Russia seeks to derail election monitors

IHT
Posted: 2007-10-24 20:40:45

MOSCOW: Russia has started a diplomatic effort to curtail the activities of the most influential election observers in the former Soviet Union, submitting proposals to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that would sharply cut the size of observation missions and prohibit the publication of their reports immediately after an election.

The proposals, circulated confidentially last month by Russia's diplomatic delegation to the organization's headquarters in Vienna, also call for forbidding observers from making any public statements about a government's electoral conduct in the days after citizens cast their votes.

Taken together, the proposals serve as an attack on the mandate and activities of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the organization's election-monitoring arm, before two important elections in Russia - parliamentary elections set for Dec. 2 and the presidential election next spring.

They also mark the latest Kremlin effort to renegotiate standards of governance and international cooperation that it accepted after the Soviet Union's collapse and seem certain to lead to another impasse with the West.

The monitoring office sends long-term and short-term observation teams, often numbering hundreds of people, to elections throughout the former Soviet Union. Ambassador Christian Strohal, the Austrian diplomat who leads the office, said the proposals appeared to be designed to limit the capacity and influence of objective assessments of a government's electoral conduct.

"All of this is an effort to redefine - not redefine, deconstruct - 10 years of one of the most credible election observations that there is," he said in an interview last week in Vienna. "It is about a certain principle that there cannot be an institution that has an opinion that comes about in a professional manner, as opposed to a political or diplomatic manner."

Whether Russia can force its hand diplomatically is unclear. The 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe requires unanimous votes for its decisions. Russia's proposals were co-signed by six former Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

But because the organization requires consensus, diplomats said, Russia can block other decisions at a meeting of foreign ministers of the 55 member countries scheduled for late November in Madrid, and try to demand that its position be heard and to exact concessions that could weaken the observers' abilities.

Russia can also act unilaterally, by demanding conditions for the observers at elections this autumn for the 450-seat Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament. At the last Duma election, in 2004, Russia invited observers roughly three months in advance. This year, Russia has not yet invited the observers. The elections are about five weeks away.

Vladimir Churov, chairman of Russia's Central Election Commission, declined to reply to a written list of questions about the proposals and invitation plans that were submitted to him Tuesday. A Kremlin spokesman declined to comment Wednesday.

But in an article published this week in the Kommersant newspaper, Andrei Davydov, a commission spokesman, suggested that the number of observers this year would be tightly controlled. Organizations, he said, will be allowed "several dozen observers, and not 400 like the OSCE has proposed."

Strohal said Russia so far had not even agreed to allow a small group of observers, known as a "needs assessment mission," to visit Russia and determine the nature and size of a mission for the Duma elections.

That step should also be done months in advance. Russia has balked, although it allowed similar assessments in years past. "We have asked several times for a needs assessment mission," Strohal said. "They say, 'What is it?' "

Bruce George, a member of Parliament in Britain who has been an observer at 18 elections, including in Russia, Georgia and Ukraine, said that because of the delay the observer mission already would not be able to do a thorough job. Further conditions, he said, will endanger future missions by encouraging other countries with a history of tainted elections to set conditions unilaterally too.

"This is part of an overall strategy to emasculate" the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, George said. "Russia does this because it knows full well that, with the methodology and professionalism of ODIHR there is no way that it will find that Russia's elections meet international standards."

Russia's diplomatic efforts to restrict the missions, and its administrative resistance to them, complete a public shift from its post-Soviet promises to encourage political freedom and plurality.

As the Soviet Union was unraveling, Russia and the other former Soviet states agreed to hold free and fair elections in a meeting in Copenhagen in 1990, and to allow independent foreign observers to monitor their electoral processes. The organization's election-monitoring arm has assumed this role as the region's principal observers.

But Russia and other autocratic states have bristled in recent years under the monitors' post-election reports and news conferences, which have routinely found that elections conducted by centralized governments in the Soviet Union's old sphere fall short of democratic standards. Sometimes the reports show that elections are clearly fraudulent and rigged.

The reports can raise questions about government legitimacy and commitment to democratic principles.

The reports have also become a public archive of the array of election-season abuses in the region, including manipulated vote counts, official crackdowns and harassment of opposition politicians and groups, the use of state resources to buoy favored candidates, slanted state media coverage, and obstacles for opposition candidates and parties to register, assemble and campaign.

The findings are influential at home and abroad. They are typically embraced by the United States and the European Union in their own assessments of the political climate in former Soviet countries. Opposition movements often brandish them as evidence of the unfair treatment, or outright repression, they suffer from the state.

Moreover, Russia and other governments have accused the observers' post-election reports and statements of triggering street protests that have overturned tainted elections in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan since 2003, creating a ripple of "color revolutions" that the Kremlin has called threats to both regional stability and its own power.

Late in 2004, as the so-called Orange Revolution was overturning a rigged presidential vote for a pro-Kremlin candidate in Ukraine, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, excoriated the role of observation missions in a statement to the organization. "Election monitoring is not only ceasing to make sense but is also becoming an instrument of political manipulation and a destabilizing factor," he said.

The Russian proposals, if approved, would silence altogether the public statements immediately after an election, allowing them to be replaced by news conferences from pro-regime observers - already the staples of the region's state-controlled television news channels.

The proposals were distributed by Russia to foreign diplomats last month. A copy of the proposals, stamped "restricted," was provided to The New York Times by a Western diplomat who requested anonymity.