OSCE Unbound

Last Word: How They Tried to Overthrow Big Daddy

This is my rough summary translation of a gripping live debate show in Russia on NTV called "Last Word" hosted by Pavel Selin. It's a popular show, and it shows that not everything about Russian TV is completely crushed by the Kremlin. (I realize it may all be contrived or allowed by the political leadership for the wrong motivations, but even so, some of the honesty comes through.)

Russian TV was very active in the campaign period showing the Belarusian opposition, and even running a multi-part series called "The Godfather" which was very critical of Lukashenka. ("Bat'ka" is the term people use to describe Lukashenka, it means literally "father" or "head" but since it's slang and often perjorative I will use the term "big daddy").

The show is one of those exhausting Russian crossfire debate shows unlike anything on European or even American television -- people not only drown each other out, they have knock-down shouting matches waving their hands and throwing fits. You might call this "Family Feud" and shut it off, as it at first seems very crazy, but in fact, it contains some very, very interesting stuff that helps you understand a lot not only about Belarus, but Russia, there are some very fine moments, it is a very emotionally gripping show, so watch it if you speak Russian. I don't think it would be easy to make a transcript, there is so much cross-talk and shouting and slang, but anyone who has the time might try.

Some highlights:

o The audience clapping for some people and not others is one of the oddities of the show (for the foreigner). Why do some pro-Belarusian government statements get applause? Why do some anti-government statements get wild clapping? Is it because these are different people in the audience? Or do they clap because they merely feel a good argument is made? or are they that easily swayed? They clap for Prokhanov, an odious right-wing figure known for his xenophobic and nationalist outbursts; but they clap for Khalezin, a Belarusian theater director who tells Russians they support this dictator only because it's economically profitable for them (so perhaps the audience claps because it feels no shame?)

o Lukashenka's representative seems right out of central casting. Aptly named Zimovsky (from "zima," or "winter") he has the white hair and ominscient smirk of Julian Assange. He is beamed in with perfect state-of-the-art fidelity to the audience in Moscow as if he is there -- Lukashenka declined to show, and as somebody in the group quipped, he won't appear on NTV until he is forced into exile in Moscow.  He turns in a completely chilling performance, smiling like a villain when asked what he thought of Irina Khalip, a journalist, being dragged from a car and beaten, screaming on the phone and trying to report the scene until police seize the phone, and saying it was "good" because "at last a journalist was speaking about what she actually sees". He uses the term "journalism's cannon fodder" to describe the reporters who came to the square during the demonstration and got beaten.

o the video clips of the demonstrations are moving; there is Rymashevski, a candidate with his head bound from having been beaten by riot police, calling on the demonstrators not to give into a provocation, to behave peacefully; there is an old man crying to the riot police, "Don't beat your sons and grandsons!" (or "Don't fear your sons and grandsons! -- I can't quite hear). There is the scenes of the vandals breaking the windows -- and statements that they are provocateurs.

o Matvei Ganapolsky, a Russian journalist, asks the question that really any liberal should be asking, regardless of whether they are a RealPolit sort of politician, or a cynical journalist who believes the Belarusian opposition is "paid for" and "disunited". He says that in fact, Lukashenka likely actually won. That even with fraud, the gap in numbers is too big. That he probably really does have that support. So given that he really had this victory, why the beatings? Why have riot police doing things like pulling the journalist Khalip out of the car? Why pushing Russian journalists face down in the snow? If it's such a victory, why do this?

o Leonid Margolin follows suit:  Real victors don't need to take hostages, that's a sign of weakness.

o Natalya Kolyada is really the star of the show. While the Russian male liberals, as well as they speak, aren't very strong in standing up to their own rightwing blowhards like Prokhanov and Mitrofonov (whose dyed black artifical pompadour is one of the fascinations of the show, a kind of counterpoint to Zimovsky's dreadful shock of white), and while some of the Belarusians seem to be somewhat intimidated on this show by all the shouting, Kolyada stands right up, interrupting when there is such bad faith in the speaker that it must be interrupted, and making very strong statements. The representative of the Union state (apparently the infamous Pal Palych Borodin is still heading it) is disgraceful -- he implies that there's something cowardly about Khalezin remaining on the square when his wife was carted off to jail -- Khalezin also makes some of the most dramatic lines in the show -- when Zimovsky starts describing Lukashevsky as a "bogatyr" (a legendary hero of the Russian folk tales), Khalezin says, "Hey, give me 10,000 riot police and I'll show you what a hero is, and you'll be left spinning". Prokhanov retorts something that sounds like "Hey, I'll give you $10,000, which is what you people take," -- somebody might help decipher that part but that's the gist.

