Joshua Foust has been raging for weeks on Twitter, in the Atlantic, and his blog Registan about the human rights crowd and their protests against Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov -- who yes, was known to boil his opponents (and now freezes them?). Is human rights advocacy not only a futile but a dangerous activity that threatens even national security -- the vital supply route to troops in Afghanistan? Are we therefore to stand down and cease our complaints about Karimov's atrocities in the name of some greater good, involving...fighting the Taliban, and then going home in 2014?
That's apparently the proposition and it's worth debating. It's worth debating even in some other form that Foust -- who is a very cynical and nasty debater shifting his ground frequently -- is likely to claim it's really all about.
YES, THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT NEEDS CRITICISM
First, let me say that I think the human rights movement could do with a lot more criticism than it ever gets from serious interlocutors, i.e. not from right-wing hate blogs but intellectuals who share liberal values, let's say, but who have serious reservations whether the idealistic project of human rights is worth it, or has any effect, or does more harm than good. (I have always said that if politics is the art of the possible, human rights is the art of the impossible.)
The human rights movement not only suffers from the "halo effect," i.e. it's work is so religiously important and self-evidently good that it seems beyond criticism itself, it also suffers from another religious tenet, the "11th commandment," which is: "Thou shalt not ever criticize another NGO publicly."
A LATE 20TH CENTURY SECT
I think these religious doctrines should be abolished and there really should be more debate about the efficacy of the human rights movement and its ideals. Although I've participated in this movement myself ardently in various forms for the last 30 years, I've sometimes wondered if 100 years from now, some historian may describe the human rights movement as we know it today as a kind of sect, inspired by the great Aryeh Neier at the turn of the 20th century (and a number of these ideas, such as outspoken protest despite geopolitical necessities, as with the Soviet Union, for arms talks, or the notion of "surrogate advocacy," come from him). It's funny to think of some future scholar writing curiously about that flurry of human rights NGO activities from 1974-2014 as a kind of Burnt-Over Place, like New York State in the early 19th century. Most of the world isn't a human rights movement -- quite the contrary.
The problem is, these organizations tend to debate about policy and priorities only internally, and sometimes not at the staff level at all but only among senior officials and board members, and then have a set piece once they make up their minds, that they don't subject to debate in part because hostile governments might more successfully challenge them and undermine their work.
RIEFF IS THE ONLY ONE
David Rieff is one of the few critics -- only critic? -- of human rights organizations and their idealism, although most of his writing has been about the futilities and fallacies of humanitarian work rather than human rights work per se, which differs, although he does continually makes a helpful if savage debunking of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (which I am a critic of as well, see my reply to Gareth Evans.) But as a rule, human rights as a project is so internalized in governments themselves nowadays and of course enshrined in the International Criminal Court, that there is little debate about whether it's an effective method (I can only think of Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia which I've only just started.)
PEACE UBER ALLES
This is not a new debate -- the proposition that this frenzied human rights protest should be held back while more urgent matters are addressed.
Back in the height of the Euromissile crisis, when a much larger -- mass -- world movement was lobbying for reduction of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe (and a minority within this movement was even protesting Soviet SS20s in Eastern Europe as well), the peace movement in the US mainly took it as an article of faith that you simply didn't raise human rights protests with the Soviet and East European governments. This was not done. Not only did the peaceniks believe our own government was as bad or worse than these communist regimes, with racism and poverty and wars abroad; they thought the crisis of reducing nuclear weapons so overrode any other concerns, however legitimate, that they simply had to be triaged. You had to keep silent.
E.P. Thompson, of course, was one of the peace activists who discarded that notion of silence and vigorously protested the East bloc's human rights crimes, whether the jailing of pacifists or the invasion of Afghanistan or the crackdown on Poland's solidarity.
EAST VS. WEST, PEACE VERSUS PROTEST
In the early 1980s, Aryeh Neier had a meeting with John Mroz of the Institute for East West Studies and they argued over whether the new Helsinki Watch, as it was then called, should vocally protest Soviet human rights wrongs -- Mroz felt surely this would endanger peace talks and strongly advised against it. Aryeh disagreed. The rest is history. And the early board members and staff of what later became Human Rights Watch mounted vocal protests about human rights violations in the Helsinki talks. It's hard to remember now that this was truly the debate then -- and an urgent problem for many civic organizations as well as government figures involved with the USSR.
