Soviet tank in Prague on August 21, 1968. Photo by Dusan Neuman on america.gov
Kyrgyzstan is still in a crisis, with ethnic clashes occuring in which Russians and Meskhi Turks were reportedly attacked and five killed. Ex-president Bakiyev appears to have landed in Minsk, according to Belarusian dictator Lukashenka; while the Kazakh chair-in-office could engineer Bakiyev's departure, the prospect of hosting what might be an opposition-in-exile right next door was likely not one President Nazarbayev, who was trying to take credit for everything, wanted to live with for long. It *is* a problem where you put ex-dictators, so that they aren't lynch-mobbed but don't continue to harm others.
Human Rights Watch has admirably gotten a report out right away about what's happening, based on interviews with 30 people and review of videos and photos, which is a kind of first draft of human rights history with the basics of the events, the standards by which international inquiries should be held, and recommendations to the Kyrgyz government.
It's very important that Kyrgyz human rights groups, perhaps in a consortium with other regional groups like Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center, also document and publicize their findings, as it is their country and their future.
When you have a revolution with violence on both sides like this, as well as ongoing sporadic outbreaks of violence and vulnerability for worse to occur, investigations are important, and you shouldn't worry about redundancy. Other international impartial inquiries need to be made, and here we have to depart the world of abstract perfection contained in Human Rights Watch recommendations and footnotes, and ask what is politically possible, and what is doable.
The goal of human rights inquiries is not merely to produce reports that illustrate abstract international legal principles but to remedy a sense of impunity and injustice in a country, to validate what witnesses have seen, to tell right from wrong, and to create conditions for domestic institutions to be strengthened on that basis. The reports prepared by the U.S. attorney Sam Dash about the events of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland did not persuade judges at the time to carry out justice but they came in handy even 26 years later when the UK finally mounted a tribunal in 1998 to review the tragedy. The failure of British authorities to adequately deal with the shooting of 27 demonstrators in Derry back then, 14 of whom died, enabled the IRA to step up its recruitment and terrorist activity for years to come. Justice might seem optional for a government facing many other pressures, but the time and care spent on it generally pays off in the long term.
The UN has a certain amount of respect and credibility in this region, in part because the Soviet Union built up its credibility over the years (and for the wrong reasons -- it paralyzed the human rights agencies of this body for decades until the collapse of the USSR). The post-Soviet independent states have taken great care to sign all the relevant treaties and cooperate with the UN in a variety of ways and the treaty body review of the Central Asian countries have been an important adversarial process that they do not face in their own countries regarding their records. All to the good.
Even so, everyone who works in this region knows that the UN has not served this region when it comes to human rights. UNDP and UNICEF and other agencies actively cooperate with oppressive governments merely to keep access to perform basic programs; special rapporteur visits, while increasing over the years can be spotty, as those same rapporteurs visit the US 14 times or the UK or France numerous times. The old discredited UN Commission on Human Rights and the new Human Rights Council (HRC), barely distinguishable, are not venues where you will get countries in Russia's "sphere of influence" much scrutiny. Indeed, it is difficult these days to get *any* country except Israel reviewed by the HRC.
Ideally, if the world were a more perfect place, and the UN functioned as it was supposed to, some ambassadors at the HRC would call for a Commission of Inquiry to be launched to Kyrgyzstan. But even in an ideal world, which we don't have, this would be hard to justify, given that situations with many more killings and much more trouble, like Sri Lanka, did not reach the consensus to assure action. The High Commissioner could make a trip or send an envoy, which seems advisable; the various special rapporteurs could be issued invitations and travel, say the mandate on "summary executions".
The problem, again, even if some of the better rapporteurs deploy swiftly is that their reports, in the machinery of the UN, will take a fairly long time to surface, and may not have an immediate and effective outlet in the Human Rights Council. Much can depend on variables like staffing or language capacity or advocacy ability of various countries -- well, it's not going to happen. That is, by all means, the Kyrgyz government should show its good will and issue standing invitations to the special rapporteurs on relevant topics such as executions, torture, freedom of the media, violence against women, whatever fits. But that cannot be the only remedy.
There is no way that the Security Council will respond to this crisis, at least now at this stage, and if it were by some miracle, Russia's veto would knock out any actual response. Ditto the General Assembly or ECOSOC or the Third Committee (which meets only in October-November, so comes too late to this crisis).