Here's my summary, put any corrections in the comments.

Bel 'R Us: What to REALLY Do About the Last Dictatorship in Europe

   Presidential candidate  Andrei Sannikov, his wife, journalist Irina Khalip and their son going to vote on election day.

Bel 'R Us. All of us should feel ownership for the situation now in Belarus -- it is our own situation in the world -- divided, weak, cowardly, pragmatic -- beaten.

There is a simple thing Europe can do -- take the 3.9 billion euro promised by Poland and Germany to Lukashenka if he held free and fair elections, and demonstratively give it to the opposition and civil society groups in Belarus -- and get other countries and multi-lateral institutions to join the effort to end tyranny.

While interestingly, 3.9 billion euro were available for Lukashenka to "reform" after a few gestures, getting that coffer turned around to really defeat him and restore parliamentary democracy will be far more politically difficult. This opinion piece signed by the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany, Czech Republic and Sweden says there won't be "business as usual" with Lukashenka -- but talks vaguely of "deepening our engagement" with democrats without specifying they will directly aid them.

Democracy in Belarus keeps failing not because of Belarusian democrats, who are more clever and more braver than any of us in resisting the tyrannical Lukashenka regime -- and more remote but still deadly -- Kremlin oppression.

Democracy fails not because the Belarusian opposition isn't united -- Europe isn't united, either, about what to do about Russia and its client regimes, and shouldn't hold people who face jail for their views to a higher standard.                                                Sannikov, beaten by police and injured.

Democracy fails because human rights standards, promoters, and protective institutions are helpful, but not sufficient to fight dictatorships peacefully -- political strategies and political programs of aid and trade and sanctions and removal of legitimacy are needed.

Democracy fails because of a lack of attention and will, but also even a willingness to openly debate the received wisdom of scholarship and think-tanks and NGO white papers and media outlets on what works for Belarus.

Democracy fails because good states of the West are weak and terribly undermined by non-state actors, as the WikiLeaks saga as well as many acts of terrorism illustrate, and also by a growing determination of a nihilistic and self-preoccupied global movement of wired elites and hackers who want rule by coder-controlled wiki rather than governments elected by representative democracy.

Democracy fails because the story, while amply told in all the glories of both old and new media, can't get a hearing and an appropriate response -- the New York Times' first article on the events made an all-too-telling mistake of writing "Minsk, Russia" for the dateline and a  Huffington Post contributor was tweeting that the Belarusian opposition should get Tor circumvention software translated into Russian until it was gently explained to him that the people who already had it were arrested and their replacements unable to work in offices with the electricity turned off or the computers seized.

Democracy fails for all these reasons and many more, but it's worth getting the analysis right and challenging the recipes used to address Belarus one more time.

By now everyone should have the story of the grim events in Belarus -- after severely flawed elections, 30,000-40,000 demonstrators converged on a main square in Minsk to protest; their gathering, while attracting many thousands more supporters than even the opposition had anticipated, was peaceful, and yet the Belarusian government unleashed the OMON (riot troops) and KGB (as the secret police is still named), creating a deliberate provocation of a "storming" of the Government Building; beating and injuring hundreds, and detaining 7 out of the 9 independent presidential candidates; many of their campaign managers; the entire staff and volunteers of Charter97.org, the most widely-known independent news site; even the acting troupe of the Belarus Free Theater who weren't on the square were rounded up.

The spectacle was decidedly Soviet in style: soon two of the presidential candidates were demonstratively meeting with the dictator Lukashenka on state television and recanting their views; among the most inspiring -- then demoralizing -- scenes of the day was the video of the policeman who called on his fellow men in uniform not to beat demonstrators (Khloptsy! Ne bey!) was himself arrested, and then, too, forced to recant on videotape.

For me, it was first thrilling to see my long-time colleague Andrei Sannikov, former deputy foreign minister and coordinator of Charter97.org, a leading presidential candidate, go hand-in-hand with his wife and young son to cast his ballot "against the dictator and for a free Belarus".  Like others long accustomed to watching the sacrifices of the Belarusian democratic opposition, I expected he and the others would lose in the first round of the rigged elections but force a second round; what I didn't expect, even from this known brutal regime, that Sannikov would be lying in the snow at the night's end, wincing in pain, and being carted off to KGB prison to face very serious charges and 5-15 years in jail for of supposedly inciting public disorder -- it sickens me beyond words.

