I asked a "new Europe" ambassador the other day what he thought of the Kazakh chair of the OSCE, and potential for concessions from Kazakhstan -- the Kazakh foreign minister was in New York reporting to the Security Council. The ambassador said that Kazakhstan would be under a spotlight, and this sunlight shining on its deeds would have an ameliorative effect. This is the belief of many diplomats -- and NGOs -- and there's something to it, as far as it goes -- as long as somebody can lay on the supply of sunlight regularly and often.
I'm not aware that Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev got any human rights questions in New York, but the meeting wasn't open; OSCE, as a "regional arrangement," reports regularly to the Security Council, and while Afghanistan and Georgia were likely topics of interest -- they likely didn't get any rigorous treatment, as the main objective of the Kazakh chair was to push the OSCE security summit.
I've always been a believer in the mantra, attributed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant," but I don't accept it with uncritical, magical thinking. "Transparency" alone isn't enough to effect change (one of the errors of the entire gov 2.0 movement now in the U.S. which substitutes openness of information -- coders' dumps of files -- for liberal democratic participation in decision making -- very different things, and the one cannot ensure the other).
The reason I don't buy it uncritically is that information is usually not the problem in any given human rights situation. The light has usually been shone on the abusive government's bad deeds by the time we hear about it and begin to warble about sunlight's detergent qualities. The point is that political will is needed to change, and political will is needed to pressure another government to change -- and we don't have sunlight or detergent on those processes usually.
Of course, there's going to be a tendency to take out our microscopes and see any good thing happening in Kazakhstan as either a result of a heightened motivation to "make good on commitments" or a heightened sensitivity to "pressure from outside" -- although if Kazakhstan *weren't* in the chair now, we might be more sanguine. We might say that it has always been the tendency of this manipulatve government to float terrible laws, make us all gasp with horror, tell a few experts that if they agree to a confidential relationship they can be in on the revision of said horrid law -- and then after the bad parliament or agency has passed this law or edict, the president or court can swoop in deus ex machina to right the wrong and show that reform has triumphed. It's a bit of a racket.
We can only hope that this recent piece of good news, with a reversal of a court injunction banning reporters from reporting on the president's son-in-law, is sincere and representative of actual progress.
Of course...it isn't actual progress in a country without precedent law especially when the law remains on the books in the civil-law system -- and the libel case is still being pursued against journalists. Much has been written about the problem of criminal libel, or "seditious libel" in all of these countries of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, and it has taken a long struggle to get the laws removed from the books, so that official cannot wield the law as a club against investigative reporters who out their corruption or authoritarianism -- the real sunlight disenfecters.
A Kazakh opposition party leader has said the decision of a judge to stand up to the attempt by President Nazarbayev's businessman son-in-law to sue newspapers criticizing him for alleged corrupt practices "deserves weak applause". Weak, I suppose, because the law is still on the books, and the capacity for a presidential relative for making havoc with the independent media still very present -- the libel case will grind to a closure that may not turn out well, if the parties don't agree to a settlement.
There were two key factors in this story besides the OSCE chairmanship - one was that OSCE representative Miklos Haraszti was willing to condemn the injunction against the reporters and the libel law; two, reporters were able to publish a dossier on Timur Kulibayev's alleged dealings with the China National Petroleum Company on the Internet. Take away either of those factors, and you wouldn't have a story.
And...in Kazakhstan, it's still a story that is far from over. Kulibayev's father has ranted that reporters who write negatively about his son should be "put up against the wall and shot," EurasiaNet reports. Sunlight can only keep disinfecting if it keeps shining, and the world grows weary -- it will take a lot of attention to keep focusing on the brave independent newspapers Respublika, Golos Respubliki and Vzglyad and others who try to take on this sort of controversial reporting in the public interest. There is always the danger that transparency without leverage for action will merely great habituation -- the goal of the "sunlight" on the Kazakhstan chairmanship should be for lasting change, not superficial optics.
And while we're on the subject of sunlight, I wish we could get some more light shed on why the State Department seems to allow the Kazakhs to win the spin on this story: the OSCE press release is cleverly written to show first support of the U.S. for a "renewed security dialogue" within OSCE; talks are welcome between Russia and the US on START (which is *not* within the OSCE context, but no matter, the Kazakhs blur that distinction); and "the Corfu Process" (I'm waiting for someone to give me a really good briefing on what this spongey concept really means to all parties).
"I was encouraged to hear Secretary Clinton's strong support for the OSCE, in particular for the Organization's work to renew European security dialogue and the importance of the forum provided by the OSCE within the framework of the Corfu process," Saudabayev said.
The next thing you know, the OSCE Chair will write that the U.S. supports a European security summit through OSCE; and the "conditionality" part that could/should go with this will be dropped. I don't see state.gov giving this story any coverage at all -- it only seems to appear on osce.org and regional news services, and only as a quote from the Kazakh minister -- which is how he puts facts on the ground.
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