Sen. Ben Cardin has made a bold and interesting proposal today at the hearing on Kazakhstan's chair of the OSCE described as "conditional support" for the summit that basically goes like this, "I'll see your bid for an OSCE summit and raise you one human rights implementation component and a side of NGOs". Good! That is the way to deal with these sorts of aggressive proposals designed to throw the West off balance and roll over the wavering and the disengaged. Be positive, but be firm: you want this basket? You have to have the other basket, too. They go together.
I think it's important to meet these disingenuous proposals squarely face on, and keep insisting on the "indissoluble link" (per Sakharov) between security and human rights. There can't be meaningful trust and security when you jail or murder journalists, shut off the Internet, persecute religious groups.
Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayevsaid that his country had four "Ts" to bring to their chairmanship: "trust, tradition, transparency and tolerance". I'm not sure what he means by "tradition," but it really ought to include the OSCE's best traditions itself and not traditions of despotism. As for trust, you get that not only when you verify, but when you stop doing bad things to your own people and stop trying to silence their protests. This really is intimately connected with external trust. As for "transparency," I think this is definitely shaping up to be the total boondoggle topic of the year. "Transparency" seems always to happen far away in comfortable conference rooms with hefty per diems and not at home in the rural areas in the dirt. For me, transparency is really more about being able to write about corruption without getting a severed dog's head on your doorstep or "falling out of a window" with your hands tied.
"Tolerance" routinely produces snickers by the international jet set as they believe "the American Jewish lobby" has introduced this into the mix to get the issue of antisemitism covered -- itself a very good example of the intolerance that still needs to be fought in OSCE, BTW. "Tolerance" is fine as a topic, and need not be about non-existent situations in Kazakhstan, if they are indeed non-existence. The chair has to be chair for all of OSCE. What about a robust study of the harassment, discrimination, and even beatings and killings that Central Asian migrant workers experience in Russia and other countries? If Kazakhstan would pick up *that* issue, tolerance will have some teeth.
(BTW, I'm going to strike out boldly and start calling the Kazakhstanis "Kazakhs" the way I call all people in Russia "Russians" regardless of their ethnicity and all people in America "Americans" regardless of their ethnicity -- without this "stani" stuff that is supposed to be a nod to other ethnicities. I don't know how that PC ball got rollling with the "Kazakhstani" but have you ever noticed that people don't write "Turkmenistani" and "Kyrgyzstani" in the same way? So let's stop the fiction. We all realize that not all Kazakhs are ethnic Kazakhs. If you make me do this, I'm going to start calling myself an "Americani" because I'm Irish-American).
Sen. Cardin said that the summit should follow past OSCE practice and include an implementation meeting and provisions for NGO participation and should be in Kazakhstan.
There's always an advantage to having these meetings take place in the more repressive settings of the more violative OSCE states. For one, it gets rid of the diplomatic comfort level so that diplomats really get a dose of the reality that they should be trying to ameliorate. For two, it gives some partial cover to the NGOs, media, and opposition in that country to try to make their case vocal while the going is good and the regime is not as likely to jail them. For three, it enables usually some concessions to be made on something -- a case, a legal amendment -- before the opening. On the other hand, some of these countries have proven their capacity for using these "gifts" to enhance their propagandistic claims. My very small sample of the poll below so far (please add your vote!) seems to suggest this.
We should also definitely distinguish between "summit" and "security conference" -- they need to be kept very separate and very sequenced. First, Kazakhstan, if you do the summit adequately, with improvements in human rights and security of conditions equal to the other OSCE meetings for NGOs, with a solid connection to review of human rights implementation and not just security and other issues, *then* we can look at the security summit down the line. OSCE negotiators: Draw this one out.
Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) talked about the need to strengthen "the role of parliamentarians" in the OSCE. I wish every country had a commission as strong as his commission with his bredth of issues and knowledge. The problem with that concept is that the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly is stuffed with members who were not elected democratically -- some of them come from very flawed elections with highly rubber-stamped "legislatures". Some shouldn't be seated at all, really, if OSCE PA had the political strength to resist them (remember how the Belarusian seat was kept empty for a time).
So if the caveat, here, too is that it is meaningful participation of parliamentarians who in fact represent their countries, then, by all means. Russia and some of the other CIS countries exploit this desire for democratic participation, however, and use it to demand that their soi-disant parliamentarians with less credentials also be heeded -- when they do things like go and bless the "parliamentary elections" in Uzbekistan for example. This is a complicated path to maneuver. On the one hand, OSCE PA has a lot of promise for NGOs and politicians as being a body that really has legitimacy from the grass roots and a more direct pipeline to law-making in each country. It's especially important in states where the opposition representing the struggle for justice and democracy is in the parliament, and not the seat of government.
Yet when I have talked about ODIHR as being the "will of OSCE" better representing the states' best selves versus the parliament, which contains non-democrats, I think its will is frankly more legitimate *when it comes to the issue of election monitoring*. Even as a bureaucratic office, ODIHR represents the best intentions of human rights monitoring and implemenation of the OSCE itself -- the negotiate results of many, many years that put the best principles forward, and doesn't seal the worst practices. Yes, there is friction that occurs between ODIHR and OSCE PA and disputes where one side is wrong, but that is a longer discussion I will have at another time. The reality is the election-monitoring judgements calls of ODIHR are generally respectful of the values of human rights and democracy. When they say Russia's elections fall short of standards -- they're right.
Meanwhile, OSCE PA contains Russian members who say their own elections are fine (they benefited by them) and then parade around the CIS blessing other flawed elections. Those CIS monitoring teams that bless bad polls in the stans are the same people filling the OSCE PA. So that's why I think one has to take a weather eye to the "enhanced role of parliamentarians". If you look at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (by contrast) you can see some of the socialists and social democrats have been vital in raising the poor records of countries like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in trying to persuade their more conservative and Christian democratic colleagues not to give those countries a pass and drop sanctions in order to pursue "energy security". To what extent can delegations do this in the OSCE PA when the fake MPS pack the meetings?
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