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.
I happened to be browsing the bargain book bin at the UN book store in New York when I stumbled on a deeply discounted book called Meeting the Challenge: Memoirs by Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister, Kassymzhomart Tokaev. I've been reading it in bus and diner installments as it is deadly dull, but it's instructive. The Kazakhs are really well organized and have very deep intentions. Their diplomats speak lots of foreign languages and have lots of training. There is a kind of cult of respect for an elder, if not in fact a cult of personality around Nazerbayev, and he has handed out enough perks and little seeming concessions to this sort of New Class (if not Oprichina) to keep it all under control.
Here's the problem: Kazakhstan REALLY wants to improve its prestige and amplify its Eurasian-centric diplomacy with this OSCE chair. No Western power REALLY wants to improve its prestige and amplify its Western-centric diplomacy by countering the Kazakhs and appear to be uncooperative and Bush-like at a time of war, energy, recession and climate change. And that's why Astana will win.
The point is for at least some Western foreign ministries to come up with a menu of a few things it can do to a) use the process for those concessions we keep talking about -- such as on Evgeny Zhovtis' case and the Internet law and b) not go below any standards that have been painfully established already over these last years. "The rest is not our business," as the poem says.
There are many little lessons you can pick up from Meeting the Challenge -- but one useful anecdote was Tokayev's frank discussoin of the case of Annaniyzov, a Turkmen dissident arrested in Russia and then deported to Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs are sticklers for observance of the letter of the law with a rigidity that the magisterial and civil law systems of the East often give such regimes (and that's probably why they have to do things like beat up dissidents or cook up fake criminal charges against them to get rid of them). In this case, Kazakhstan was able to turn the Turkmen over to UNHCR, however, not due to U.S. pressure or reasons of humanity, but because legal beagle Tokaev figured out that the dissident's "crime" had not been committed in Kazakhstan, and therefore Kazakhstan had no jurisdiction over him and could give him to an international authority.
The game of "lawfare" is one that Kazakhstan has played many times with draft laws. With every single piece of legislation coming along -- on media, religion, the Internet, whatever -- officials first imply that some draconian version of the text is being floated by evil security forces bent on resisting reform; that "liberals" within the government establishment would like to 'work with" Western counterparts to "bring the law up to compliance with international law" but there is a fierce battle within the administration and "I alone have escaped to tell you," your interlocutor will whisper confidentially.
If the official can get the NGO or think-tank or PR firm to sign an NDA and agree not to disclose the draft text of said draconian law, they can play on their vanity even more and get them to imagine they are "having an influence" on this process. The cunning officials then at the 11th hour purport to "get concessions," tweak a few things, and come out with some law that has perhaps the most odious piece of it removed -- so that everyone breathes a sigh of relief and imagines that "interactive dialogue" has saved the day again.
Nobody ever publicly calls the Kazakhstani government on this ploy; in the period running up to the chair, this was pulled on the religion and Internet laws, and human rights were the loser.
So, taking a page from Tokayev's playbook, I would say that Western diplomats should become more insistent on letters of OSCE "human rights law" such as it is, and of course not be shy about referencing the treaties "by which they may be bound". Nobody should fall for the notion that outsiders can't ask a judicial system to change its practices; the wily Kazakhstani diplomats often say that the president can't interfere with the judicial system without violating the norms of democracy.
Oh, baloney. Of course he can -- and so can foreign diplomats. They can invoke the standards of due process validated under international law and incorporated in OSCE documents and manuals and concluding statements. It's okay to do so -- even if their own countries are not always shining examples of implementation -- that's why they are called universal norms.
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