An exhibition of paintings depicting the brutality of Uzbekistan’s prison system goes on tour this autumn, in what artist Sergei Ignatyev says is an attempt to use art in support of human rights.

Ignatyev, originally from Uzbekistan and now living in the United States, is coordinator of an arts project for the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia.

In an interview for News Briefing Central Asia, Ignatyev described how letters smuggled out of prison inspired his work.

Sergey Ignatyev: When I saw evidence of the extreme brutality to which Uzbek prisoners are subjected, I conceived the idea of doing a series of pieces. The subject-matter came from letters written in prison, from former political prisoners, from photos of the bodies of prisoners who died from brutal treatment, and from reports produced by human rights defenders and journalists.

For example, the painting “Dream” was prompted by the lines, “I was unable to free myself from the illusion that dull obedience to the regime would release me from humiliation. I wanted to survive, but freedom soon became just a secret dream.”

NBCentralAsia: How compatible do you think art and human rights are? We generally think of protecting human rights as something serious involving reports and protests rather than paintings.

Ignatyev: Hollywood actors have joined in the protests against restrictions on human rights. Caroline Aaron and Reno Wilson played leading roles in “Cries From The Heart: Freedom Needs a Voice” [theatrical performance in support of Human Rights Watch, May 2012], which depicted the brutal repression of rights and freedoms in Uzbekistan. In my opinion, this was one of the finest examples of the solidarity between artists and rights workers.

At a concert in Moscow, Madonna appeared on stage wearing a mask and called for the release of members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot.

A selection of 44 of Ignatyev’s works based on letters and stories from Uzbek prisoners goes on show at the Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in the Peruvian capital Lima this October, before moving on to Brussels and Paris as part of an exhibition highlighting the plight of political prisoners in the former Soviet Union.

This is an extract from a longer article produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting as part of News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

RTWT

Democracy advocates are insisting that the Obama administration puts human rights on the agenda of negotiations with Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president, to permit military vehicles and equipment to transit from Afghanistan through Uzbek territory.

U.S. diplomats will “walk a fine line between maintaining transit routes out of Afghanistan and expressing support for democratic principles,” exiled Uzbek dissident Sanjar Umarov recently insisted.

Kazakhstan acted illegally by sending 28 asylum-seekers to neighboring Uzbekistan last year, says the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

The UN committee ruled on the issue on June 1, and made its findings public in a letter to the French anti-torture group ACAT, which had been representing the Uzbek asylum-seekers’ claims against the Kazak state.

In December 2010, ACAT France filed a complaint with the Committee Against Torture on behalf of a total of 29 individuals – 27 Uzbekistan nationals and two citizens of Tajikistan – who were detained in Kazakhstan and were believed to be at risk of being sent to Uzbekistan, where they might face torture and ill-treatment in custody.

Despite these concerns, the Kazak authorities announced that 28 individuals were extradited to Uzbekistan on June 9, 2011.

In its June 2012 ruling, the UN committee ruled that the extradition placed the Kazak authorities in breach of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, and that they should therefore ensure that the individuals concerned were brought back to Kazakhstan and offered compensation.

Despite the stern rebuke the UN committee delivered to Kazakhstan, leading human rights campaigner Yevgeny Zhovtis said the country’s government was unlikely to show any visible reaction.

“The authorities will take this ruling as a recommendation that doesn’t imply any legal obligation to take action,” Zhovtis, who heads the Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, said. “And they can always cite the Minsk and Kishinev conventions that require members of the Commonwealth of Independent States to assist one another on legal matters.”

At the same time, he said, the UN committee’s decision was a blow to Kazakstan’s reputation and might just make the government more cautious about repatriating asylum-seekers.

The Committee Against Torture required Kazakhstan to respond to its conclusions within 90 days. Zhovtis said it would be worth watching to see how the committee pursued matters and ensured that Kazakhstan complied with the ruling.

This is an extract from a longer article produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing CentralAsia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law is supported by the NED. Yevgeny Zhovtis is a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy.

Rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina can't work with incoming president Putin

A new generation of Russian netizens will be able to initiate legislation through a new Web portal, President-elect Vladimir Putin said today. But a crackdown on dissident voices, the ominous rise of nationalist far-right groups and today’s detention of up to 20 rights activists defending freedom of expression casts doubt on the credibility of any such cyber-based empowerment.

Russia’s government needs to exploit the most modern technologies, including crowdsourcing, Putin told a conference addressing the themes of his pre-election article “Democracy and Quality of the State.” Citizens should be able to use a Web portal to submit bills for consideration by the Duma after collecting 100,000 signatures in support, he said, before establishing certain conditions.

“This place must not be politicized and must not be used as a promotion site for various political forces. It must be a purely professional place,” he stressed.