I might have imagined any of the opposition leaders might win in a second round, where there might be less of them, and where the 3.9 billion euro may have induced Lukashenka to share power. But as one candidate, Nikolai Statkievich of the social democrats aptly quipped, "Dictators don't do second rounds."

Charter97.org now has an English translation of the excellent narrative of events and numerous independently-made videos and photographs that explain the story of how people peacefully protested, and provocateurs staged a "storming" to be able to set up the opposition candidates and their supporters on charges of violence. From these and many other videos on Youtube and LiveJournal, you can see how a relatively docile and passive crowd (it is, after all, long-suffering Belarus) is standing outside the Government House with signs, flags, and flowers. Several beefy men come up then in the space between where the crowd has stopped and the doorway, and begin methodically breaking the windows and doors, their hands wrapped in preparation and their implements ready.

Then one is showing talking into his sleeve, and eyewitnesses report that he was talking into a hidden microphone. Independent observers agree that these vandals were not part of the opposition groups, but provocateurs, who then summoned the riot police who came with their shields and their truncheons.

This narrative, given all this huge amount of documentation, shouldn't have to be disputed. But it is, and not only by Lukashenka and his odious Interior Minister Kuleshov, who spins a propagandistic tale for the masses of an enraged crowd going on a rampage. While his claims of 30 injured police certainly merit investigation (there might be some, but we haven't independently confirmed the story), his comparison of these events -- get this! -- to the Battle of Kulikovo between Muscovy and Tatars (!) lets us know we are dealing with entrenched, fanatical dictatorship. The notion of the "opposition storming" became part of the BBC narrative immediately -- it will be hard to undo -- even with the footage of the injured opposition candidates and supporters, who appeared to have been the ones in fact stormed -- by police.

While our immediate problem is the brutality of the Lukashenka regime, there are at least eight deeper reasons why we have this "Nightmare Before Christmas," as the Committee to Protect Journalists has dubbed it; these reasons have been a long time in making and are fiercely disputed:

Zhovtis "Worth Less to the Opposition Out of Jail Than in Jail" -- Holbrooke

Obama congratulates Holbrooke Jan 22, 2009, State.gov

More WikiLeaking, revealing the sausage-making of diplomacy -- which isn't always pretty.

Here's a cable showing the late Amb. Richard Holbrooke -- published on the day of his death after the news had broken (Tuesday 14 December 2010 18.24 GMT). That's yet another strange coincidence that has prompted me to ask whether WikiLeaks and Guardian aren't being terribly strategic (and agitproppish) at times to dole out and sync the leaks to various high-profile world events -- or not. (I asked why nothing negative about Tashkent came out at all until *after* Clinton's trip to Uzbekistan.)

We're told, however, that this cable on Holbrooke only surfaced because of a "crowdsourced" request to get something on Roman Polanski -- who is mentioned in this cable by the Kazakh foreign minister in a gaspingly awful act of moral equivalence, comparing him to jailed human rights leader Evgeny Zhovtis. Thus it appears a coincidence.

Cynical OSCE-watchers long ago concluded that first the U.S. gained their agreements from Astana for the Northern Distribution Network's right-of-way through Kazakhstan and the flights over the north pole, then agreed to Kazakhstan's bid to hold the OSCE summit (military vehicles but not weaponized is how they are described in this cable -- already ratcheted up from the "non-lethal materials" we hear about often). The West was loathe to give Kazakhstan the prize of the summit (see my poll below) -- their human rights record was too poor with suppression of civil society and there were too many other headaches with the Russian drive to re-make security architecture.

What I didn't realize -- and I didn't know Holbrooke had even gone there and I'm not sure the trip was publicized -- was that our special envoy on "AfPak" was charged with negotiating OSCE-related matters and that it was so directly tied to Afghanistan and the NDN.

