared Russia "partly free" and sponsored a summit of human rights defenders in the past didn't find the Russian-American summit an occasion for appealing to the two leaders about cases or issues.
It's hard to know *what* was discussed at the civil society event that some of these groups and others took part in, as it was not public. We're told some sort of notes will emerge from. One anonymous tweeter said that Americans in the meeting raised "democracy" and this made Russians "uncomfortable," a fact I should be "happy about". Why? The purpose is not to shame Russians and make them uncomfortable; the purpose is to show solidarity to victims and defend colleagues under fire. If it turns out that makes your Russian interlocutors uncomfortable, I can't worry too much about it, and I can ask if maybe you need some new interlocutors. Obama can't help who he has to deal with as a counterpart; "civil society" can.
The civil society component of this summit was extremely slick. And not surprising, because either the State Department, or IREX (an agency that organizes international exchanges, research, and assistance programs, handling U.S. government contracts), or *somebody* hired the powerful public relations firm Edelman, which was listed as a contact. Edelman's job here, as it has been in other settings, might have been as much about keeping press to a minimum, as it was in getting press coverage to reflect the proper spin. I'm going to hazard a guess that the reason they are there is because the government "needed help" with its "social media policy" even though typing a tweet is something dirt simple and easy and cheap and doesn't require special gurus. The State Department helps Edelman; Edelman helps the State Department with love pats like this one:
Last January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a policy address about Internet freedom at the Newseum in D.C. In the address, Sec. Clinton argued that the rise of the Internet and information networks is creating a “new nervous system for our planet”.
Nee-noo, nee-noo, sounds like we have some Singularists in the building...
And this one:
Speaking at a breakfast earlier this month, Jared Cohen, a member of the State Department’s policy and planning staff, maintained that social media and the “connection technologies” we now use every day are more revolutionary than radio or television when they were introduced. Why? Because, today, the platform is the intermediary. These new technology platforms are game changers. They empower people by connecting them directly to information, other individuals and resources.
Yeah -- I know how that works. "The platform is the intermediate," and Edelman and Jared Cohen are disintermediating the people from their elected officials by managing the platform -- and managing the democracy. Wave the magic wand of "empowering people" -- and maybe no one will notice that the main people empowered are social media consultants and platform devs.
Since when does the State Department have private public relations agencies handle civil society events it is associated with? Well, since Gov 2.0 and Obama, I guess -- perhaps those closer to the situation can explain it to me.
I was among those avidly asking what this civil society event would be about (it was held close), and you would have to "just know" that the State Department even issued a release on it and put it on state.gov on June 23 (even with all the lists I get from state.gov and all the news searching and tips I get, I missed this and was still looking June 24 until I saw a grainy cell phone photo of Hillary at...some sort of event...showing up on a Facebook friend's news feed in DC and figured they had her drop by instead of Obama.)
In this press release, we are told:
The C2C Summit was launched shortly after the U.S.-Russia Bilateral
Presidential Commission was announced in July 2009 by Presidents Obama
and Medvedev as a way to improve communication and cooperation between
the governments of Russia and the U.S. The Bilateral Presidential
Commission (BPC) and its sixteen working groups, including one on Civil
Society, serve as a platform for government-to-government dialogue
between the two countries.
The International Research &
Exchanges Board (IREX) is the convener of the C2C Summit.
This is exactly the process I've been critical of, because I feel it's too coopted on both sides, with of course a healthy understanding of the differences between Kremlin and State Department cooptation.
There are few people these days who question the fact that most non-governmental human rights organizations, including some that never used to take any U.S. government money, are now taking it -- they have to, or they'd be out of business, not only with the downturn in donors after 9/11, but with the global recession, Madoff, and the turn of a new generation of younger philanthropist to social and economic causes rather than human rights.
There are few people these days who question any more the very fact that the term "civil society" is not coterminous with "NGO" -- that self-organized and government-funded NGOs professionally managing topics in bilaterals aren't the same thing whatsoever as all kind of civic, labor, religious, and business groups independent of the government, who might have very, very different views on these issues than those contractors who are inside the Beltway -- and their PR help.
There are also few people these days who question this status quo, where an organization (a GONGO, or government-organized NGO) runs an affair like this, because if they did, they'd be told they "were not being constructive" or they would be told "that they weren't pitching in and making a proposal" or they were "not sufficiently informed" or "out of the loop" and finally -- especially if a critic begins to ask questions about budgets and how they are spent or make specific criticism of decisions taken, told "they will never get a grant". It's that sort of situation. It's very deep, and very pervasive. We all know what kind of role IREX had to play in the Soviet era, keeping its access. It was not the role of oh, Helsinki Watch or Freedom House. We all know the role that IREX has to play today, keeping its access, often having to provide technical assistance rather than real direct aid, and having to pick and chose among radical and tepid and compliant opposition groups and newspapers simply to keep a presence in some countries.