Putin’s legitimacy this week took a blow from a Council of Europe report confirming that last month’s presidential election lacked transparency, and was marred by the partisan abuse of administrative resources and pronounced media bias.

“Many interlocutors suspected substantial manipulation of votes, but that would be hard to prove due to the lack of a truly impartial referee in the electoral process,” said the head of the delegation, citing domestic observers, such as the “Golos” election monitoring group, which reported widespread fraud, including multiple ballots cast by voters bussed to various polling stations.

Up to 20 activists were detained today after protesting against the prosecution of members of the Pussy Riot punk music band for an unsanctioned performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.  The three women members of the band face up to seven years in prison if convicted of violating public order. Human rights groups, including Memorial, have condemned the prosecution, but expressed reservations about the political value of the group’s action.

Memorial “does not condone conducting political protests or artistic self-expression on church space, all the more so if this is conducted in ways which are alien to religious practices,” the group said. “However, condemnation of the actions by the members of Pussy Riot from a moral, or indeed expedient, standpoint cannot form a basis for their criminal prosecution.

Veteran dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said the prosecution and possible sentence are excessive.

“What they did does not deserve such a long period of imprisonment,” she said.

Alexeyeva is one of several democracy and rights activists considering the value of serving on the 38-member presidential human rights council after Putin assumes the presidency next month.

Rights campaigner Svetlana Gannushkina (above)* has declared that she will discontinue her role on the council under Putin:

“I’m no Bandar-log,” she said.

Gannushkina, who has repeatedly been suggested for the Nobel Peace Prize because of her work with Chechen refugees, used an expression for “monkey” from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” Putin famously used that word in December when he ridiculed opposition protesters as monkeys.

On the other hand, Alexeyeva said that she was willing to remain but doubted that Putin would allow her to do so.

“I think he will hardly invite someone to work in a presidential council who regards him as not legitimate,” she said.

The anti-Putin opposition has rallied behind protests against electoral fraud in the provincial city of Astrakhan, but the campaign on behalf of the hunger-striking Oleg Shein is highlighting both the diversity and potential divisions within Putin’s critics.

“[O]pposition figures who get into power may not always be what pro-democracy supporters in the West, or even in Moscow, have in mind,” The Economist notes:

Mr Shein was a member of the far-left Communist faction that opposed Boris Yeltsin in 1993, and later served as a deputy for the nationalist Rodina party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, a bombastic, anti-Western politician who is now a deputy prime minister in Mr Putin’s government.

Looming reforms will complicate things for Russia’s protest movement. A new law liberalising the rules for registering new parties may mean that the political field will be flooded with dozens of them, confusing voters and fracturing the opposition

The high-profile presence of ultra-nationalists and other illiberal groups, including the National Bolshevik Party, within opposition ranks has disturbed many liberal democrats. But the Moscow-based Sova is one of a number of human rights groups campaigning against the prosecution of several activists from the NBP and the Other Russia

“We consider neither the ban on the NBP legitimate, nor the fact that the people who act on behalf of the Other Russia movement, which has not been banned, are persecuted,” Sova said in a statement last week.

But some observers fear that liberal democratic groups may be inadvertently entering a Faustian pact with far-right ultra-nationalists who will ultimately undermine or subvert prospects for democratization.

“The currently liberalizing tendencies are in danger of being reversed by anti-democratic forces,” according to analyst Andreas Umland:

The most worrying anti-liberal force today is the growing post-Soviet ultra-nationalist movement with deep links into both Moscow’s governmental institutions and Russian civil society. The various radical nationalist groupings and circles have so far been fractured and often more engaged in quarrels among themselves than in challenging their (also fractured) anti-nationalist opponents within and outside the regime. Yet, the currently evolving democratic movement could provide an incentive for the various Russian extremely right-wing forces to consolidate. Should this happen, Russia could again become a major matter of concern for international security.

The xenophobic and conspiratorial tone of Putin’s presidential election campaign has boosted the legitimacy and public profile of ultra-nationalist groups, including the Anti-Orange Committee:

It is led by the prolific political publicist and flamboyant TV host Sergey Kurginyan who has brought together, in the Committee, a “Who’s Who” of Russian anti-Westernism. The Anti-Orange Committee includes, among others, two of Russia’s most well-known and ardently anti-American TV journalists, Mikhail Leont’ev and Maksim Shevchenko, the notorious apologist of fascism and Moscow State University Professor Aleksandr Dugin, as well as the founding father of the post-Soviet Russian extreme right and editor of the most important ultra-nationalist weekly newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) Aleksandr Prokhanov. The self-assigned task of the Committee is to promote an ideological innovation of Putin’s regime in ultra-nationalist terms, and its reconstitution as a Eurasian empire.

