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.
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