"The Working Group Was Not Working" -- US Pulls Out of Fake US-Russian Group

"I think it's time I stopped the show....All we have to do now is take these lies and make them true somehow... All we have to see is that I don't belong to you and you don't belong to me." George Michael

Thank God. The US has finally dumped the awful US-Russian Civil Society Working Group although it still remains in the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission.

I was the first to call for pulling out of this working group two years ago -- I believed it was a unequal hybrid concoction that only served to give Russia legitimacy it didn't have then or now in the area of human rights and democracy. I wrote for rferl.org:

This is awful stuff, and U.S. human rights groups should definitely not be participating in it, and sealing the bad faith particularly on the part of the Russians, and the compromising on principles on the part of the Americans.

...and had to keep arguing and arguing -- including with US officials -- about this contrived and lame body and their limp responses in it to Russian oppression.This commission was called the "McFaul Surkov" commission after Michael McFaul, who as at the National Security Council at the time, and Vladislav Surkov, often dubbed the "Kremlin's grey cardinal"; he was in charge of "modernization" and Georgy Saratov warned us not to believe it.

With a reshuffling and consolidation of Putin's power, Surkov was actually moved to the side and replaced by Volodin awhile ago; the always-easy-on-Russia "Power Vertical" claimed that this was "the end of the Surkov era," although it's not that -- he still retains control over religious organizations, and that counts for a lot in Russia with the growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church in shoring up the Russian state, and the increasing demand for participation by the Muslim community. Surkov himself is Chechen.

Surkov used to manage the Kremlin's storm stroopers, Nashi and Young Guard, and that's why it was particularly odious for McFaul and other US officials to snuggle up to him and talk "civil society" when those organizations were inciting hatred and beating people.

When McFaul was sent to Moscow to serve as ambassador, the group was renamed the "Melia-Dolgov" group after Tom Melia,  Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and Ambassador Konstantin Dolgov, Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law within Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As I pointed out a year ago, it was terrible that this anti-gay commissar was put in charge of a civil society joint working group, and we should have been shed of this even a year ago.

Dolgov belongs to the Soviet "your Indians" school of human rights combat, whereby he distracts from his own country's considerable crimes against indigenous peoples by asking pointedly about Native Americans. So he raises the secret CIA rendition prisons in Europe, but forgets to explain why over 400 Chechens disappeared in the North Caucasus in Russian custody; he raises the fact that crimes against Jews in Europe has increased in the last decade, without admitting not only remaining antisemitism in Russian, but murders and beatings of Central Asian and Caucasian migrant workers in Russia. And so on.

Asked why we weren't still dialoguing with the Russians, and wouldn't that be best, Victoria Nuland put it bluntly:

QUESTION: Why is it not better to stay in the working group and try to convince your interlocutors there either to try to reverse some of the recent moves that you oppose or to do other things that would promote civil society? I mean, did you just come to the conclusion that that was never going to happen in this working group?

MS. NULAND: Well, as I said, the working group was not working. The new restrictions that the Government of Russia was placing on civil society in recent months were increasingly calling into questions whether maintaining this government-to-government mechanism was either useful or appropriate, and it was not advancing the cause of civil society in Russia, so we will do that other ways.

It's appropriate that after the "anti-Magnitsky Law" was passed (the "Dima Yakovlev Law," named for a Russian orphan who died accidently in his father's custody), and after the Duma just voted for a law that would criminalize "homosexual propaganda" and the banning of gay events with punitive fines, that the US says, "ok, that's enough".

They shouldn't have even gotten into this harness; a year ago it would have been appropriate to get out.

So now, the expulsion of USAID, the closure of the US-funded voting monitoring organization Golos, the passage of a vague but harsh new law against NGOs who are determined to be "foreign agents", the crack down on demonstrators and the Internet, all of this and more means it's time to go. "Sometimes the clothes don't make the man."

Amb. Richard Schifter, who negotiated with the Soviets during the difficult era of the 1980s, met with his counterpart Yuri Reshetov regularly without forming any formal "commission"; they were simply bilateral talks, which he came to with lists of political prisoners, hoping to get them freed -- and succeeding sometimes.

There is no reason why we can't meet and negotiate with the Russians; we really don't need a formal working group; indeed, I'd be for disbanding the entire commission, group by group, because in every area, I think we're going to see stonewalling and non-cooperation and bad faith.