“While the recent upsurge of democratic sentiments in Russia gives reasons for hope, it may also intensify the already apparent rapprochement between Russia’s systemic and anti-systemic radical nationalist forces,” Umland suggests, even if “[u]ltimately, a Russian re-democratization would cause a marginalization rather than escalation of anti-Western sentiments in the post-Soviet world.”

Golos, Sova, Memorial and the Moscow Helsinki Group are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

*Svetlana Gannushkina is head of Civic Assistance. The NED supports the group’s work providing legal assistance to refugees threatened with illegal deportation or extradition to Central Asia’s authoritarian regimes.

“The prominent Kazakh human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis has been granted amnesty, after serving more than a half of his four-year jail sentence for manslaughter,” RFE-RL reports:

Zhovtis, former chief of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights, told RFE/RL by phone on February 1 that he will be released in 15 days.

The move comes a day after the Obama administration chastised President Nursultan Nazarbaev for failing to honor a pledge on political reform and his government lifted a state of emergency in the oil-rich Mangistau province, imposed following clashes between striking oil workers and police.

At least 14 striking oil workers were killed in the oil town of Zhanaozen, which prompted some analysts to suggest that the violence portends a potentially turbulent transition in the authoritarian Central Asian state.

The amnesty also coincides with public criticism of the regime’s record and human rights from the Obama administration.

Kazakhstan’s commitments to initiate political reform and uphold human rights remain “largely unmet,” said Robert Blake, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs.

“President Nazarbaev has often spoken about the three goals he set for his country when Kazakhstan became independent: to build a truly sovereign and independent state, to jump-start the economy, and to liberalize the political system,” Blake told a January 31 conference in Washington marking 20 years of Kazakh independence.

“Kazakhstan has advanced rapidly in pursuit of the first two goals,” he said. “But the third goal remains largely unmet, despite Kazakhstan’s stated commitments to reform and to uphold human rights and democratic principles.”

Credit: RFE-RL

Political liberties in the country deteriorated over the past year, according to the latest survey by the pro-democracy group Freedom House, which cited new provisions restricting religious freedom and December’s crackdown on the striking oil workers (left).

Nazarbaev “has the opportunity to demonstrate the same farsighted leadership to build democracy that he showed in renouncing nuclear weapons,” said Blake.

But the regime’s failure to reform, shaky legitimacy, widespread corruption and growing political turbulence have led some observers to suggest that it is ripe for an ‘Arab Spring’ uprising:

For two decades, the regime of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, buoyed by the wealth of the country’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves, has brooked little dissent. But now it faces one of its more considerable tests. In December, striking workers in the western oil town of Zhanaozen clashed with security forces. The resulting crackdown led to some of the worst violence witnessed in the country’s short history… What began as economic protests over wages paid by a state company has taken on a starkly political dimension. While making an effort to investigate reports of police brutality and local administrative failures in Zhanaozen, the Nazarbayev regime has also pointed the finger at pro-democracy elements in civil society, the media and politics as subversive agents potentially stirring up unrest.

“We can expect future unrest in the oil-rich western provinces, and in some big factories, if economic difficulties lead to a reduction in state budgets for workers in these industries,” says Andrei Grozin, Moscow-based central Asia director at the official Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

“Kazakhstan cannot muster enough police force to keep order in the tough manner it did in Zhanoazen if unrest spreads,” he believes. “There is a real danger that strikes will spread in the spring, and authorities will be faced with the tough choice between buying the workers off or ordering in the Army.”

As The New York Times reports:

Industrial labor discontent has simmered in the oil regions of western Kazakhstan for years. Union organizers have been routinely beaten and intimidated, and have been prevented by government security forces from organizing at Western-financed operations such as Tengiz, run by Chevron.

The unrest has posed a challenge not only to the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former Soviet apparatchik who has ruled Kazakhstan since independence, but to Western oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil that invest heavily in the region.

The regime has responded to the unrest by trying to buy off discontent:

Flush with oil money, the government has set about resolving the labor problems here as it has in the past, releasing a mini-gusher of new financing not only for the workers but for the local government, schools and roads.

Prime Minister Karim Q. Massimov said in a telephone interview last week that the government would give oil workers raises of up to several hundred dollars a month and would invest about $300 million in the town. “I strongly believe this issue will be resolved soon and it will not spread to the foreign companies working in Kazakhstan,” he said.

The social compact underpinning authoritarian rule is looking fragile, says Central Asia analyst Joshua Foust:

Most of the striking oil workers have accepted new jobs, going along with the same bargain Nazarbayev has promised his country the last two decades: forget about liberty or freedom of speech, and in return I’ll keep you employed. It’s kind of worked so far, but as the Zhanaozen protests (and the initial hints of terrorism) show, that bargain is clearly beginning to fray.

