OSCE Unbound

Are There Blogs About OSCE?

I've been looking for blogs about OSCE -- but of course, mindful that there are likely to be blogs about OSCE *countries* or *issues*.  It doesn't seem that OSCE itself has blogs yet although it has a Twitter account and videos, such as this ten-minute special from Nazarbayev addressing the OSCE ministerial, which only had 9 ratings and 1,154 views.

I'm going to look and see what some "keepers" should be for my links to blogs that regularly cover OSCE.

Euronest is a good blog to watch from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliamentary Assembly although you have to keep clicking on past dates to see topics as they don't hyperlink topics (but please, don't put in a tag cloud). It seems to have more reiteration of official press releases such as this item on OSCE-EU relations than any analysis, i.e. it turns out that it is "vital" that these two bodies cooperate to solve conflicts -- but I would like to hear more about their complementarity.

The UN is basically getting forced out of Georgia by Russia, despite the best efforts of seasoned diplomats like Amb. Johan Verbeke of Belgium who was the UN special representative to Georgia, and who was also a great asset at the UN here in New York for a number of years. He gives a careful diplomatic answer to the question of the UN observer mission in Georgia, pointing out that the UN still has other forms its presence takes (UNDP, etc.) and says:

"In diplomacy, you can never force structures -- they have to naturally follow diplomatic developments. It may very well be possible that the UN will increase somewhat its presence in Abkhazia as time goes on, but we should not pre-fix such objectives."

Well, you can never force structures if Russia doesn't want them -- there was a time (hard to remember now!) when Russia *asked* for a UN mission in Georgia, but that was in the Yeltsin era when dissident Vyacheslav Bakhmin was representing Russia at the UN. In fact, Russia's force-out of the structure of the UN observer mission in Georgia is part of a worrying trend of countries second-guessing UN presences they had once agreed to, and demanding they leave -- as happened with MONUC in DRC before renewal, and is now beginning to happen with MINURCAT in Chad. 

FREE Rad!cals looks promising, such as this item on the "Myth of the Lone Wolf in Terrorism" or this four-part series on what is called ummah-oriented Muslim activist identity. 

Here's a a Kyrgyz blogger which tells me something I hadn't heard, among the increasing list of bad things in Kyrgyzstan -- the Kyrgyz authorities recalling the OSCE Academy's license. I  guess the OSCE Academy is a structure that "did not naturally follow diplomatic developments" which perhaps were not timely enough to prevent this -- stay tuned.

A blog to revisit for a June 2009 piece on the tensions as the EU and OSCE tried to monitor the situation in Georgia where the Russia's technical (but political) point that the missions "no longer have a mandate" when the territories they were observing "became sovereign states." See how structures can begin to unnaturally follow diplomatic  developments?

In case you were wondering who the Obama Administration's ambassador to OSCE is going to be, the appointee is Ian Kelly, "a senior Foreign Service officer and former acting deputy assistant secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, a long-time Russia hand, with a PhD from Columbia University". I haven't come across him before. The confirmation process in the Senate is predicted as "relatively painless". The Obama appointments have been painfully slow (USAID took forever) -- a year into the Administration and we don't quite yet have an OSCE ambassador, it wasn't a priority. We still don't have an ambassador to strategically-vital and gas-rich Turkmenistan, next to Afghanistan, but that's a strange problem that the Obama people inherited from Bush.

Delving back into the rich OSCE past, you can find this blog that helps you trace the increasingly belligerent posture of Russia to the OSCE, where here it is said Russia "effectively held a gun to the OSCE’s head [in 2004], when it threatened to withold it’s budget contributions unless it’s proposals were taken seriously." The proposal? Getting rid of that pesky practice of ODIHR to make statements about elections soon after the polls close, instead of sending their reports to Vienna for political vetting to see what should be said later. Of course, ODIHR monitors elections *before* they occur, sometimes long before, and can usually make an accurate call on what's likely to happen given the lack of free media, presence of opposition parties in the electoral commissions, etc.