Now comes the sausage part. Holbrooke used a kind of insider's "we're all in this together, we're the smart ones surrounded by idiots" bonding gimmick with the odious Kazakh foreign minister,  as one worldly global leader to another, condescendingly explaining that making a martyr out of Zhovtis wasn't good for Astana's cause:

Holbrooke told Saudabayev that the imprisonment of human rights activist Yevgeniy Zhovtis is one of the pressing issues affecting Kazakhstan's bilateral relationship with the United States. He told Saudabayev that Zhovtis has become a symbol for the opposition in Kazakhstan, "a fact that he certainly understands and exploits." Holbrooke said that if Zhovtis could be released by presidential pardon, that would reduce his symbolic value, since "he is worth less to the opposition out of jail than in jail."

Actually, I think the opposition isn't as cynical as Holbrooke appeared to be here, and appreciates Zhenya's worth out of jail, but I get his point.

Saudabayev responded:

On Zhovtis, Saudabayev agreed that "neither you nor we need this problem." But he said that this is an issue of principle. "We must respect the independence of our judicial system," he said. "If we make an exception to the law for Zhovtis," he claimed, "then 200 others with similar sentences will demand to be released from prison as well. They are watching to see if the government of Kazakhstan will be pressured into releasing Zhovtis." He also said that as a human rights activist, "Zhovtis never came under any political pressure" to cease his activities. Saudabayev said that Zhovtis unfortunately killed a man, was tried and sentenced by a court of law, and now must serve his four-year sentence. According to Saudabayev, "the law worked exactly the way it was designed."

Here's an even more cunning cynic, expertly playing American liberal human rights sentiments and values like a violin.

The reality is that vehicular manslaughter in Kazakhstan, when the driver is not shown to have been driving under the influence of alcohol or having any other type of negligence, don't necessarily get four years imprisonment. They only seem to when they are the leading human rights activist of the country on the eve of that country's chairmanship of the OSCE. Regretably, U.S. officials seemed to prefer insider's tactics like this one that were ostensibly playing on Kazakh psychology, but they only get outplayed in a scene like this.

While Holbrooke might not have been expected to get down in the weeds of the case, others could have made the point that it's not "pressuring the judiciary" to call for universal standards of due process to be applied. They weren't in this case. The defendant didn't get to mount various defenses. We don't have an accurate report on how these "200 other cases" were handled -- I've been told of at least one such case where the driver didn't go to jail at all. Let's see them. And let's have a discussion about world practices; involuntary manslaughter is not going to lead to a sentence like that in a democratic country under the rule of law.

Then -- more sausage:

Saudabayev observed that the "unprecedented pressure" being placed on Kazakhstan as a result of the Zhovtis conviction is "not viewed positively in our society." He acknowledged that the "only legitimate way out" for Zhovtis would be via presidential pardon, but said, "that is the prerogative of our president." Attempting to draw a parallel, Saudabayev added that he admired the "persistence" of the U.S. judicial system in its persistent attempts to get film director Roman Polanski, "even though he was forgiven by the victim." Holbrooke took strong exception, noting that Polanski fled justice, escaped the law, and has been living free despite his conviction by a U.S. court.

Saudabayev of course misrepresents "our society" imagining he speaks for it -- when he does not. He then goes on to disgustingly compare Zhovtis, a man of honour and conviction who did not deliberately commit any crime but had the misfortune to strike a drunken pedestrian by accident while driving at night, to Polanski, who was charged with raping an underage girl and fleeing justice.

The meeting appeared to conclude happily -- and as we know Astana got their summit. As this cable shows, the U.S. is better than we know -- Holbrooke was tough in raising a controversial human rights case and not shirking from the task even though he had the more urgent issues of his AfPak mandate to secure, he persisted in making the arguments and tried to make them compelling, he did what he could.  No one can expect the U.S. to set aside the supplying of troops in Afghanistan via Central Asia, and cease cooperating in OSCE after their renewed engagement in it, for the sake of one dissident; we should be glad they kept raising the case (and have to keep raising it now that the spotlight is off Astana and the chair is passed on to Lithuania).

I mourn the passing of Ambassador Holbrooke and my thoughts and prayers go out to his wife and family. I met with him a number of times when he was ambassador to the UN in New York in 1999-2000, post-Dayton, when a coalition of human rights continued to press him specifically on all the human rights issues that were not yet implemented. We had several really stormy meetings.

I recall one time when a group of us were discussing conditions for NGOs and journalists and various issues like implementing women's rights in aid work. Holbrooke, as usual, was brilliant but gruff, and I remember him snapping at a colleague who happened to be pregnant raising the issue of women's care on behalf of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. That for many people was the Holbrooke they didn't like, and remembered in all kinds of awful settings - Korea, East Timor, for example, where human rights activists believed he had compromised (and I know one prominent human rights official who refused to sit on a platform with him at a dinner to honour Kim Dae Jung years ago.)