Attempts to bribe workers and other dissidents into political docility are unlikely to resolve the underlying grievances, says one of the Zhanaozen union organizers. According to Human Rights Watch, many of the 130 workers detained were beaten, stripped and hosed with cold water, one of whom died from injuries sustained while in custody.

“At this point it was no longer about money,” said Muktar Umbetov. “It was about dignity. After so many months, the economic questions fell by the wayside.”

RFE-RL notes: In a statement, the OSCE has urged Kazakh authorities to follow the release of Zhovtis with full, transparent probes into recent violence in a western Kazakh city and allegations of electoral irregularities in January elections.

According to Zhovtis, 25 inmates in a labor camp were amnestied on January 25 in connection with the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence. The amnesty was adopted by the Kazakh government last year.

Zhovtis believes the regulation obliging all the amnestied inmates to stay in the labor camp for 15 days before their release is “hard to understand.”

“Any man, who served a part of his term established by law, and the [Criminal Code] statute, according to which he was sentenced, is eligible for amnesty, should be released immediately,” he said.

“I think that is obvious. But this decision, from my point of view, is absurd, because it is not clear for me who needs those 15 days. Why does the state need me and other [amnestied)] inmates to stay in our labor camp for another 15 days? What for?”

RTWT

Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Kazakh opposition leaders burned copies of election results today, as around 100 voters held a peaceful protest in Almaty, the country’s largest city, to dispute the results of a weekend poll. While the authorities claimed the snap election was the first step towards pluralist politics, independent observers dismissed the process as badly flawed and confirmation that the Central Asian post-Soviet republic “has only the barest fig leaf of a democratic system.”

The poll confirmed President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s grip on power , as the ruling Nur Otan party won 81 percent of the vote. Two nominally opposition parties entered the legislature: the pro-business Ak Zhol took 7.5 percent and the Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan 7.2 percent, said the Central Election Commission.

Nur Otan (“Ray of light of the fatherland”) was named in honor of Nazarbayev after he merged his Otan (“Fatherland”) party with his daughter Dariga’s Asar party in a move seen as consolidating the president’s power.

The “necessary conditions for the conduct of genuinely pluralistic elections, which are a prerequisite for functioning democratic institutions, were not provided for by the authorities,” said observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, citing government bans on opposition parties and candidates from contesting the election and media self-censorship.

Miklos Haraszti, the head of the OSCE’s long-term election-observation mission, criticized the “tightly controlled campaign environment in which the electoral rights of the citizens were seriously limited.”

“There was limited public debate and the media, the mass media operates in an environment characterized by self-censorship and in which there is no room for editorial independence in the broadcast media,” he said.

The “results of the election, including the presence of two parties apart from the state party, can be described as an orchestrated election,” Haraszti said, noting that the purported turnout of 75 percent should be listed in the Guinness book of records.

“Almost all of the voters participated in elections,” he said. “Almost everyone voted the same way.”

A video posted by Radio Liberty (above) showed ballot box stuffing by a woman who cast multiple ballots, claiming that elderly voters with poor eyesight asked her to vote on their behalf.

“Whether the small step toward pluralism, reflected by allowing new parties into Parliament, will suffice to diminish rising discontent remains to be seen,” one account suggests:

Kazakhstan is one of four Central Asian nations led by largely unreformed, Soviet-style potentates who appear increasingly anachronistic after the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Central Asia has been largely exempt from the protests elsewhere in the Muslim world, though the police shot into a crowd of protesting oil workers last month, killing at least 16 people.

But the election confirmed that the authorities claim to be pursuing a strategy of incremental democratization was bogus, said opposition groups.

“We won’t play by the rules set by the authorities anymore and will talk to them differently now,” Zharmakhan Tuyakbay, chairman of the National Social Democratic Party, said at the rally today. The Social Democrats – widely considered the only real opposition party contesting the polls – took 1.6 percent,  according to the Central Election Commission.

Activists and analysts alike say that the poll was part of a PR offensive by a regime trying to improve its international image a month after security forces killed striking oil workers in the western town of Zhanaozen.

“Nazarbayev needed to make political changes, because his health is failing and if oil prices fall there will be serious financial problems,” says Pyotr Svoik, a leader of the Azat Party.

“The one-party parliament was always an embarrassment, and the oil strike and its aftermath was an awful, unexpected event for the authorities. They made sure these elections would produce a better-looking parliament, but kept most genuine opposition parties from participating or winning enough votes to get into the parliament,” he said.

“Now there will be protests against electoral fraud, as there were in Russia last month though probably on a smaller scale. Nazarbayev is feeling alarmed, and he has good reasons to.”