A preview of the exciting seminars awaited under Kazakhstan's chair -- gender equality, always a safe topic especially for the stans where the status of women after the Soviet era isn't as bad as some countries in Asia and the Middle East, so they can look progressive by contrast. Pro tip: children is another safe subject, but not particularly on the OSCE's menu as the UN does this topic better.

This blog lets us know about the UN's secret prisons report which will include some OSCE countries but it's not clear whether the report just reiterates the little known from other meager sources, such as on Turkmenistan's secret imprisonment of the participants in the alleged 2002 plot against past dictator Niyaozv.

Somehow despite daily reading of this page I missed this excellent piece about the, er "conflicts of interest" involved in Kazakhstan essentially buying itself freedom from sharp criticism among think tanks in Washington. I will revisit this topic.

Raising the Case of Jailed Rights Activist Yevgeny Zhovtis in Kazakhstan

I often think of my long-time colleague Yevgeny Zhovtis, the jailed human rights leader of Kazakhstan who was arrested in connection with a car accident right before his country took up the chairmanship of the OSCE. I had thought for a time that the OSCE chairmanship might in a sense buy some protection for people like Zhovtis to go on reporting critically about human rights, but instead the situation with this tragedy has been manipulated by the government to silence him. Zhovtis was driving at night when a drunk pedestrian ran into his car; blinded by oncoming headlights he struck and killed the man. He and his lawyer have been unable to bring their considerable mitigating evidence to court -- Zhovtis had not drunk any alcohol himself and the road was in a dark rural area. There were other procedural violations, and his appeal was unsuccessful. He's been sent to a remote prison colony 1,000 miles from his home, making visits for relatives difficult.

If you ask people like Robert Bernstein, chairman of the Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch) or Secretary of State George Shultz or then-CSCE ambassador Max Kampelman how they were able to get out hundreds of prisoners from the GULAG and hundreds of thousands of people permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union, the formula was simple: in each and every meeting with the Soviets, in as many fora as possible, in bilateral and multilateral settings, raise the names of individual people, raise human rights cases. At each and every meeting, when the Soviets learn that they will hear the names "Sharansky" or "Orlov" at the start, it starts to have a cumulative effect; eventually it works. But you have to raise the cases; you have to mention names; you have to raise them in all settings, not just specific "human rights dialogue" meetings for this charm to work.

So that's what's needed for Zhovtis -- and at a time when it is 100 times harder to get diplomats to do this simple act for 100 different reasons of diplomatic nicety and also at a time, much like the Cold War era with its preoccupation with intercontinental missiles, when they feel there are far more pressing issues needing a cooperative environment to negotiate, like "Corfu" or "Georgia" or "Afghanistan". Even so, you can ask. It cannot hurt. Kazakhstan will not walk out of the room over the mention of individual cases.

There's an opportunity to ask a series of questions about Zhovtis' case coming up February 2 with the CSCE hearing. And many others such as a panel coming up tomorrow on "Energy Diplomacy and Eurasia" at the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, are also organizers of the ENOUGH campaign on the Darfur crisis, and they are very outspoken on Sudan. Let its officers be as outspoken on the case of Zhovtis and the other perils of the Kazakhstan chair and the need for "energy diplomacy" trumping human rights talk in Eurasia, even though this panel does not have anyone from the democracy or human rights communities on it and seems more to be about energy politics. Even if a question from the floor will seem "off-topic" -- there's always asking "on the margins".

And it doesn't hurt to keep writing the same letters. The questions are very basic. What is the status of Yevgeny Zhovtis? Can a judicial review be convened with international observers, given the allegations of violation of due process? Can we hear why a case of vehicular manslaughter in which the driver was not intoxicated, whose vehicle was in order, and where the pedestrian was intoxicated, led to such a severe sentence? Can this sentence be served at a facility closer to home? And so on.

Aim to start each OSCE meeting with a question about Zhovtis, and eventually we will see Zhovtis himself at one of these meetings, instead of in jail.

