EurasiaNet has posted a thoughtful interview with former ODIHR staff person Vladimir Shkolnikov, and I wish we could hear more. Hopefully Shkolnikov will do some more writing and Youtubing about OSCE, which, as he justly notes, is a complex organization that takes a lot of effort to run every day, and should get more engagement from states -- and NGOs. Interestingly, he resounds the note of Sakharov's thesis and the Helsinki core principle of the intertwined relationship between security and human rights:
"Outside the OSCE, it's actually hard to find fora that talk about democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly in this particular framework as crucial for security. That these are not abstract good things. That without meeting the commitments of what in OSCE is called the human dimension, there is no security internally or in the region as such."
These are golden words, and now we have to think how to enact them in a climate of diminishing receptivity. There's a reason why NGOs became disengaged: a number of key international NGOs became utterly disenchanted with ODIHR under Gerard Stoudmann in the 1990s and early 2000s because of a pattern whereby ODIHR would send full-fledged observer missions to elections that didn't have even basic conditions for participation of beleaguered post-Soviet oppositions and civic groups. (Later, ODIHR developed more of a nuanced approach to send smaller teams that did not bless the poor pre-election settings but were merely monitors.) NGOs also became frustrated with the OSCE field missions which were often forced to make nice to the host governments in demeaning and debilitating ways just to keep their presence.
Some groups wrote off OSCE as a whole because of these frustrations, to my mind, too rashly, without giving enough persistence and time to the effort (many years went into the struggles against the old communist systems, but when they fell, there was a tendency to think they could change over night). Groups in those former Soviet countries were just as frustrated, if not more appalled at some of the missions, and then switched their attention to the Council of Europe, if their country was in it, or to the EU, if there was an accession process they could aspire to, because these organizations simply provided much more political traction and pressure for their causes -- the CoE has the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture; the EU had the carrot of membership.
None of that did any good for the countries not in the CoE or in the EU, and once countries were made members of the EU, the pressure was off -- and here we all are. That's why people are back looking at OSCE again.
Shkolnikov articulates an interesting thesis that ODIHR is now getting along better with Russia, although he says it has not changed anything in its behaviour and is still critical. He notes that the personal dynamics between Slovenian Janez Lenarcic and the Russians are working better than they did with Christian Strohal, the Austrian diplomat who is the former head of ODIHR.
I recall working with Strohal closely when he was the human rights secretary for his foreign ministry and he supervised the "Vienna Plus Five" fan-dance at the UN, in which the carefully-constructed "moratorium" established in Vienna in 1995 over fighting between economic/social rights (East) versus civil/political rights (West) was in danger of becoming unravelled. This took a lot of skillful negotiations and I think the consensus remained. Certainly the problem with Strohal wasn't some kind of abrasiveness, as he was charming. But I do think that he had to give a message to the Russians that was not palatable to them in 2007, and that Lenarcic -- and ODIHR as a whole -- simply hasn't been tested yet with having to monitor and call a Russian election. Back then, Strohal said, "“We made every effort in good faith to deploy our mission, even under the conditions imposed by the Russian authorities. The Russian Federation has created limitations that are not conducive to undertaking election observation.” OSCE then refused to monitor the presidential elections of 2008 that led to the coronation of Dmitry Medvedev and the reifying of Vladimir Putin as prime minister.
To be sure, Lenarcic has tried hard to do a "reset" on ODIHR-Russian relations at the start of his tenure just by urging an end to bickering and being willing to listen, and that's all to the good. I don't know if this was Slavic brotherhood working its magic, constrasted with Austro-Hungarian Empire empirics; the reality is, ODIHR was right on their call of the Russian parliamentary elections, and they'd be right again if they had to make a call today, as press freedom and freedom of independent parties has only lessoned. But would they? Countries have had to work to "shield ODIHR" as Shkolnikov says, and they'd be that much more under pressure today from a Russia backsliding that much more.
And you know, it wasn't just pesky ODIHR. As Wikipedia tells us, Goran Lennmarker, president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, a Swedish moderate politician, called the Russian parliamentary elections the same way. OSCE PA and ODIHR are not always on the same page when it comes to judging elections, and one of the problems as I've noted before is that the OSCE PA contains delegations from countries with flawed election processes (like Russia's) which can even field monitors to the CIS election team which never saw a post-Soviet election it didn't like.
And Luc Van den Brande, the Flemish Christian Democrat who headed a delegation from the Council of Europe, referred to the "overwhelming influence of the president's office and the president on the campaign," saying there was "abuse of administrative resources" designed to influence the outcome says Wikipedia, citing Fox News. Hate Fox News or not, the reality is that these Europeans, without some specifically "Cold War" agenda, called this election in a way that the U.S. supported. This was not an American problem. ODIHR cannot be characterized as a "tool of the Americans" as the Kremlin claimed.
(BTW, here's a good reason why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia: the article on the Russian elections claims the German government said "Russia was not a democracy. And Russia is not a democracy." But in fact, although the German government was critical, that quote should be attributed to the opposition politician Gary Kasparov.)
So far, ODIHR has called the Ukrainian elections as one that "meets most international commitments", and called the Tajik elections flawed, call that Russia is likely very comfortable with. So time will tell whether ODIHR and Russia will go on getting along.
Shkolnikov also makes some interesting comments on the sobering effects of the chairmanship for Kazakhstan, as it finds, as other chairs, that it has to find multilateral consensus, and doesn't have a conveyor-belt for its capital's decisions, tempered by what he calls the "boiling in that multilateral cauldron" (almost sounds like St. Augustine going to Carthage!) What matters is that the Kazakhs and Russians find some boiling, so that those unholy ideas of undermining the entire human dimension of OSCE do not succeed.
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