The autocratic regime deserves credit for attracting over US$130 billion in foreign investment to exploit Kazakhstan’s vast but elusive oil reserves “while keeping the Russians out,”  says Washington-based economist Anders Aslund, But the country “fares very poorly on all social indicators,” while “miserable corporate governance” leaves corruption and cronyism unchecked.

The regime is following in Russia’s footsteps, analysts suggest, by establishing the illusion of pluralism in an ersatz managed democracy.

“The multiparty nature of Parliament will be decorative, as it is in Russia,” said Vladimir I. Kozlov, the chairman of the main liberal opposition party, Alga, which was denied registration for years.  “The other parties just create the illusion of differing opinions, not in fact having any influence on the dominant party or the president.”

Unlike in Russia, Kazakhstan’s opposition is unlikely to mount a serious challenge to the regime any time soon, some observers claim.

“I’d be more afraid for Putin’s fate today than that of Nazarbayev,” said political analyst Aidos Sarym. “Kazakhstan’s opposition doesn’t possess the symbolic capital that could be transformed into mass social protests.”

But other analysts believe that the socio-economic grievances that emerged in the Zhanoazen dispute could yet foment political unrest and force the regime into a political dilemma.

“We can expect future unrest in the oil-rich western provinces, and in some big factories, if economic difficulties lead to a reduction in state budgets for workers in these industries,” says Andrei Grozin, Moscow-based central Asia director at the official Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

“Kazakhstan cannot muster enough police force to keep order in the tough manner it did in Zhanoazen if unrest spreads,” he believes. “There is a real danger that strikes will spread in the spring, and authorities will be faced with the tough choice between buying the workers off or ordering in the Army.”

The regime even recruited former British premier Tony Blair to advise on economic reform and help give a PR makeover to the regime, reportedly as part of Nazarbayev’s personal campaign to secure a Nobel peace prize.

“The political system is largely the creation of one man [Nazarbayev], who first assumed power as Kazakhstan’s Communist Party leader in 1989,” according to Freedom House, the US-based rights and democracy monitor.

Does the experience of post-Soviet transitions bear lessons for the Arab Spring? A leading human rights activist considers how “to make change stick”  after the revolution.

“Twenty years ago, in July 1991, I was poised to start a job researching human rights violations in the Soviet Union,” writes Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at Human Rights Watch, in this extract from a must-read analysis in World Policy:

A month later, the failed coup to unseat Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev precipitated rapid political changes that would lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25. Watching these events, my family told me I would no longer have a job. Like many others, they assumed that the end of communism would usher in a new era of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in the Soviet Union’s successor states. I started my new job as planned and it only took five minutes to see that those assumptions were wrong.

The events of the Arab Spring provide an opportunity to assess some of the lessons learned from the post-Soviet transitions, she writes.

“Were our assumptions faulty? What could be done better, or differently, to promote human rights during tectonic societal shifts? Does the exercise have relevance beyond the region, particularly given the upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa?”

1. There is Nothing Inevitable about Transitions to Democracy

Soviet Union watchers have seen how the collapse of a repressive, authoritarian regime in no way guarantees the arrival of a government committed to human rights.

The reasons vary, but in several Central Asian countries, for example, the leaders and political classes in 1991 had no interest whatsoever in relinquishing power. They worked to neuter alternative political forces demanding change. As a result, the institutional reforms necessary for accountable government, pluralism, and effective protection of human rights never happened.

In much of the region, entrenched post-Soviet authoritarian leaders allowed for some openings, but held onto power, resulting in political and social stagnation. In scenes not dissimilar from the Arab world in 2011, people in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan took to the streets demanding fair elections and political reform. But the experience of the so-called color revolutions of 2003 to 2005 is a sobering reminder that popular uprisings do not automatically or necessarily lead to good human rights outcomes.

2. Guard against Misplaced Blame

In the aftermath of political upheaval, people become disillusioned as they cope with economic, political, and social instability. Many come to blame “democracy” for their suffering.

The end of the Soviet era brought about real and colossal privations for millions who lost their life savings, jobs, and sense of identity and dignity. In Russia, privatization programs under Yeltsin favored a handful of Kremlin cronies who bought up the most valuable state assets at bargain-basement prices in exchange for crucial political backing. It is not surprising that many of those who lost out blamed their struggles not on the deeply rooted flaws of the ancien regime, but on “democracy” and human rights movements, seeing them as the handmaiden of chaos. Putin exploited this anger and a growing sense of public nostalgia for the Soviet era.

A lesson here is that Western policymakers who care about human rights need to support institutions rather than individual leaders. The enthusiastic support the West at times showed Yeltsin during the chaotic 1990s or Saakashvili during the early days after the Rose Revolution, backfired in the long run. As popular opinion about the democratic credentials of each soured, so too did popular backing for more far-reaching democratic and human rights reforms.