If I -- and many of my colleagues -- didn't think condemning the Soviet Union's jailing of dissidents and invasion of Afghanistan would harm nuclear arms talks, for God's sake, why would picketing a president's daughter's fashion show threaten or stop the delivery of goods to troops in that same Afghanistan today?
In fact, if anything, what we learned in the 1980s and 1990s (although seemed to forget by about 1997) is that you cannot have fruitful arms talks and trade agreements and peace with regimes that have no civilian oversight and restraint on their militaries and on the corruption of elites. This was the premise of Andrei Sakharov and his friends although this integral relationship between arms control and human rights seems hard to convey nowadays. And by extension of the premise today, you cannot expect that cooperation with Uzbekistan for strictly pragmatic delivery options, much less something as ambitious as the State Department's Silk Road plan for post-conflict recovery, will ever really be authentic and successful if there aren't basic changes in the nature of the regime.
RAINING ON GOOGOOSHA'S PARADE
In The Atlantic, Foust complained about those of us who picketed Gulnara Karimova's fashion show. (I write for eurasianet.org and also cottoncampaign.org). It seems a perfectly reasonable and necessary protest to me -- you couldn't say it was about being nasty to cultural and design people unrelated to politics because a) Gulnara is an ambassador of her country to Spain and to the UN in Geneva; b) she was reportedly associated with Zeromax, a now-bankrupt state conglomerate with brought profits to the state and allegedly to the Karimov family; c) cultural events like this are used by the regime in propagandistic ways to influence public opinion and recruit supporters.
Foust not only found this futile; he found it misguided and strongly implied it shouldn't have been done, and human rights condemnation should be left to officials -- presumably quietly. Many of these same human rights groups and labour unions picketed the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC) conference with both US and Uzbek officials and corporate executives in attendance for the same reasons: that 's what protestors do, they find symbolic targets and call the press and march with their signs, you know, like Occupy Wall Street does? Or is it not OK to do it about foreign governments the US needs in its wars? I'm not getting any of this.
Foust's fury seemed all out of proportion to the issue at hand -- as if it was somehow politically incorrect to spoil Gulnara's big do in Manhattan. But she represents an oppressive state and more directly, she shows off fashions made of Uzbek cotton, and this is picked by hundreds of thousands of school children in the largest state-organized forced labour program in the world. Why can't we protest this any way we can, peacefully?
ALLEGED MORAL FAILINGS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
Foust's lashes out at all aspects of this story:
o the protestors didn't show up last year when Gulnara was in Manhattan at the same Fashion Week Show -- and then he links to my story from last year -- and therefore the implication is that they are opportunistic and not consistent in their moral outrage
Answer: We didn't know exactly when she was coming last year, and we had much less notice of her appearance last year. Indeed, I had to write about it *after* I saw mention of it in the fashion press.
o Foust then asks "why now" given that it was "long-scheduled" this year (again linking to my story).
Answer: Human rights groups didn't have the exact time and date and confirmation she was coming, although she was mentioned in press releases -- then it was found on the Mercedes Benz website later. And they did protest, but the organizers didn't want to undo it. The protest was advertised on NGO websites and planned for weeks before her arrival -- but that alone did not make the organizers change their plans to host Karimova.
We had no idea when we planned the picket that it would actually lead to Karimova being cancelled -- it seemed an impossibility at the time, given that she'd already appeared the previous year and was on the schedule. Nor was the amount of press attention expected -- I thought the entire episode might get a wire service report.
FASHION SHOW ORGANIZERS CHANGE THEIR MIND
Frankly, I think when the Uzbek emigres appeared on the very first day of Fashion Week with their protest, and the labor groups announced they were going to picket Gulnara's show then later (which was the following week), the organizers decided that it was going to look very bad for them to be associated with child labour in this fashion. They may not have felt this way when it seemed more abstract. Certainly the very hard-hitting Daily News Article helped a lot.
It isn't at all the case that "only when the press shines a light on" do people gasp. In fact, these human rights groups are what got the issue press in the first place! It just took time. Last year, they didn't have enough of a run-up of notice, and the campaign had taken awhile to attract companies to pledge not to use Uzbek cotton -- now there are 60 of them.
SURROGATE ADVOCACY
o Foust says: "It's no secret Uzbekistan abuses its citizens. So why do we only seem to get outraged with Uzbek human rights abusers when they publicly associate with our fellow Westerners?