Ban Ki-Moon's visit to the region was likely as good as it gets for this part of the world, and it cannot and will not be sustained. Ban Ki-Moon did a lot more than was expected by departing from the usual UN script on issues like water and sustainable energy, and confronting authoritarian President Karimov of Uzbekistan to start delivering on his promises, but he stopped short of demanding, for example, an independent investigation of the Andijan massacre of 2005, a staple of all Western dealings with Uzbekistan until the EU dropped it with the end of sanctions earlier this year and the U.S. dropped it with rapprochment of relations in the quest to build the Northern Distribution Network to ferry supplies to the war in Afghanistan. If Ban could not raise a massacre that happened 5 years ago when hundreds of demonstrators protesting corruption and injustice were shot by police, how will he get involved with past and ongoing violence in Kyrgyzstan, where are events on a smaller scale but with some of the same dynamics?
OSCE then becomes the "indispensable organization" as Madeleine Albright once called it (although she tended to call the UN more "indispensable" and also to speak of America's role as "indispensable").
Crunched between the U.S., which was rather preoccupied with its base and now belatedly coming to the human rights portfolio, and Russia, which sent 150 paratroopers to reinforce its base in Kyrgyzstan and is talking about sending more, Kyrgyzstan is under a lot of pressure (there's China too, which is worried about its economic projects).
OSCE monitors -- fair numbers of them -- could really play a crucial role now, as they did in Kosovo and other conflict areas in the past and even in Georgia as they attempted to function for a time. Bishkek could ask for them, and they would need "consensus minus one" to be deployed -- it would be interesting to see if the "minus one" for once wasn't the country where the monitors were to be deployed, but a regional hegemon.
Vladimir Putin does not like OSCE monitors. That was clear in his one book (which I translated) where he very clearly articulated that for him, OSCE monitors spell trouble. "First, OSCE monitors, then independence" he said about Kovoso -- and he wasn't wrong. He absolutely opposed them in Chechnya, and while the Austrian chair-in-office, for example, struggled to get them deployed, they could not be. I once asked a high-ranking Austrian official why it was so hard to stand up to Russia and get those monitors in there, given UN peacekeepers, for example, in far more massively violent spots. This official said very bleakly "The great powers do not wish it". That is, it's not just that Russia didn't want independence for Chechnya; other great powers, the U.S., the UK, France, and others, didn't want it either.
But...Kyrgyzstan already *is* independent -- and needs to stay so. the presence of OSCE monitors will not of itself threaten either U.S. or Russian bases. Even so, they can have an ameliorative effect -- in this kind of situation, citizens need a complaints office that isn't their own authorities whom they may not trust (there are many tweets grumbling about the interrim government not being up to the task and unable to keep control) and a validation of what they themselves see.
The OSCE has databases of experts to deploy in field condictions with conflict experience who speak Russian but aren't necessarily Russian, or Russians who are independent of the Kremlin. You don't always get that at the UN, quite frankly. Language ability *and* trustworthyness is important in crisis; finding someone who can speak a language you understand can make or break a situation.
I continue to maintain that the OSCE ODIHR would be the most credible office to mount an independent investigation. I suppose the chair-in-office could also appoint special envoys for this purpose, as he did for the initial assessment of the situation, but it's probably not advisable that a commission of inquiry be a creature of the C-i-O.
The Kyrgyz situation is not only one in which the violence of the first few days, when at least 85 were killed, needs assessment and validation to help bring about justice; it's one in which new violence will be ongoing if there is a persistent sense of unfairness and inability to bring grievances to some competent and effective authority quickly.
I'm not there, and I don't have a direct feel for the situation, but I see some worrisome signs that seem like the Warsaw Pact deja vu all over again -- Lukashenka, who has taken in the ex-president and will add him to his old boy's network of people with grievances against the U.S., like Chavez in Venezuela, with all the expected media circus that goes with that, has directly called for the Collective Security Treaty Orgnization to intervene. The CSTO is not supposed to mount aggression against any one member, but is supposed to respond to the threat to one as if it were a threat to all. It just might fly that Russia will make the case that it is needed to protect its own citizens -- and others -- through the CSTO. That was the Warsaw Pact argumentation.
The rules of engagement don't appear to be existent for intervening in domestic conflicts, and they might be just made up as they go along -- the Russian-dominated body has shown an increasing appetite for taking on security for others in the region, and met with some static from Uzbekistan, which has not joined in its exercises.
Others are also invoking the idea of the CSTO as some kind of "peace-keepers" for Kyrgyzstan. Russian peace-keepers do not keep the peace, as we saw in Georgia. The situation must not be allowed to reach such a state. The Kazakh chair-in-office, the U.S. and Russia need to work together to enable OSCE monitors to function.
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