But in the next minute, Holbrooke was, as George Packer warmly recalls, "always reaching out". When I started in with litanies of protests about journalists' mistreatment and lack of access for human rights monitors, he suddenly asked me to pick up my cell phone. "Call the ops center!" he barked, rattling off a number. Startled, I pressed the numbers and handed the phone to him. He got on the line and asked the staff in Washington to patch them through to a guy -- I'm not sure of the name now. He told us dramatically that this man was in the field in Kosovo literally sleeping in a tent, and he was going to wake him up and get a report from him and raise these concerns. We all goggled at him. This was vintage Holbrooke. The man wasn't reached as it happened, but Holbrooke promised to follow up -- he was all action and all connection.

Three weeks ago at the dinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists, I happened to be chatting with Amb. Holbrooke's now widow, Kati Marton, active in CPJ affairs (where I used to work) about the OSCE summits and media freedom issues. Suddenly, there was Ambassador Holbrooke, bear-like and intense with his piercing eyes, smiling broadly and pumping my hand as I said he may remember me when we used to work on Kosovo.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I suddenly switched to Afghanistan. "A family friend has been killed in Afghanistan," I began. In our little circle, the husband of a friend of my old school mate stepped on an IED. Three boys out of five who had all trained together and went off to the war in fact had all been killed in recent weeks and Thanksgiving was a sad affair with three fresh war widows in that neighbourhood.

Holbrooke suddenly switched gears and glared at me at me as if to say, "Don't lobby me here now," curtly nodded and brusquely brushed past me. I was left standing, chagrined, my plea unfinished. But this was our Holbrooke -- very warm and effusive when you were on topic and needed -- very brusque when you were off topic and not. And I respect that even as I find it profoundly disturbing.

He was a great man serving a great country in an era pre WikiLeaks that both of us stood at the end of at that CPJ affair, honouring brave journalists who had faced jail and persecution to bring out their publications and classic human rights activists like Aryeh Neier -- not honouring anarchists and thugs like Assange and the 4chan.

I recognize that Holbrooke was also a complex figure serving a country that was entirely mixed in its moral reputation in wars. People used to joke that it was Holbrooke himself calling the wire services to spread the rumour that he was going to get the Nobel Peace Prize for Dayton. But he surely deserved it for Dayton more than Obama does for Afghanistan.

Staring at Holbrooke's receding back in the crowd after he ditched me, I didn't consider chasing him because I realized that he knew better than I did just how many American lives were being sacrificed and did what he could.  He had seemed so hale and hearty that night I would never have imagined he would be dead shortly thereafter, as dead as the boys from the neighbourhood, as dead as the many, many more civilians of Afghanistan.

 

 

Is the Summit Less Than the Whole of Its Parts? Part II

I have an article posted at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty today, OSCE Summit Less Than the Sum of Its Parts in which I single out two points which I think often get lost by the "seminarians" and the "resolutionaries":

All states commit human rights violations, and the U.S. reputation has been considerably tarnished in recent years by its condoning of torture in the "war on terror" and its inevitable killing of civilians in protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet in analyzing the failures of OSCE, there is an elephant in the room that few want to confront head on without debilitating moral equivalence: the Kremlin's imperial overreach and meddling, and the Central Asian dictatorships' cruelty.

More proposals for various new OSCE bodies cannot paper over the essential truth about security: Western governments mistrust leaders in the East and doubt the sincerity of their intentions when they jail dissidents or stand by while journalists have their arms broken or human rights monitors are assassinated. In the Soviet era, it took the appearance of Poland’s Solidarity, as much as the West European peace movements, to put an end to the opposing military blocs and their missiles

It's become terribly politically-incorrect to point out the root of the problem in the OSCE region -- the Kremlin (and the Central Asian tyrannies that are propped up by it or a backlash to it). So never fearing politinkorrektnost', I get to the heart of the matter because I don't think the major challenges for OSCE and human rights are headscarves in France or minarest in Switzerland or GLBT or Roma rights -- although these are all valid issues that need to be addressed fairly and squarely by the Western European powers with OSCE values applied. The threat to *security* -- i.e. violence that leads to the sort of pogroms we saw in southern Kyrgyzstan this summer where more than 400 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, and the war between Georgia and Russia, not to mention the lingering "frozen conflicts -- these are all a function of Kremlin meddling and Central Asian dictatorships as I said.

