UN-tethered

"For Our Freedom and Yours"

"For our freedom and yours".

Bush is demanding that Russia remove troops, and sending in military planes with humanitarian aid. This has sparked concern from humanitarian groups who try to keep a separation between military action and the delivery of humanitarian aid, to keep the humanitarian space open.

This isn't an abstract issue; today brought the tragic news of the murder of 4 aid workers in Afghanistan, an American, a Canadian, a Brit, and their Afghan driver, all of whom worked for International Rescue Committee on children's education. Apparently it is the worst security incident the NGO has faced in its history, after working in Afghanistan for 25 years, and a vivid sign of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The Taliban takes responsibility for the deliberate attack targeting foreigners, and a Taliban spokesman even claims falsely that the women were "military" and that is why they were shot -- indicative of precisely this sensitive issue of trying to keep these distinctions as literally a matter of life and death, especially in a context where they are deliberately misrepresented.

The issue of just what kind of aid the U.S. has given Georgia is now under much scrutiny. The BBC says, "It [the U.S.] has already helped revamp and re-train Georgian forces, provided more sophisticated military equipment and updated bases to meet Nato standards" -- actions the BBC says may have caused Russia to "re-assert its authority in the region in the first place" -- an analysis that strikes me as heavily Western-centric and self-flagellating about a situation where Russia has been dominating the entire region and its oil routes, quite apart from any U.S. meddling, which is hard to characterize as significant.

Ken Anderson has a very long, rant about the New York Times's C.J. Chivers following the "blame America first" with a description of U.S. involvement in providing miltiary aid to Georgia:

"The risks were intensified by the fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state."

The End of the Era of Transition

Daniel Kimmage, the senior geopolitical correspondent for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, has written a seminal piece,Toward a New Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Petro-States. Everyone interested in the future of liberal democracy in international affairs should be reading and thinking about.

Basically, Daniel calls it clearly:  the former Soviet states aren't transiting anywhere from communism: they're done now, and they've landed on the square called "authoritarianism"on the great board game of life.

Of course, those of us who used to work in these countries, long before the era of the TTD Seminars ("transition to democracy" sessions led by $500-a-day consultants in high-priced hotel rooms), have always said they weren't transiting anywhere fast because the same people tended to be in charge, and the people with whom the TTD crowd were holding their chalk talks had no intention of changing, or replacing themselves.

As Daniel acidly tells us, "democratic reform in all four countries [Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan] requires an exceptionally powerful, and perhaps uniquely curved, magnifying glass to be seen" -- the kind of loupe, I could add, that energy-eager Western leaders have been wearing on a golden chain around their necks these days...

Where's the Security Council on Georgia?

The Caucasus

You've heard France (Kouchner), the U.S. (Bush), the UN Secretary General Ban Kim Moon, the International Crisis Group, Sergei Kovalev and other Russian human rights activists sound the alarm about the war between Russia and Georgia and the U.S. and allies are talking about ways to "punish" Russia.

Where's the Security Council on Georgia?

Divided. So it hasn't spoken out with a united voice in the form of a presidential statement (Belgium is in the chair) much less a resolution (that would be extraordinary). Even meeting four times in three days. To be sure, Ban Ki Moon has called for "an immediate cessation of hostilities."

It's not for lack of being "seized" with the issue; in fact, Georgia has long been on the SC agenda (which can be hard to do when the situation involves a Permanent 5 member). As UN Security Report noted back in July, Georgia had asked for a meeting to discuss "the intrusion of Russian military aircraft into Georgian airspace on 8 July." That's the sort of detail that can get lost in the fog of war. Russia admitted it had flown fighter jets over the breakaway territory of Southern Ossetia ostensibly "to prevent bloodshed and to keep the situation within legal and peaceful bounds." Of course, prospective mediators like Kouchner were busy on the situation before; Koucher claimed to have "prevented" a war in Abkhazia with a phone call.

The fault line that runs in the SC around Georgia is the same line that divides the Western members and supporters from Eastern Europe and Latin America from Russia, China, and their allies (including South Africa on many issues). Russia vowed that if the world became involved in securing Kosovo's independence, it would see the Georgian separatist territories of Abkhazia and Souther Ossetia as equivalent, a concept that hasn't found support at least among some international jurists.

Going Back to Durban

Photo from the archive of Magenta Foundation for ICARE.

Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with colleagues and go over the documents and papers from Durban, the ill-fated 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. That year, in the long-lost era before 9/11, I helped lead a delegation of some 40 NGO activists from the U.S., Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia, to sound our own particular notes at this world conference. We were involved in the lengthy preparatory process of several years and found over and over again that the "human rights-based" approach to the problems of discrimination was constantly marginalized, as movements favouring heavily-ideological approaches, incitement to extremism and provocation, and even violence, took precedence.

There was no question that international human rights movement was in a terribly weak position in this Durban process -- they had no intrinsic race, class, national or even grass-roots credentials to wield in this highly-charged politicized atmosphere. And as "offices, not movements," as E.P. Thompson used to make the distinction, they didn't have sufficient involvement in local initiatives and their politics to be able to sound a credible note. In some cases, they were too dependent on some extreme-minded groups for information to be able to vocally criticize their bad behaviour.

Indeed, the ideals of the international human rights movement had always been outside of nationality or ethnicity, and did not ascribe responsibilty -- or remedy -- for human rights violations to economic models for society, whether socialist or capitalist. That put human rights advocates directly at odds with ideologues from Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan and other bad actors at the UN. The human rights movement also eschewed violence as a solution -- which did not mean that it was pacifist in the face of clear-cut genocide, but which meant that *for its own movement in particular* it did not propose recipes involving armed force. These ideals were supposed to be the strength of the international human rights movement, its hidden wellspring of support in the face of seemingly insurmountable tyrannies, where it had achieved many victories.

Yet in Durban, the INGO tent was empty.  It was less effective in dealing with the tyranny of other non-state actors.Few tried to caucus effectively to prevent the riot.