People so fear "the Cold War". Why? Cold is what you  need to be when you are dealing with a government that has expelled your aid agency, and lets the lawyer of a Western company die in imprisonment deliberately; cold is what you need to be when lawyers, human rights activists and journalists and gunned down or beaten severely, even injured permanently.  Yes, Russia has a 60% chokehold over us on the Northern Distribution Network to get our troops and equipment out of Afghanistan. That's no reason to be craven; when all else fails, you can just not confer legitimacy on a government like this, and convey clearly what the benchmarks are for restoring normalcy and warmer relations.

Nuland said that the group had been formed to help civil society; now it wasn't doing that. But she said the US remains committing to working with civil society nonetheless:

Well, we do continue to work with a broad cross-section of Russian civil society organizations. They obviously have to manage to do that within their own law. I think you know that there are lots of countries where we do this from the United States. We do it from offices in third countries. But as long as there are Russian civil society activists who want our help, who want our support, who want to connect with civil society organizations in the United States, we will help them.

It's always hard when states try to encourage civil society against other states that are oppressive; this is better done by actual counterparts in the non-governmental sector. But given the need, and the request by Russians themselves to help, we have to only increase our funding for NGOs, particularly for Internet freedom, protection of independent sites, and circumvention of censorship. After all, it's not as if there isn't plenty of private sector activity between Russia and the United States. After all, when you have "Intel Inside" investing $4 million in a Russian Internet start-up, this is not a situation where you need to place the burden of "civil society" work on an inter-governmental committee. Truly.

If anything, both the US government and NGOs have to catch up to this sort of metaversal Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. They both have to be asking Silicon Valley whether they will be helping or hurting real Internet freedom given the war for power on the Russian Internet.

 I'm very concerned about how Sen. John Kerry is going to do on Russia. I haven't had a chance to listen to the hearing but before the Magnitsky bill was finally passed, Kerry spoke directly against it, alluding to US problems as a reason why we can't accuse Russia of anything. Nonsense.

There's no need for any apologies and clutching of the breast over American sins; we have a robust civil society of our own that just elected the most liberal president in American history; we have a rich NGO sector that works on a huge variety of American problems from mistreatment in US prisons to the attempt to close Guantanamo and to prevent excessive surveillance.

Let me tell you the difference between America and Russia one more time with one more example. When a young hacker dubbed a computer genius commits suicide in New York because he is facing possible jail time, there is a tidal wave of response from media, technologists, professors, and human rights lawyers, who take up every aspect of the issue from proposals to change computer fraud laws to discipline or removal of the prosectuors. I actually differ in their assessment of this case and don't share their copyleftist approach on this and believe the prosecutors were doing their job. But the point is that the response is enormous, and affects many levels of society and will not go away until those concerned about justice feel they have reached some kind of closure.

This week a young Russian scientist named Dolmatov committed suicide in a refugee camp in the Netherlands, because he failed to get the political asylum he requested after fleeing very likely persecution and torture in Russia in connection with his participation in a large opposition march last May. While a tiny handful of human rights activists and a few independent journalists tried to help his mother and tried to get an investigation started, not a single Russian official or prominent scientist or lawyer had anything to say.

I wonder how this decision to dump the working group got made, and I can't help thinking that some enterprising bureaucrat figured out that with the furor over the orphan law and today the gay law, and with Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for democracy human rights and labor, who was for keeping the working group as a vehicle for advocacy, on his way out now, and with Kerry not yet in place, the time was perfect -- and the window might not repeat -- to make this symbolic move. The Russians are predictably unhappy and snarky.

 

 

Comments

[Mr. X]

Hey Catherine, it might interest you and your idol Craig Pirrong to know that Alyona Popova used to post photos of herself with Anya Chapman on her website back in the day when Anya was a hot Moscow celebrity post-expulsion from the U.S. for incompetently spying. Those photos have since been scrubbed thanks to her association with Ponomarov. Coincidence? I think not!

And I let Pirrong have it over at RobertAmsterdam.com. Let the entire Russophobic Russia watcher community know what a fanatic joke this man is and how pathetic his defense against lawlessness within his own industry has been.

http://robertamsterdam.com/2013/01/whos-afraid-of-kim-dotcom/#comment-180440

[Mr. X]

"There's no need for any apologies and clutching of the breast over American sins; we have a robust civil society of our own that just elected the most liberal president in American history;" Liberal jingoist or fake libertarian jingoist, birds of a feather like Fitzpatrick and Pirrong flock together.

http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/1281/