Answer: because that's how the "surrogate advocacy" formula works. This is how human rights groups work their advocacy. They can't easily get at the target of their outrage, the Uzbek government, especially if that government is doing things like kicking out Human Rights Watch, so they go to those who have a relationship with that government, or even support it in some way, morally or politically or financially. This is an age-old formula used by many protest movements and shouldn't itself be targeted for indignation -- although I'm happy to debate as to whether it is inappropriately used or overused at times.
And I might add that whereas once, Human Rights Watch might have just gone about its business documenting bad things in Uzbekistan and publishing the results of its research on its website, and submitted reports to various EU or UN committees or commissions, once the worst happens, and it can't even function normally in a country, then understandably, its researchers are going to talk more to the media, even an unnatural interlocutor like the Daily News.
Foust says "it's not as simple as a senator or even organizer saying 'I disapprove of your human rights record.'" Well, it is. You work at getting senators to say that. Eventually, if you have enough of them, you don't then have something happen like the Senate Appropriations Committee deciding to put in language in the foreign operations bill to lift sanctions that had been in place for 7 years -- when there is no improvement in human rights. Yes, each senator expressing disapproval counts, that's politics, and that's how human rights advocacy works.
REALPOLITIK
Foust then delivers his RealPolitik graph:
There is history and context to publicly shaming these governments, even blowback (as when the U.S. lost access to the Uzbek government in 2005, undermining the very human rights activism it hoped to advance). The is an ebb and flow to U.S.-Uzbek relations, starting very warmly in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, but cooling during the earliest stages of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. They warmed quickly, helped along by generous U.S. loans for the Kharshi Khanabad airbase south of Tashkent, then cooled again during the "colored revolutions" the U.S. helped to spawn in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, the Andijan massacre caused a sharp break, and ever since there has been a slow, steady warming again. This is complicated stuff, and as much as we can and do express concern for the rights of normal Uzbeks, the sad, cynical fact of the matter is, the U.S. has bigger concerns to worry about.
Well, yeah, we get all that -- but I'd have to sharply disagree with the notion that there was "blowback" and that we "lost access" and "undermined the very human rights it hoped to advance." I realize this is the perspective that Donald Rumsfeld articulates in his memoirs, and perhaps it is one that others in the Pentagon today or various defense contractors share (like Foust). That doesn't mean it's a viable or convincing narrative.
Let's recall that the US rightly protested this atrocity involving the gunning down of numerous men, women and children assembling on a public square. To be sure, there were escaped prisoners who took hostages, but that was only one part of the Andijan drama and not a justification for massacring hundreds.
Because the US rightly protested this atrocity, Tashkent booted the US from the bases at K2. There's nothing to suggest that had the US not protested this awful thing, they may have improved human rights and even kept the bases. The idea that after an atrocity of that magnitude, keeping silent about it and not showing the most strenuous kind of protest is going to improve behaviour is preposterous. I know of no country situation that has ever worked in that fashion -- ever. The US did the right thing, despite its own internal conflict.
A government that was prepared to gun down protestors who were demonstrating against the arrest of Muslim businessmen (in very shakey criminal cases in the first place) is possibly one that might be isolating itself enough to kick out the foreigners from bases anyway. But in any event, there is nothing to suggest that rewarding a government committing a crime against humanity in that fashion by silence and cooperation would work. There is nothing to suggest that a government that did that awful thing was in fact on a great trajectory toward more human rights and democracy, but whoops, got sidetracked because nervous liberals talked Rumsfeld out of staying the course with Karimov. That just makes no sense.
On a smaller scale, massacres or death-squad hits would occur in Latin America in the 1980s, and the Reagan Administration would be silent and go on dealing with the authoritarian governments. Is there any evidence that this hastened democracy in these countries? No. In fact, this is why Jacobo Timmerman remarked, "Quiet diplomacy is quiet; silent diplomacy is surrender."
HARD CHOICES
And yes, we get it that now, the US is over a barrel and has to put in place an alternative path to supply troops than Pakistan. But it doesn't have to be craven in doing so, and does have some leverage -- and among the levers are not only Tashkent's self-interest in deterring the Taliban, and playing off the US against Russia (and China), there is the lever of simply not giving Tashkent legitimacy, even if it gets cooperation.
As I wrote about Rumsfeld's position:
Obviously, a government that is capable of ordering troops to fire on unarmed civilians assembled in a square has already regressed to such a point that it could not be characterized as "moving in the right direction."
Even before the West uttered a word, this profoundly regressive act revealed just how much was wrong with the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, which should have earned Western condemnation much sooner.
