Validity of missions under fire in Moscow

By C. J. Chivers The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2005
MOSCOW Early this year, as President George W. Bush began his new term, he declared a vision with allure for many people living within the stunted democracies or autocratic regimes in the former Soviet Union.
 
"The policy of the United States," Bush said, "is to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
 
Eleven months on, Bush's inaugural challenge is facing an oblique but determined attack in territory once under Moscow's sway. The battlegrounds are elections, which offer a glimpse into an emerging nation's political health. At issue are perceptions. What exactly is democratic progress? And who gets to define it?
 
In much of the former Soviet Union, a patchwork of corrupt and semi-functional states where authoritarianism has proven durable and political liberalization has been uneven or thwarted, elections are routinely flawed or stolen. From eerily empty polling places in Chechnya to the rubber-stamp victories of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, post-Communist governments often manipulate electoral outcomes, ostensibly lending a patina of legitimacy to plainly undemocratic men.
 
Now, alarmed by popular uprisings that followed rigged elections in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, Russia is leading many former Soviet states in an effort to undermine honest discussion about electoral misconduct.
 
The target is the election monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is the principal monitor of elections behind the former Iron Curtain.
 
The United States makes clear that it relies on the European organization to inform its view of an election. And as the United States has applauded the observation missions, the Kremlin and many of its former charges have chosen an opposite course.
 
The goals are clear: Weaken credible Western monitors while creating alternate observations for public consumption.
 
The European group's election-monitoring arm, known as the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, sends long-term and short-term observer teams to countries holding elections. The teams analyze each campaign period and election day, including voter and candidate registration, safeguards against multiple voting, ballot counting, use of state resources, media coverage, police conduct and more. As they work, they publish, producing assessments that become report cards of the balloting.
 
In recent years, as assessments have documented abuses in countries whose leaders then fell amid popular uprisings, and after the observers were critical of the re-election last year of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has begun treating the reports as highly provocative.
 
"Autonomy of the ODIHR has turned into a complete absence of control, and decent governments cannot accept this," Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said at the annual meeting of the European group last week in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "It is also necessary to introduce order in the publications of assessments."
 
The election observers' leadership, while not seeking confrontation with the Kremlin, has firmly defended their work. "We are holding a mirror up," said Christian Strohal, the director of the monitoring office. "Maybe there are some people who do not like the picture in the mirror. But if they smash the mirror, the picture is not going to change."
 
Working with Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Russia also sought to introduce rules that would have weakened the monitoring group and delayed publication of its reports. The United States and other governments rebuffed the proposal, and for now the observation mission seems secure.
 
But challenges to the observers' positions have been multiplying. As elections have become freighted with the potential to discredit the status quo, the Commonwealth of Independent States, an alliance of 11 former Soviet states, has begun deploying electoral observer missions of its own.
 
These missions release reports that faintly resemble the European ones but lack detail and underlying data. They invariably reach conclusions that are the opposite of the Europeans' and are then funneled into state television for domestic and regional consumption, assuring citizens in the former Soviet sphere that democratic change is indeed afoot.
 
Bruce George, a member of the British Parliament who led a mission this month to monitor the presidential election in Kazakhstan, said he viewed the tactics of the Russian-led observers with suspicion and contempt.
 
"In my view their methodology is simple," George said. "Be really nice to your friends."
 
Vladimir Karpechenko, a supervisor of the observation missions from the Commonwealth of Independent States, declined to be interviewed or to explain their methodology. But a comparison of reports shows differing approaches.
 
In Azerbaijan, the Europeans provided an analysis of television news coverage, showing how it favored the state. It also documented "bad" or "very bad" ballot-counting practices in 43 percent of polls observed. The Russian-led observers said the news coverage was balanced but provided no evidence.
 
One concern they did note was that the indelible ink used for marking voters' hands, a program encouraged by the West to discourage multiple voting, might carry health risks.
 
Daniel Fried, an assistant secretary of state who oversees U.S. diplomacy in the region, said efforts to blunt the European monitoring missions were creating "a bizarre alternative universe."
 
In the future, he said, some post- Soviet countries may forbid the European group from observing their elections. But Fried said those countries would lose respect in the West.
 
"Respectability goes to countries that let ODIHR in," he said.
 
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/14/news/russia.php