3. Institutionalize Strong Minority Rights Protections

Both during and after the shattering of the Soviet Union, many parts of the region succumbed to armed conflicts whose roots, for the most part, lay deep in the Soviet past. ……….. Toward the end of the Soviet era and after, both the Kremlin and several Soviet successor states responded to new nationalist demands and movements with force. There were secessionist wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, and Transistria, devastating communal violence in places like Osh and Ingushetia, and a civil war in Tajikistan.

The lasting harm of these conflicts, most of which remain frozen, should serve as an important warning about the need to respect minority rights and build tolerance among minority and majority populations. New governments need to address past minority grievances, ensure language and confessional rights, give minorities a place in law enforcement and security agencies, act swiftly to protect minorities from violence, and initiate public discussions that emphasize tangible common interests that transcend ethnic and confessional differences.

4. International Institutions Matter

Another lesson is the importance of motivating states in transition to join international institutions and processes that champion human rights. The international system includes a panoply of institutions dedicated to human rights protection like the European Union and the Council of Europe. However, these institutions should not take ratification of human rights treaties at face value. They need to become actively involved in supporting democratic and human rights reform in countries “in transition.”

5. Establish Concrete Human Rights Benchmarks and Give Them Teeth

Experience in the former Soviet Union region, particularly in Central Asia, highlights the importance of setting out human rights benchmarks as a condition for international engagement and unrelentingly pursuing their implementation.

One of the most disappointing developments in this regard was the EU’s failure to hold firm in demanding human rights improvements in Uzbekistan as a condition for dropping sanctions imposed on the government following the May 2005 killings by government forces of hundreds of civilian protesters in the city of Andijan.

A related lesson is that assigning an abusive government exceptional status in light of its strategic importance sabotages efforts to get it to improve its human rights record. Western policymakers like to point to Kazakhstan as a regional leader in a rough neighborhood. Led by Germany and France, the EU warmly supported Kazakhstan’s bid to chair OSCE in 2010, though Kazakhstan’s brand of soft authoritarianism made it an inappropriate choice for an organization with a mandate to promote democracy and human rights.

International actors should also learn from the post-Soviet experience that viewing human rights and security interests as tradeoffs is exactly the false choice repressive leaders want them to make, and that bargaining with dictators over human rights concerns will not lead to a good outcome.

6. Support a Strong Civil Society

A resoundingly positive lesson of the last 20 years has been the importance of support for civil society in countries in and beyond transition. These are the organizations and media outlets that, in the absence of checks and balances in post-Soviet authoritarian regimes, are doing the most to hold their governments accountable, often providing services to help the public access their often opaque governments and exposing government corruption and wrongdoing.

In many countries these communities are now so deeply rooted and vibrant that it is easy to forget that they are in fact quite new. At the same time, no one should take their vitality for granted. Over the past 10 years, one government after another in the region has adopted laws restricting non-governmental organizations and has used an arsenal of bureaucratic tools to harass and overburden them, and, in some countries, imprison their leader. The creation of civil society throughout the region was one of the signal achievements of the glasnost era, and policymakers need to support them now more than ever.

The 20 years of post-Soviet experience should lead policymakers to embrace the opportunity for change in the Middle East. They should be guided, though, not by heady optimism, but by an enduring commitment to universal principles, far-reaching institutional reforms, and strong support for the people who continue to fight for both.

RTWT

At least 10– and perhaps as many as 70 – people were killed and up to 500 wounded in Kazakhstan today when police opened fire on striking oil workers. Violence erupted as hundreds of workers protested in Zhanaozen, an industrial town in the western Mangistau region, disrupting a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence.

Elite special forces were deployed against the strikers, according to an eye-witness.

“There are these OMONs [special security forces],” Aitkul Nurova, a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose father was injured, told RFE/RL. “Some people were shot in the head and are dying. Some of them were shot in the chest and are badly injured. Some of them are dying. So many of them.”

Workers employed by KazMunaiGas and CITIC, a Chinese investment group, in the Ozenmunaigas oil field went on strike to demand better pay and conditions. The company dismissed over 900 strikers after a court ruling deemed the stoppage illegal, and workers have since held protests and sit-ins to demand reinstatement.

The clashes erupted when protesters destroyed the traditional “yurt” felt tents and a concert stage erected in Zhanaozen’s central square, which workers had been occupying.

“They were outraged that the administration was preparing a holiday for the town’s residents … and they started pelting stones at people walking by,” Zhanna Oishibayeva, an aide to the regional governor, told Reuters.

The authorities were determined to end the strikers’ longstanding occupation of the central square where the shootings occurred, said Vladimir Kozlov, head of an unregistered opposition party.

“The fact that the people have been standing on the square for seven months and not leaving irritates them,” he told K-Plus. “They haven’t used DDT [pesticide] yet, but they have tried all other means. They are still standing. This irritates the authorities the most.”