So to characterize the US as being somehow at fault for pushing Uzbekistan into a dark ages that the regime was already embracing on its own is a curious kind of American exceptionalism. It implies that the US has more power than it really has to influence the regimes of Central Asia – for better or worse -- but it also then strangely serves as a ready excuse not to use such leverage as there is in the relationship to insist on real human rights concessions.
YES, HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY WORKS
No, human rights advocacy and interventions may not work immediately or perhaps never. But they are worth doing for a number of reasons:
o not to break faith with the people inside the country brave enough to struggle for human rights
o to reach the point of equilibrium eventually where those people are strengthened and outsiders (the West) cease to be divided about the regime's nature and how to deal with it and take concerted action
o to reach those perestroika liberals inside the regime who might change, even incrementally
o to create pressure publicly that diplomats can refer to quietly
o to save at least some individual life, i.e. even one token prisoner -- "it matters to the starfish".
o to avoid conferring legitimacy on regimes that commit atrocities -- as inevitably, they fall and then others bringing change will view you more favourably for having called it correctly
o human rights violations and corruption and arbitrariness in business and arms control are very intimately connected and the latter do not change until progress is made in the former
Now, for some reason, my reply on Registan in the next round of debate with Joshua Foust didn't pass the moderator yet, so I post it here:
Joshua,
I don't suggest that the US has practiced enough containment, but certainly what they did practice in terms of restriction on military aid was the moral and correct thing to do and had more of a deterrent effect than if they had ignored such an outrage as the Andijan massacre and kept soldiering on.
To be sure, they didn't have a chance to test the depth of their morality as the Uzbeks evicted them from K-2, but again, you don't seem to allow for the fact that it is possible to do the moral thing in foreign policy, and not look for results, if for no better reason than to follow a moral domestic law, that says we should not give aid to foreign militaries that practice torture and massacre people. Perhaps the EU and US suspension of aid (and it really wasn't suspended in fact as I've shown with the EU) deterred more Andijans. But I don't need to speculate to affirm again that the US policy in recent years at least provided some restraint on the Uzbeks, and forced them to do at least some superficial things, like adding habeus corpus, admitting the ICRC, and signing the ILO conventions. Human Rights Watch staff, while not really ever properly registered and facing some harassment, at least travelled and functioned in Uzbekistan -- ironically as the latest round of friendship began ratcheting up, HRW was finally liquidated and their visas not renewed. When the VOA correspondent was arrested, it was vocal protest -- in Washington by the State Department and at OSCE -- that helped turn it around, not just quiet diplomacy.
I certainly don't look for instant cause-and-effect results for such policies that seek not to legitimize bad behaviour. You do. That's the problem. I've been at this longer, and had two decades working on human rights in the Soviet Union and cases of political prisoners and such before seeing results. I was fortunate to see them in my lifetime.
I also think you're misreading Corke's piece by making it seem as if she's blaming the deterioration of things in Uzbekistan on US policy. There's only one factor to blame for deterioration of human rights in Uzbekistan: the Uzbek government itself, the clinging of the old leader to power, the oprichina-like loyal lieutenants mired in corruption and brutality and so on. There's a curious kind of American exceptionalism in reverse on the left and even among liberals -- that America is directly responsible for this or that development in the world. Or America is responsible for only this or that *negative* development in the world, and if only America would be positive and do the right thing, why, the world would be transformed. This is immature and silly. America matters less and less. BRICS matter more and more. And that's why in fact we can afford to be moral, the one coin of the real we do still possess, though tarnished.
Again, you're not telling us what "proper outrage" would look like. Silent seething and glares in meetings? No invitation to that July 4th picnic? You don't explain why we can't speak out or ask Clinton to speak out or some of the other officials on trips to the region, or why there can't be regular State Dept. or White House statements about bad human rights developments, as there are for other countries where we have all kinds of needs for engagement, like Russia. There isn't any reason. The only possible objection would be that it would somehow trigger Karimov to cancel cooperation on the NDN.
But if he and his cadres were to do such a thing, they'd only look bad and particularly capricious and the world could say to them: and your plan is...what...for the war in Afghanistan, exactly? And you'd like the US to leave now? You know, we're going to see how this experiment will play out with Iraq. The US wanted to leave 5,000 troops to help with security, but they demanded immunity from prosecution for soldiers. Leaving aside whether that was the right and moral thing to do or not, the fact is, they demanded it, they didn't get it, and...they are pulling the soldiers. And now the Iraqis will be left alone with Al Qaeda. And you can be sure that all of Central Asia will watch this closely, because it will be their fate in 4 years, too, if the US is serious about withdrawing.