I was underwhelmed by the bloated and distended final document produced by the parallel conference which would have been the envy of an ODIHR wordsmith for its vagueries and conference-speak. For some reason, the coalition opted to put out a more punchy statement well after the summit, perhaps away from the media glare of Astana, in which they called the summit a "wasted effort" which surely would be seen as a slight by their Kazkah hosts. But unlike another document (which does not seem to be online anywhere, so I'll put it here, from a different coalition of Central Asian groups which forthrightly and simply called for the release of political prisoners, the #parOSCE organizers said the summit was a failure because...the parties failed to adopt an "Action Plan". 

The broad language in the Astana Commemorative Declaration is no substitute for a targeted, meaningful action plan committing participating States to concrete steps to strengthen implementation mechanisms in all three dimensions.

Of course, it's not for a lack of a "framework" or "an action plan" that states don't take action; they don't take action due to a lack of a political will and a profound clash of civilizations, if you will. Putting observers in Georgia doesn't need to be a carefully-worded box to tick on a draft document that gets negotiated; it needs to have Russia stop blocking it.

I was glad that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was able to appear at a town hall meeting of 600 people where many more representatives of civil society than could fit at the parallel conference were able to come, as well as states, and her message, calling for greater media freedom and government openness was not hindered by the forcible exposure of the Department's overseas cables in Wikileaks. If anything, the cables validated what the people of the OSCE countries already know all too well -- that their leaders are vain, corrupt micromanagers with a pension for drinking, dancing, villas, and yachts gifted by oil companies.

At the core of the Helsinki understanding was that peace, progress and intellectual freedom --security and human rights -- were indissolubly linked, as Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace prize winner and rights campaigner famously began explaining in 1968. To be sure, the echoes of the Helsinki principle are still in the outcome document today:

The OSCE’s comprehensive and co-operative approach to security, which addressesthe human, economic and environmental, political and military dimensions of security as an integral whole, remains indispensable.

If this approach truly remains "indispensable," than the organization itself can remain so. Yet many feel it has been overtaken by other competing acronyms from the European Union to the Collective Security Treaty Organization and even the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Kazakhstan has put up all these initiatives for ever new bodies such as on economic and environmental affairs, all seemingly benign and yet all departing from the fundamental absence of civil rights in that country and others that, when present, begin to better grapple with the economic and social rights issues.

As I noted, De Brichambaut made a troubling statement himself in putting human rights after sustainable development in his interview for the OSCE website:

Security begins with the sustainability of resources and the availability of opportunities – for education or for work, regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity. It is rooted in the inviolability of rights and in the belief that there is adequate recourse if those rights are violated.

So sure, security is "rooted in" inviolability of rights but FIRST comes "sustainability of resources and availability of opportunities for education or for work, regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity" -- as if discrimination (as in what preoccupies Western Europe, although of course it exists in Eastern Europe) were at the root of inequalities, or the failure of "some power" to lay on "sustainable resources" -- however they are defined (gas in Turkmenistan?)

I'm sorry, but I think security begins with the right not to have your government kill you, or stand by while you are killed by violent forces which they either condone or fail to prosecute. Oleg Kashin's journalism about a forest being chopped down over local commercial and political interests despite intense civil society protest is an example of why freedom of speech needs to precede "sustainability of resources". Oleg's arms and legs were broken and he is still in a hospital -- not because resources were unsustainable, but because of impunity in Russia over which the Kremlin presides.

I'm afraid I see the secretary general's comments as indicative of that modern tendency to privilege economic and social rights as somehow requiring pride of place before other rights can function or even be recognized. Certainly Kazakhstan has always used that old Soviet argument to justify its failures of democracy and free media. In fact, however, without democracy and good governance, development -- sustainable or otherwise -- does not proceed. The 1995 UN conference in Vienna on human rights was supposed to declare a post-Soviet truce on arguing over which was more important, economic or civil rights, and pronounce them both equally necessary; it's as if that consensus has been lost in OSCE.

In the thicket of so many other problems, the eternal tragedy of Belarus is forgotten. In 1999, the problems of the Belarusian opposition captivated the OSCE ministers more -- thanks to the OSCE mission head Amb. Hans-George Wieck, God bless him, Belarusian opposition leaders were freed from jail and able to travel to Istanbul to take part in the parallel meetings of the summit there and OSCE, led by the U.S. and Europe despite Russia's objections, put a good deal of effort into trying to make elections there more free.

