EurasiaNet Civil Society - Russia and Kazakhstan Strive to Put OSCE Democratization Arm in a Sling

CIVIL SOCIETY

RUSSIA AND KAZAKHSTAN STRIVE TO PUT OSCE DEMOCRATIZATION ARM IN A SLING
Jean-Christophe Peuch 7/14/08

Janez Lenarcic, a Slovenian diplomat, took up his duties at the outset of July as the new head of the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the democratization arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He is inheriting an institution that is under assault by a group of post-Soviet nations, led by Russia. Another prominent critic is Kazakhstan, which will take the helm of the OSCE in 2010.

Lenarcic, whose term will run for three years, believes his office should not look at the upcoming Kazakh chairmanship with apprehension. "I am not afraid of anything with regard to that," he told EurasiaNet in an interview. Although the chairmanship carries with it "a lot of work and responsibility," the new ODIHR director stressed that "it is not one of the OSCE’s decision-making bodies."

"I am confident that [our Kazakh colleagues] will be able to work well. But they will need the cooperation of all [OSCE] participating states, they will have to create an atmosphere of confidence and cooperation. I trust they will be able to do that," Lenarcic said.

Kazakhstan is among a group of seven post-Soviet nations in the OSCE that have been pressing the organization to pay less attention to election monitoring, adherence to democratic standards and observance of human rights, and refocus on its other dimensions -- economic environmental and, first and foremost, politico-military. In comments reprinted in the July 2 issue of Russia’s "Kommersant" daily, Kazakhstan’s Senate Speaker Qasymzhomart Toqaev described the OSCE as a "security organization."

"It is neither a human rights, nor an election-monitoring organization," the former Kazakh foreign minister added. Toqaev went on to tell "Kommersant" that he believed the decision to give his country the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE in two years’ time showed that other participating states were "listening" to Astana’s and Moscow’s arguments.

ODIHR has mounted election-monitoring missions for many of the votes that have taken place in the former Soviet Union since 1991. The overwhelming number of those votes has failed to meet minimum democratic standards. Russia has blamed the bad marks given by international observers to Georgia and Ukraine for the political upheaval that shook those two countries in 2003 and 2004 respectively. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Claiming that ODIHR is an instrument of regime change in the hands of the West, Russia, Kazakhstan and other CIS states -- Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan -- last year put forward a set of proposals that would have drastically altered ODIHR’s operations. The plan, for example, would have reduced to 50 the number of international observers sent to monitor any given election, as well as restricted their work. Critics argued that the plan effectively sought to sideline ODIHR.

Although the United States and other Western nations vetoed the plan, Russia and its allies continue to press for changes.

Of late, the struggle over ODIHR’s fate has shifted, with the democratization body seeming to face a threat from within the OSCE. In a June 21 interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Russia’s Central Electoral Commission Chairman Vladimir Churov said he believed an agreement on the "criteria and principles" of international observer missions could be reached soon.

Helping to foster Churov’s optimism were consultations between the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA) and the CIS Parliamentary assembly (CIS PA). Inter-parliamentary discussions began in April at the initiative of the OSCE PA, which sought "to discuss the quality and future of election observation" and exchange views on OSCE election-related documents and Russia’s reform plan.

The last round of talks opened in St. Petersburg on May 26 to discuss a final set of draft recommendations on OSCE election observation. When the meeting ended, the OSCE PA announced that both sides had failed to "formally agree on common standards for election observation," but had nonetheless "benefited from a full and frank exchange of views, which showed potential agreement on a number of difficult issues."

"Talks have been concluded without any agreement," OSCE PA Spokesman Klas Bergman said by phone from Copenhagen. He declined to elaborate further. The OSCE PA-CIS PA negotiations have caused alarm among Western-oriented OSCE officials, who view them as part of efforts to hijack ODIHR’s election mandate.

"ODIHR did not participate in those discussions, therefore I cannot comment on them," Lenarcic told EurasiaNet. "All I can say is that ODIHR’s activities are regulated by consensual decisions made by OSCE participating states. Unless those decisions are changed -- and they can be changed only by consensus -- we will continue to operate the way we’ve been operating."

The respective roles of ODIHR and the OSCE PA in international election observation missions are defined in the cooperation agreement the two OSCE institutions signed in 1997 "to avoid overlap, redundancy, unnecessary expense and confusion."

According to the Copenhagen assembly’s own interpretation, this document gives it a mandate to assume the "political leadership" of OSCE election-monitoring operations
-- something many OSCE officials are wary about. In their opinion, observation missions are a fact-driven exercise that should remain free of politics, lest they result in misleading statements as it was the case in the immediate aftermath of Serbia’s 2007 parliamentary polls and Georgia’s 2008 presidential ballot. In both those instances, individual observers made assessments that contradicted ODIHR’s general conclusions.

Addressing the OSCE PA annual session that took place earlier this month in Astana, British representative Bruce George caused a sensation when he accused his own assembly of seeking "to supplant ODIHR as the primary election observation body within the OSCE."

In George’s opinion, nothing illustrates better the "increasing collusion" he claims exists between the OSCE PA and Russia than the recent discussions on shared election standards. "The Assembly’s leadership has clearly been working with Russia as there is a remarkable similarity between the stated objectives of the two in relation to election observation," George said, according to a copy of his speech obtained by EurasiaNet.

George added that, in his view, the OSCE PA had "no legitimacy" to conduct talks on shared election standards with its CIS counterpart. "This is an attempt to break away from ODIHR election observation and ally with the CIS," he concluded.

OSCE PA Spokesman Bergman says George’s accusations have been "categorically denied" by the assembly’s leadership. "In any election observation mission we have contacts and share observations with the CIS PA. We’re talking to the CIS the same way we’re talking to the Americans, the British, or the French," he told EurasiaNet.

Russian election officials say they hope the new director of ODIHR will be more open than his predecessor to the idea of reforming his office. "I am open to criticism. But it must be constructive and aim at improving the efficiency of ODIHR, not at making its operations more difficult," Lenarcic said. "I cannot do something that I know would prevent ODIHR from doing its job. That would be against the very decisions on which our mandate is based."

Editor�s Note: Jean-Christophe Peuch is a Vienna-based freelance correspondent, who specializes in Caucasus- and Central Asia-related developments.

The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website, meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed debate about the social, political and economic developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is a program of the Open Society Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open societies around the world by supporting educational, social, and legal reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues.

The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent the position of the Open Society Institute and are the sole responsibility of the author or authors.