I disagree that speeches don't have any effect. Of course they do -- that's why they spend time making them and leaving things out or putting them in. Clinton didn't hold a town hall in Tashkent, she held a meeting with 4 people -- these sorts of optics and messaging are very carefully planned and that's why they are worth bothering with.
As for the issues of the route out of Afghanistan (you seem to be talking about the need for an exit rather than the more urgent and current need for a supply line into Afghanistan) -- the US of course has no choice but to deal with Uzbekistan, and it is better at least for now in practical terms. But of course, they take on a bunch of problems -- the corruption in the rail business with the buying and selling of the delivery time slots, the bureaucracy and incompetence that plague these countries, the security issues. It's not like it's some smooth, turnkey operation without costs.
That's why the language in the Senate Appropriations Bill calls for a six-month period review on the corruption issue regarding logistics contracts. But even as US officials wrestle with these things, they could be taking opportunities to raise human rights issues, because the corruption and lawlessness in business and trade correlates directly with the violation of civil rights -- they are part and parcel of the same phenomenon and that's why they are always worth tackling together.
Instead, Obama has crafted this soft option that is really irksome and confuses or even angers local civil society groups. They have State Department bureaucrats on these trips and in various programs pick out certain topics that they think will be acceptable to the authoritarians -- topics like children's rights (but not forced labor in the cotton industry), women's empowerment (but not the problem of rape of women in prison), small business development (but only as long as it doesn't threaten the state), even corruption (but only as a stick to beat rivals and local administrators with, not to tackle the central corruption of power at the top). And this soft option stuff is really pernicious, because not only does it undermine authentic work on any of these good topics, which, if done right, in fact would challenge the regime, they distract from the hardcore human rights topics like failure to register parties and religious associations and suppression of the media and Internet -- that in fact are all really needed apriori to work on issues like women's rights or trafficking or corruption authentically.
I haven't done any crickets here. Weeks ago on Twitter, and again in this post, and again right now, I've been saying the same thing which you evade every time: the US indeed has leverage, and that leverage is first of all as a means for Tashkent to play off against Russia. That's pretty important. And then more to the point, there is the possible hardball scenario, to say -- don't like our human rights and democracy talk and push for better behaviour? Don't like our insistence on clean contracts? Don't like us at all in any way? Then *you* deal with the Taliban, guys, we'll get out sooner, you're on your own, and don't look for even a USAID grant from us or scholarships for your kids, end of story.
I don't know how I can spell that out more clearly, Joshua. The debate to me isn't whether there's leverage; it's whether to use *this* sort of hardball leverage and how -- whether it is moral to leave Central Asia to its fate because at the end of the day it prefers Russia to the US to run things; whether to try to work toward some sort of multilateral solution that in fact doesn't look so different from Tashkent's 6+3; or whether the US should in fact double down (we can't be sure, can we, if Obama is not re-elected, that some future Republican president might scrap the idea of withdrawal of troops, especially if by then Iraq is in flames.)
I think it's important to ask about your personal philosophy because it's always a bit baffling. Conservatives in the Pentagon or companies like Honeywell who defend quiet diplomacy or zero diplomacy on human rights at least have a framework of their own to go with it, which is that they actually believe that by cooperating with countries with trade and aid, you will ease them along a path to democracy. Of course now we can point to the failed policy of 30 years of this with Egypt, and similar stories, but at least when these military or corporate men talk about the need to buddy up with Uzbeks, they cover what may be bald cynicism with a line about how engagement works incrementally, but certainly.
You don't. You say that not only are they terrible and you recognize torture is an outrage (they may not); you invoke double standards (as if you can suddenly drop your usual RealPolitik and move to moral suasion) and then you say nothing works. You're simply not convincing. I ask what your worldview is to try to make sense of your framework. You're too old to be a lolbertarian and too young to be some some kind of convinced communist. So what it is?
And I ask again whether this is yet another evidence of the "progressive" line -- pragmatism in foreign policy with a big dollop of cynical disrespect for the once shining moral values of one's own country -- or rather (the flip side of the coin), a zealous belief that if only our country were better and *more* moral everywhere, the world would be magically transformed.
As for ad hominem attacks, gosh, bring it, I'm not scared. I'm a big believer in keeping the constitutionally-protected ad hominem attack fresh by practicing it.
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