Today, Kazakhstan -- and for that matter anyone else -- has done little to ensure that Belarus has a free and fair election. Of course, there was that offer from Poland and Germany of $3.9 billion if dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka holds decent elections -- which is preposterous given the mere few months for the presidential campaign and the general lack of media and resource access for the opposition.  Sikorski should have given some of the billions to the opposition to run a satellite TV station out of his country instead. The cynicism (and utopianism) with which the RFE/RL Belarus Service continues to cover this issue is part of the problem -- and since my comment is still stuck in moderation, here it is: Download Belarus comment

Turkmen Coup Cat

OK, I couldn't resist when I read this cable on Wikileaks...

Butters.photo

 

Tweeting #OSCE2010 and Livstreaming the OSCE Summit -- and a Soviet-style Newspaper

People often look for "Twitter revolutions" -- or debunk them -- in major events like a demonstration of 100,000 people on the main public square when elections are contested.

But the actual Twitter revolutions often shows up in small places or in the interstices of large events that don't even seem to be about revolutions per se, or even self-consciously, social media itself. And I suppose that's when you know social media is really "changing the world". But...is it?

Eleven years ago, during the OSCE summit in Ankara, of course, we didn't have Twitter. We had email and faxes, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous. I recall getting only a few emails or faxes back then from Ankara (I didn't go, although I worked on various issues leading up to the summit, I had colleagues who attended). People didn't have email back on their cell phones then even if they had a cell phone (and they were far less prevelant), and it would have been difficult to find an Internet cafe to send email -- it wasn't necessarily standard in 1999. I don't recall having Internet so readily available even at home in the 1990s -- it was in the 2000s, although of course we had it at work.

Now, the OSCE summit in Astana is casually being tweeted by various people, young people who are either low-level staff or reporters or NGOs, tweeting largely funny, social, superficial things. President Medvedev had only one tweet to say he arrived in Astana -- the Twitter feed doesn't seem to have any heads of state commenting.

A Kazakh woman who describes herself as "giggly" and is quite astute at times describes the different colour ties of the various heads of state -- but also works in comments about how the parallel conference seemed to be very selective as to its invited participants and seemed to be "a bunch of people from mail.ru who make bucks from grants on hot topics and are active on social media".

I found myself having to tweet to one of those earnest @parOSCE boosters that you know? Civil society is *not* just NGOs, and not just NGOs who go to international conferences. You almost think it would be startling not only for the heads of state, but for these professional civil-society-c'est-mois sorts to see actual civil society in its more pluralistic manifestations -- local grassroots environmentalists not organized into grant-taking entities, priests and imams, parent and teacher groups, labour unions (one never hears of them at OSCE, ever!), even businesses.

Hillary's speech at a town hall (fortunately not related to the parallell summit but separate) seemed to impress -- her call for media freedom and mentioning of jailed journalists.

A man expresses surprise that Lavrov and Otunbayeva both have their head phones off to listen to Ban Ki Moon because they both know English -- "Respekt" he tweets.

Another young Kazakh fellow tweets that some of the delegates are *sleeping* during his president's speech! Imagine that! And he isn't jailed for reporting this, of course.

The same guy tweets that judging from the faces of some of the delegates sitting in the meeting, "they could give a fuck," he writes (in Russian).

It's always interesting to me to see how Russian is tweeted -- for example, instead of writing out "kakoi-nibud'" they write "k-nit'" or even "kin'". If typing with Latin letters (the type of phone they have?) they use a "4" for the "ch" sound.

Several expressed unhappiness that Central Asian leaders were speaking in Russian, and of course, President Nazarbayev is chairing the meeting in Russian. One twitterer applauded the OSCE General Secretary Marc Perrin de Brichambaut for at least adding some Kazakh words at the end of his speech.

Native language concerns, the colour of ties, the expressions on faces -- and the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel were "looking good" -- these are the concerns that these young people on cell phones or i-pads with access to Twitter are tweeting from this world summit about august matters of state and somber topics like the war in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it's an accomplishment of Helsinki itself that they are embodying its principles of free speech and "knowing and acting on one's rights" almost unconsciously, rather than reporting the sort of thing that people used to try to smuggle out of labour camps to get into the OSCE meetings.