The authorities appear to have gone on the offensive just days after the strikers’ demands became more politicized, including the right to form independent unions and political parties.  

“Simple people are demanding respect and a just relationship to labor from their government,” said a leaflet distributed by strikers this week, which also called for the release of Natalya Sokolova, a lawyer who has represented the strikers, and the right to form independent parties.

The political sensitivity of the protests is evident in the regime’s blanket censorship of media coverage:

In a sign that Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government was attempting to contain information on developments in Zhanaozen, internet users reported being unable to open independent news websites or Twitter. Virtually all domestic media failed to cover the events throughout Friday, as lavish celebrations took place in the capital, Astana, to mark the independence anniversary.

“This could be a wake-up call that Kazakhstan is facing a potentially turbulent transition period,” said Kate Mallinson, a central Asia expert at the GPQ political risk consultancy.

The violence is a setback for Nursultan Nazarbayev, [Reuters reports] the authoritarian president of Kazakhstan, who hosted lavish independence day celebrations in Astana this week to burnish his country’s image as a global oil power and safe destination for foreign investment. Analysts said the unrest was likely to bring a security crackdown in Kazakhstan which is preparing to hold a parliamentary election next month.

Kazakhstan is reportedly eager to improve its international image. Nazarbayev even recruited former British premier Tony Blair to advise on economic reform and help give a PR makeover to the regime, reportedly as part of Nazarbayev’s personal campaign to secure a Nobel peace prize. Kazakhstan has come under fire for its record on human rights and democracy.

“The political system is largely the creation of one man [Nazarbayev], who first assumed power as Kazakhstan’s Communist Party leader in 1989,” according to Freedom House.

Emerging reports suggest that Kazakhstan’s government is planning to release the country’s most prominent dissident.

Justice Minister Rashid Tusupbekov is believed to be considering a pardon for imprisoned human rights activist Evgeny Zhovtis (right).

Zhovtis was sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally striking and killing a man with his car. Independent observers consider the prosecution to be politically-motivated and the legal proceedings deeply flawed.

The United States and other Western democracies have pressed the authorities in Astana to release Zhovtis on the grounds that his trial lacked due process, most recently during this week’s meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the gathering to make a forceful speech on human rights and it is believed that she raised the case with her Kazakh counterparts.

Kazakhstan is reportedly eager to improve its international image activists. President Nursultan Nazarbayev even recruited former British premier Tony Blair to advise on economic reform and help give a PR makeover to the regime, reportedly as part of Nazarbayev’s personal campaign to secure a Nobel peace prize. Kazakhstan has come under fire for its record on human rights and democracy.

“The political system is largely the creation of one man [Nazarbayev], who first assumed power as Kazakhstan’s Communist Party leader in 1989,” according to Freedom House.

Zhovtis is director of Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, and as a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy.

The regime has repressed striking oil workers pressing for independent unions

Democracy advocates and opposition figures in Kazakhstan are urging Tony Blair to press authoritarian president Nursultan Nazarbayev to initiate democratic reform or resign from his new role as a counselor to the government.

The regime recruited the former British premier to advise on economic reform and help give a PR makeover to his regime, reportedly as part of Nazarbayev’s personal campaign to secure a Nobel peace prize. Kazakhstan has come under fire for its record on human rights and democracy.

The Financial Times reports:

Mukhtar Ablyazov, the former chairman of Kazakhstan’s BTA bank who has waged a campaign against the government from exile in London, has written to Mr Blair warning he risks playing a destructive role in Kazakhstan unless he pushes Mr Nazarbayev to embrace democratic reforms.

“Attempts by western democracies to play along with the leaders of Iraq and Libya have ended up in multimillion dollar losses and hundreds of lives of young soldiers,” says the letter, obtained by the FT. “I hope that you have learned from these lessons and will either encourage Nazarbayev to change or resign from this spurious [advisory] role.”

“The political system is largely the creation of one man, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who first assumed power as Kazakhstan’s Communist Party leader in 1989,” according to Freedom House.

“Nazarbayev has often urged that Kazakhstan be viewed as a bridge between Asia and Europe,” the rights watchdog notes. “Politically, though, the leadership in Kazakhstan has been unwilling to commit to European norms for democratic governance.”

Rights groups have highlighted the case of jailed democracy advocate Yevgeny Zhovtis, the director of Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law and a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy. He is serving a four-year prison sentence following a car accident in which a man was killed. The prosecution was politically-motivated and the legal proceedings flawed, according to independent observers.

The regime’s repressive tactics have been evident most recently in its efforts to repress a strike by workers in the oil-rich province of Mangistau. The oil workers are demanding a wage increase, parity with foreign workers, and an end to restrictions on independent labor unions.