This is a difficult situation to change, because the one thing these contractors fear is Congressional scrutiny, and with good reason: Congressional oversight, badly needed, tends to simply cut budgets and misunderstand cover stories under which good deeds are done, and is too blunt an axe. Even so, it deserves scrutiny. The situation is difficult to change because no other source outside the government, with the exception of a few foundations, are able to mount the kind of extensive budgets and political connections needed to run operations abroad.
So, here we all are, with what I can only call, well, managed democracy.
There is no question this civil society exercise took the soft option, whatever harder questions were raised semi-publicly in the meeting.
Coming up with a joint project on a text message service for pregnant women to get information is the sort of techno feel-good I would expect from this operation, but it's worth pointing out, that cell minutes and texting and Internet access can all be limited and expensive in Russia. It's all good, but there are basic issues at stake for the reasons for maternal and infant mortality and morbidity in Russia that aren't about not having the ability to text tips about what to expect when you're expecting.
I can't help but think as well that this feel-good covers up a really awful issue between our two countries which has been the subject of agonizing press stories and conflicts: the deaths in custody of Russian children adopted from Russia by American parents, and the difficulties ensuing for new adopting parents. I have to say I'd lean toward the position taken by the Duma on this issue of freezing adoptions until they can investigate the cases involved. But those who are adopting shouldn't be angered at this, but should lobby for more accountability and transparency from the Russian medical community, health ministry, and orphan bureaucracy so that children with severe disabilities, if adopted, are recognized as the profound challenges they will be and provided sufficiently competent parents and support structures in the U.S.
I also want to take note of this smarmy message about what appears to be a sort of expo of tech -- no doubt sold by the same Silicon Valley companies that have invaded the "free opensource" (sic) Gov 2.0 effort around the Obama administration all over:
The Marketplace will bring together ten different organizations from the U.S. and Russia to share novel and innovative technology tools used domestically and abroad to serve the public and advance societal change.
Let me tell you something about that paragraph. Somebody has a contract; somebody is getting paid. It is not a suffering and needy deserving Russian NGO. And the notion of "societal change" will be out of the pages of the "progressive agenda" we've seen around these efforts before. Who changes, comrades? How? Who decides what public service is? How?
OK, I've seen enough. When an Edelman contact appears above a State Department contact name on a state.gov page like this, I feel like I'm in Snowcrash.
Hillary gave a shout-out to what is called "the innovation team". These are the tweeters and Facebookers who are inserting the "share" stuff into every single State web page and communication.
We have a dedicated group inside the State Department focused on how to use technology in the 21st century. We call it 21st Century Statecraft. I saw Jared Cohen when I came in. I don’t know if Alec Ross is here or not. But who else is – anybody else here from your team, Jared? We have a great team of really dedicated young people – primarily young people – who care deeply about connecting people up. And I’m very proud of the work they’re doing. They have been everywhere from Mexico to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Syria to Russia, and every place in between. And we want to be a facilitator to help empower you in this area.
Jared Cohen is the State Department staffer who called up the Twitter devs during the Iran revolution last summer and asked them to delay their scheduled maintenance day and latest patch because there was a crucial moment in the demos that would have lost momentum by Twitter being "down". This incident has been parsed as both an example of evil American hubris and manipulation of colour revolutions as well as spun as uber cool by the tech gen about how the Obama people "get it".
My call to the innovative bunch is to stop tweeting inanities, blurbs about how fabulous the tech or themselves are, little emo missives worthy of slashdot fic to the Twitter devs and hints about lunches with IBM CEOs and transmit *substance*. On *the issues*. Time to stop talking about the tech and the fabulous young things putting it in (and trying to weld in their ideologies into the tools by stealth) and use the tech *to talk with freely*.
I realize, however, that the content-free tweets of Mr. Cohen will continue, as will Hillary's feelgood initiatives like text4baby. It will be hard to expect anything more solid out of this venture because of the overarching political and economic reality of this summit: it was won by Silicon Valley, which didn't supply the slightest bit of starch about human rights, or even the intellectual freedom of scientists.
Only Leon Aron and a few others linked up these old issues as they were once indissolvably linked by Andrei Sakharov.
Sestanovich happened to mention the Khodorkovsky case; so did the San Francisco Chronicle. They were in the minority. The Intel billion-dollar deal and other similar Silly Valley deals went forward "without any lecturing". The scene of the Russian ship landing as if in "The Russians are Coming!", the visit of Mrs. Medvedeva to the coopted emigre community and Russian Orthodox church -- this was all paskha to the kulich.
It will be very hard to break through this silicon cocoon to get real issues and cases handled, as Obama has essentially outsourced Russia to California IT businesses to deal with while he focuses on other urgent domestic issues like the oil spill and health care. Even so, we must try, and there are those who are doing this -- more in my next post.
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