Frank Year in Review from CSCE

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) has a first-rate report up on its website of the year at OSCE in review, and some frank talk about the perils of Kazakhstan's chair of the organization. While it may have been obvious, CSCE notes that the same president (Nazarbayev) who signed the Helsinki Accords in 1992 as a newly-independent state is *still* in office -- and 19 years is a long time for *any* president. 

Says CSCE:

For some who were strongly opposed to giving Kazakhstan the chairmanship, the integrity of the OSCE as an institution is undermined by the disparity between the commitments adopted by the participating States and the practices of the government in Astana. In particular, the Kazakhstani chairmanship begins with the country’s most well-known human rights activist [Yegeny Zhovtis] behind bars in a penal colony.

That's a good point to keep making when some debate the other challenge to integrity by *not* having some countries ever chair the organization. Some say "well, we weathered Libya in the chair of the Commission on Human Rights". Er, no, we did not -- not only the Comission's reputation suffer terribly, and the revised body turn out worse in some ways. In fact, the working methods and procedures were savaged and features like specific country mandates and those special sessions obsessively focusing on Israel could become possible precisely because of the bad-faith chairs of what should have been an impartial human rights body. It's that undermining of good faith that we have most to oppose in Astana's chair of OSCE and the corrosive effect of bad will.

The CSCE report notes that at the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw this past year, NGOs stood up in protest wearing t-shirts in defense of jailed human rights leader Yevgeny Zhovtis. I could note that unlike the UN, where every single one of these NGOs' organizations would have permanently lost their grounds pass (remember when Polish activist Irena Lasota tried to unfurl the Solidarity banner at the UN in the 1980s?) -- OSCE diplomats upheld the NGOs right to make this visual but silent and peaceful protest in the room. And the Russians tried to play the bash-NGO game, as CSCE points out in its annual report, by walking out in protest when the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society got to speak.

Here, I'll note what I said about Kazakhstan's past record of hewing to the letter of law and highlight how important it was that some OSCE members stood up for the rock-solid NGO participation principle:  Only “persons and organizations which resort to the use of violence or publicly condone terrorism or the use of violence” may be barred from participating; there are no other grounds for exclusion, reminds CSCE.

The Russian-Chechen Friendship to my knowledge, having worked with them in the past, has never advocated or used violence and has not been been charged for such even by biased Russian courts -- so Russians making this claim have to be challenged to back it up.

So I'm glad to see CSCE out of the gates in the first month of the Kazakh chair with a very strong statement, but I'm also reminded of what a UN official pointedly said about his reform efforts: "We need to stop writing reports to each other and get out of the building." And reminded of a poignant statement by an Indian Lahor man to a journalist: "You give us a handful of flour, and yet you're writing so much. Go now. We've had enough of you."

Kazakhstan in the Chair

OK, here we are now, Kazakhstan is in the chair. There was never any serious Western effort to stop this from occurring -- not with such energy and security interests at stake -- and not with Russia backing it. A number of conferences have been held on whether or not this chairmanship will represent a chance to improve human rights, or a device to cover up their ongoing violations -- but not with any serious challenge to Kazakh diplomats themselves, who are often at the conferences -- paralyzing the ability of NGOs and diplomats to do some serious strategizing on their own. Anyone bothering to engage on the issue thinks that they will quietly use the framework of the chairmanship to get some concessions, and never have a better idea.

So...This time next year, Kazakhstan's chair will be over, and we'll have...Lithuania. Remain calm, it will be interesting, and it's going to get better. Activists really *do* have to try to get diplomats to make good on the concept that the framework itself will lead to improvements -- which it might do, at least for some individual cases or issues -- but only if advocates push publicly and not get diverted on soft-option topics like "tolerance" and "gender" and "local governance" into foregoing frank interventions on torture, oppressive media laws, and rights of political parties.

I'll say what everybody thinks about this: Kazakhstan wouldn't likely have changed if the West had tried to use the denial of the chairmanship to extract concessions; it will not change if instead they use a cooperative framework with Kazakhstan in the chair as a means of trying to extract concessions.

