Joshua Kucera called the CSCE hearing on Kazakhstan a "love fest". I was a bit surprised to see that as I thought the CSCE had made the right noises of criticism before the meeting and the right statement afterwards signifiying conditional support. But I wasn't in the room and haven't watched the video yet -- so I'll have to see. Hearings are, well, hearings, where everyone gets to air their opinions and the real question is how the rest of the OSCE members are going to grapple with these issues and whether other countries will keep asking the Human Rights Watch "ten questions" on realizing rights in Kazakhstan.
I don't think you can say that calling for a preparatory review conference is merely a "procedural detail," however. The prepcons are where the human rights implementation gets looked at, where concessions can be made, and if the situation is deteriorating *that* badly, I suppose that could scuttle the summit -- in theory. Usually, *something* will get conceded before such summits, in the fine Helsinki tradition of hostage politique. In 1999, first there was a review conference in Vienna in September-October, then the summit in November 1999. If the modalities for NGOs to meet and participate in both the review and the summit are poor, that could also possibly lead to suspension -- but it would have to be pretty bad.
See, OSCE itself and the CSCE before it have themselves always been a kind of love fest in a way because you had to agree to be nice even to have the organization in the first place. You have to meet, even when very awful things happen, like the invasion of Afghanistan, or Iraq for that matter, or the invasion of Baku or the bombing of Grozny. Jaw-jaw and not war-war and all that. Meetings are not postponed -- and it takes a lot to get diplomats to walk out of them. So the summit won't get postponed over a newspaper closing, but I have to say, in 1999 there was some brinkmanship on the case of Anatol Labedzka, leader of Belarusian United Civic Party, who was jailed for a demonstration. The OSCE PA chairman made sojourns to Minsk at the time raising issues not only of conditions for elections such as access to media but prisoners' cases. Reading OSCE Amb. Georg Wieck, you can see how the Istanbul summit because a leverage to try to get concessions that fall -- and it worked -- but of course Lukashenka reneged on the deal after the summit.
Even so, OSCE members should go "no lower than Labedzka", so to speak -- and insist on a favourable resolution to the case of Yevgeny Zhovtis before any preparatory review or summit is held in Astana (they could ask for a lot more, of course, like the same press access the Belarusian opposition sought and got before Istanbul for a time).
Of course, U.S. domestic politics were on parade at the CSCE, as Kucera explains about Californian Republican Congressman Darrell Issa's notion that like Kazakhstan, Washington is a "one-party town". The fields of OSCE are constantly fertile for moral equivalency, and one can only urge U.S. representatives to try to see these countries first-hand and sit with people who understand what it's really like living in a one-party town when their newspaper has been closed or their colleagues beaten -- and read the State Department's Country Reports more assiduously.
Then there was Eni Faleomavaega, a Democrat from American Samoa, who said:
Kazakhstan’s recent human rights record should be seen in the context of the country’s decision to give up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. "While human rights groups continue to point fingers at Kazakhstan, I submit that only Kazakhstan had the moral courage to renounce nuclear weapons altogether for the sake of all mankind," he said.
To be honest, "moral courage" and "for the sake of mankind" are not phrases I'd readily apply to a country where most of the independent media has been closed and opposition driven out. This sort of statement actually comes out of the culture of an earlier era, when a staple of Soviet propaganda everywhere and parts of the Western peace movements it manipulated was "no first use" of nuclear weapons and "nuclear-free zones". We used to cry "no first use of bad arguments!" from the back of the room, because the Soviets' love of "no first use" was utterly disingenuous -- they could easily afford to make this rhetorical claim because they had overwhelming conventional forces in Europe that would roll into and crush any country that stuck to its own "no first use" rhetoric.
Today, this old Soviet-era meme has made a comeback among some God-Boxers but it doesn't have much traction due to the same pointlessness of mismatches among types of arms. "Nuclear free zones" were declared all over the place in the 1980s -- and the Soviets were only to happy to bless them in Eugene, Oregon and fail to declare them in Tomsk and have various East European countries declare them because their nuclear umbrellas remained. Kazakhstan could be "selfless for mankind" after poisoning generations of people from Semipalatinsk because of a larger picture where it didn't really control the situation in the first place.
So I'm wondering if there is quite some revision of history here. I don't recall Kazakhstan selflessly renouncing Semipalatinsk testing and weapons "just like that" as part of any sort of grassroots authentic peace movement (there wasn't any). What happened in fact was the Belovezha Pushcha agreement that broke up the Soviet Union. And the deal was this: in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons to Russia, or destroying them, countries of the eventual Commonwealth of Independent States got their independence. The nukes were always under central Moscow control anyway; at first the stans were going to have joint control over the launch codes, but this broke down -- it's more complicated than merely a selfless renunciation.
In other words, it was a deal -- roll the nukes out to Russia, and Russia promises not to invade and to respect sovereignty. The Belarusian opposition has been trying to collect on that pledge for years. The Kazakh government knows that even without its own nukes, Russia's are not far away. I'd love to hear some independent expert pronounce on exactly what that deal was, and also, what the missile trajectory is today. You can look good without nuclear weapons if your neighbour in fact extends its nukes to protect you. And ultimately, nuclear disarmament occurs best, and most extensively, when internal change makes civilian oversight a reality, and not an add-on at a prepcon.
The hearing inevitably gave the Kazakh foreign minister a chance for a star turn with some dubious claims, reports Kucera:
"Just a few years ago we incorporated very significant amendments in our legislation on elections, on the freedom of mass media, we have adopted a national plan on human rights and their implementation," he said. "We are planning to advance those freedoms and principles in Kazakhstan.
Ah, the old "National Plan" gambit covering a multitude of sins. Drawing up "national plans" which of course you discuss in commissions -- hopefully abroad with nice restaurants! -- are a vast diversion from the real action of human rights, which should be in court systems and independent bars and independent media, not merely in national plans. If you see a national plan heading your way, it's often a sign that all the other institutions that are supposed to make human rights work aren't working.
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