One woman noted that her efforts to tweet from a Kazakh ISP seemed to be blocked and she wondered if it was deliberate and wrote, essentially, "I won't be tweeting anything bad." [She tells me that she meant something different -- although it wasn't clear -- that "tweeting isn't so bad," i.e. let me tweet, it wasn't about the content but the form apparently.]

It's hard to reproduce twitter snippets, streams, convos -- follow me at @catfitz or use the hash tags #OSCE2010 or just #OSCE to see the stream of tweets I'm referencing here, or check out #parOSCE for the (already past) discussion of the parallel conference.

"A good thing about the OSCE2010 is that noow the world will know that we don't live in yurts and ride on camels," one young man wrote.

You can see the Russian-language livestream here on kiwi, a Kazakh TV station [um, yeah, just because something has TV cameras and broadcasts a summit live to the Internet doesn't mean it is an actual TV station, it's a...an....Internet broadcast thingy. This shorthand caused several regional hands like @musya to become indignant at my "many incorrectnesses".]

Moving on the fast lane with the Twitters, where people basically write what they want (it's not even so much self-censorship that they don't try to write more about human rights and democracy problems, but simply a different modern culture and outlook), it comes almost as a shock to go look at the Soviet-style newspaper put out for the conference that reminds me of the sort of Soviet tabloid that used to be put around foreign hotels or available on your flight to Moscow.

The Astana Times has anodyne pieces about the conference itself, and for 10 days now, has hugged the picture of Nazarbayev meeting Obama (but not at the OSCE in Astana, at the Lisbon summit) lol. Although Astana Times should be putting up fresh photos of their beloved leader, the temptation is just too great to keep showing Obama with the radiant Kazakh prez.

Other articles let us know that a labour problem is -- of course -- being solved. And...this just in. Seems it may not be a bad idea to raise camels in Siberia, after all.

 UPDATE:  Meh, everybody's a critic, especially if they are a barcamper (oh, that reminds me, I have to find my notes about all the barcamp ideologies and how rigid they are and write that up, it's a cult, like TED).

But hey, this was just a light blog trying to give a little flavour in English of what the Russian Twitter stream was like out of Astana. So I was corrected that kiwi "is  not a TV station" (it's an Internet broadcast thing, and of course, it's not easy to make a TV station in Kazakhstan, as I should know, having worked on these very issues probably when some of these people were still sitting with their crayon boxes).

I was also told that in fact there wasn't concern about the tweets being blocked by the Kazakh ISP provider (although it's been confirmed that a number of web sites ARE blocked in Kazakhstan so it's definitely a valid concern) but it was more like "hey, this isn't working, let me tweet, tweeting isn't so bad" i.e. not "I'm not going to tweet anything bad". But...as always with twitter, 140 characters, especially 140 characters in shorthand Russian, isn't always going to be clear.

BTW, @musya, there is nothing so self-important as self-imported translators of Russian tweets into English during historical events. I know, because I myself have felt myself to be Terribly Important to the Metaverse when I translated Russian-language tweets during, say, the atrocities in southern Kyrgyzstan. Yes, we must all make do with such burdens on the Internet as People With a Sense of Mission, present company included, it comes with the territory.

I don't see any other things to correct, but there's the comments below. Basically, I think what a few readers resented was the portrayal of Kazakh NGOs as superficial and writing about ties and lunches and facepalms instead of, oh, I dunno, torture in their prisons, the case of Zhovtis and others, the Uzbeks being extradited, and other more somber things. The reality is, all of these grim things have been said and re-said  many times in the course of the three review meetings. At the actual summit, if you aren't there, it's good to get a flavour of it from those who are there, which will be made up of small tidbits, like the fact that the facial expressions of some of the delegates there broadcast the "I could give a fuck" message.

But, it is what it is. Bored NGO staffers watching the summit on a video feed in the Pyramid write somewhat glib or funny tweets. Understood. They may have already done their serious messaging elsewhere and they have other venues for it.

I do take exception, however, with the notion conveyed that you can't express serious thoughts on Twitter, or that it is not a medium for that. Of course you can. There are many people who do put very serious news accounts and thoughts on Twitter, fitting into the one line, or running a bunch of lines. It's ok.

I'm interested in hearing more about the NGOs who aren't GONGOs in Kazakhstan and who maybe didn't get into the restricted parallel summit, and what they think of the OSCE process and issues, so I'll be looking for that.