Kazakhstan is to OSCE as China is to the world. Plan accordingly. It has its own ideas of "democracy" and "economic reform" and they do not mesh with yours. It is extremely forceful, and has some of the most aggressive and good-English-speaking diplomats on the circuit to crush wavering Eurocrats and ill-prepared NGOs. It is not going to be pretty to watch. It's important to document it -- and I hope blogs will appear that will do this from inside, or closer to Kazakhstan than I can get -- or that those that do exist already will get more visibility.

And I'll say what everybody says in private: Kazakhstan has some real thugs in power. You do not get to be president-since-the Soviet-era by letting intellectuals fill up parliament and TV stations and allowing dissidents to create colour or flora-and-fauna revolutions. The things that happen in Kazakhstan to people -- both foreigners and their own people -- are very sinister. There are decades of stories. The U.S. official cracked over the head. The U.S. media trainer murdered. Opposition members murdered. Trumped-up criminal cases against journalists. The severed dog's head on the doorstep of a leading independent paper. The opportunistic and remote jailing of the country's leading human rights critic *right* as Astana takes the chair. These are all the stories told and retold, even if nobody can really make fully-footnoted document reports proving that any of these dark deeds were done with the consciousness and deliberation of the actual state authorities. But enough of the bad deeds were, or were tacitly approved of by shadowy security forces, or were manipulated by powers-that-be, to create a nasty undertow to the experience of the Kazakhstan chair that we all know about.

Now. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, has a lot of professionalism in its diplomacy and is doing some of the right things to win over some constituencies in the West (i.e. Afghanistan and tolerance as topics). The government has gone to enormous trouble to educate and season a new generation of diplomats. I've seen there are young professionals of Kazakhstan who Youtube and Twitter and can run circles around all the other slackers at the Third or Fifth Committees at the UN because somebody bothered to train and deploy and keep them commanded. Not everyone bothers in the West to do the same thing -- for the U.S., multilateral institutions are where the second-rate or the political plum job seekers are sent to put them *somewhere* -- not where the best and the brightest are schooled for serious work.

Unfortunately for liberal democracy, Kazakhstan bothers to get up early in the morning, well versed in the documents and the drafting and the procedures -- and it prevails. The tyranny of just showing up, when the West hasn't been pushing back in a long time.

Should We Have an OSCE Summit?

Not surprisingly, not long after assuming the chairmanship of the OSCE, Kazakhstan wheeled out a proposal to have an OSCE summit -- a controversial idea that is fraught with ramifications that go beyond the simple good idea of having heads of states talk more to each other.

There hasn't been an OSCE summit for years. The last one was in Ankara in 1999, 10 years ago. And for good reason - the Russians want a summit to be all about creating a new European Security Charter, and turning the OSCE document based on a kind of gentlemen's agreement about the Eurasian continent into a binding charter with the status of legal personhood. The West is not interested in renegotiating Helsinki in this fashion -- well, at least parts of the West. Some in Europe are likely willing to go along with this notion because some tool is needed to revive the whole OSCE process and make it relevant, and for some new Ost Politickers, this will be it.

My own rather naive thought is in fact that the same kind of risky gamble that launched the process back in 1975 is needed again -- danging the carrot of something the Russians want (the security charter, the legal status) with a stick of something the West should be able to get (binding human rights treaties and bodies to examine Copenhagen compliance, real resolution of "frozen conflicts," obligations that Russian forces will not be deployed to other CIS or CSTO members -- I'm just thinking out loud). My notion of this bold idea, however, is conditioned on the kind of muscular diplomacy for human rights and democracy for which the Reagan Administration was noted in its day -- and I'm not sure we'd get that now.

The Obama Administration isn't likely to want to get into the enormously challenging and perilous process of handing the Russians a big security charter grab and ramp up the willingness to really step up to the plate on the human rights "baskets" -- not when official policy these days is not to tell other countries what to do and go softly-softly on "internal affairs".

The Kazakhs have sharpened the proposal by saying it's all about Afghanistan -- at a time when they can get NATO countries to focus on the very real experience of the war spilling over into Central Asia, for example with returning fighters from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan -- and when they've gotten the regimes of Central Asia to roll over and accept rail and air transit of freight to help the war effort.

Maybe we should ask Afghanistan to join OSCE.

The down side of trying to get Afghanistan ensnarled in the already complex and dilatory processes of OSCE (there is actually already some engagement, on issues like border guard training, etc.) is that the UN is already engaged, and has a UN Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Ashgabat full tilt on OSCE-type activities -- and of course NATO and the EU are already involved. The overlay of yet another acronym is not always a value-add.

Answer the poll on my blog below as to whether you think this is a good idea.

Hello, 56 States!

The OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) is one of those acronyms in the world that most Americans (and probably a lot of other people) have never heard of. In fact, the agreement that spawned the institution --the Helsinki Final Act -- is one that many people don't even remember. It's so dull that even the conspiracy nuts haven't assigned a mythological capacity to it to land black -- or blue -- helicopters anywhere. If you ever heard a scandal about the OSCE like "oil-for-food," it's probably about the breakfasts at the Hotel Planeta in Minsk.

A famous saying has been invented about NATO -- "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down" -- but nobody even remembers that anymore". If you had to invent a saying about OSCE, it might be, "To keep aging foreign service officers employed, to get inexperienced junior staff members deployed, and to keep NGOs annoyed". Sometimes you  hear talk around various foreign ministries that the expensive, sprawling body that has no binding force under international law (except indirectly) should just be dismantled. The U.S. has stopped paying dues to it -- not necessarily with fervent ideological revulsion, as Washington used to do with the UN, but because nobody bothered to care. Russia has tried to take OSCE over to bend it to its long-dreamed agenda of making a security umbrella on the Eurasia continent that the Kremlin will utterly control, but the West isn't biting. Meanwhile, the OSCE-i-phate of seminars for resolutionaries who were once revolutionaries, time-keepers and mine-sweepers keeps lumbering on, a kind of mash-up and muddle of good intentions gone awry, cynical per-diem grabs and hopeful citizens that sometimes are helped.

If nothing else, one wise old diplomat counseled about this hybrid body with more free speech for NGOs  at its meetings but less clout than the UN -- "let it be a job corps for dissidents". If some people who are out of favour or inadequately employed in their own oppressive countries can get a job or a consulting contract or even just a berth at a seminar, that's all to the good. If somebody has a pot of money for a plane ticket that might get somebody to a seminar rather than a jail cell -- it's the Lord's work. Critics say it's more often that  retired intelligence officers, Wendell Wilkie idealists and regime-changers, and folks whose brother-in-laws run large construction companies are the ones who get the gigs. An American foreign service officer who took a number of times to pass the personality part of the foreign service exam once bragged to me that driving around in the white vans with "OSCE" stamped on the outside, he found it easier to "pick up babes".

Indeed.

I've chosen a rather bland layout and colour for this blog -- I love making blogs! -- because it's a dull organization, but it's easier to read the black on white and if you want colour and widgets and even viral Youtubes of kittehs and a drunk guy at the 7-11, go here. But after days of trying to think up a really crackerjack blog title, I couldn't think of anything really superior. I wanted to stay away from titles likely taken by very dull legal publications like "OSCE Overview" or "OSCE Observer", and also wanted to avoid treacly names like "Human Dimensions" or the creepyness of calling a blog "Final Activist". (An exasperated OSCE official who was tired of repeatedly giving me the floor at a Human Dimension Seminar where nobody would speak once called me "The Participating State of Fitzpatrick".

Hence "Unbound," which for me is associated both the greatest promise and the greatest peril of this organization. It has no power of binding international law, except for the phrase we always repeat about the treaties incorporated within it "by which they [the states] might be bound". States often *don't* feel bound at all by their old Helsinki  or Copenhagen or other obligations. Boundaries were supposed to be made inviolable in exchange for the "third basket" human rights elements being incorporated, but in the end, the borders became moveable for situations like Kosovo and the basket dumpable for situations like Chechnya. Even so, it is OSCE that has likely done more than any other institution to make it possible for people in Eurasia unbind their shackles over the decades. I'm also thinking if something is "unbound," it is not only freed, but unpacked and explained.