Credit: BBC

The daughter of an independent union leader was killed, activists attacked, and journalists beaten with baseball bats while covering the strike. Natalya Sokolova, a lawyer representing the strikers, was recently sentenced to six years in prison for “igniting social unrest,” RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reports.

The dispute indicates the government’s failure to spread the country’s wealth and its vulnerability to social unrest, analyst Dosym Satpayev told the BBC.

“Kazakhstan is a rich country with small population, but in those regions where there is plenty of oil and gas people continue to live in poverty. Now many people are beginning to ask why,” he said.

A recent visit to the strikers by a social democrat leader critical of Nazarbayev has the authorities worried.

“When the opposition tried to use it for its own political goals, I think some political structures became afraid that this social protest might spread to other regions of Kazakhstan,” he said.

On a recent trip to investigate the strike, Human Rights Watch researcher Mihra Rittmann “had just a small taste of the kind of surveillance and harassment workers in the oil sector have been subjected to.”

In his new capacity as adviser to Nazarbayev, Tony Blair “should start by telling him that freeing Sokolova, ending the harassment of oil workers, and guaranteeing rights to freedom of association, expression and assembly … are essential steps his government should take to improve its image,” Rittman says.

“Repressive tactics so obviously on display in Kazakhstan have no place in a country boasting the fastest growing economy in central Asia,” said Rachel Derber, HRW’s deputy director of Europe and central Asia. “People advising Kazakhstan should begin with the rule of law and basic human rights.”

Recently published diplomatic cables include a U.S. Embassy official’s lengthy account of Kazakh leaders’ “endemic corruption,” penchant for heavy drinking and other extravagant behavior. Officials “are able to indulge in their hobbies on a grand scale, whether flying Elton John to Kazakhstan for a concert or trading domestic property for a palace in the United Arab Emirates,” the cable notes.

Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Vladimir Putin’s stage-managed re-assumption of Russia’s presidency reveals the subtleties of Russia’s new authoritarianism and casts light on the architect of its ‘sovereign’ or ‘managed’ democracy, writes Peter Pomerantsev in a must-read essay:

It’s the apotheosis of what has become known as ‘managed democracy’, and the ultimate triumph of the show’s writer-director, Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov [above, left], the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.

Surkov personifies the shifting allegiances, deep cynicism and aggressive opportunism that infect Russia’s body politic, Pomerantsev suggests:

He trained at a martial arts club with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then one of Russia’s emerging young business stars. Khodorkovsky took him on as a bodyguard, saw he had more use for his brains than his muscles and promoted him to PR manager. He became known for his ability not only to think up ingenious PR campaigns but to manipulate others into getting them distributed in the major media with a mixture of charm, aggression and bribery. ‘Surkov acts like a Chekist of the 1920s and 1930s,’ Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst, said. ‘He can always sniff out your weak spot.’

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

It is little wonder that popular sentiment is similarly plagued by fatalist pessimism, according to recent polling from the Levada Center, Russia’s most reputable polling group. A majority of Russians expect the results of the forthcoming State Duma and presidential elections will be manipulated.

“People understand what political system they have and that they have no influence over it,” Levada analyst Denis Volkov told The New York Times.

54 percent expect the elections will be unfair and 62 percent believe that the Kremlin’s “dirty tactics” will benefit United Russia’s favor, Volkov recently told a Washington forum.

“People expect falsifications, violations and unfair competition,” he told a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group that sponsored the research.

An innovative political technologist and prime exponent of pre-emptive authoritarianism, Surkov realizes that the state need not revert to Soviet-style blanket repression to neuter political opposition. Selective intimidation, beatings and occasional executions of prominent dissidents will suffice, but the first step to retaining power is to delegitimize the opposition:

In a neat instance of calling black white, the Surkov-controlled media refer to liberal supporters of Khodorkovsky as the ‘demoshiza’ (short for ‘democratic schizophrenics’), when it is the Surkovian ideology that is, in the vulgar sense, schizophrenic: it’s Khodorkovsky’s supporters who demand consistency. The ‘demoshiza’ tag also serves a useful purpose in conflating ‘democracy’ with ‘mental illness’.

Surkov’s success is evident in the hollowing-out of Russia’s democratic institutions and the marginalization of the opposition.

“There has been a complete destruction of the institution of democratic elections in Russia, all of which has taken place with the direct participation and approval of all levels of state authority,” said a group of leading democracy activists, in an open letter the Council of Europe on the eve of the ruling United Russia’s party conference.

The democracy advocates petitioned the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly to confirm Russia’s lack of a fair electoral process.

The authorities were only allowing selective registration of political parties and the mainstream media was actively promoting the ruling party ahead of the December 4 elections, said the letter, signed by prominent activists and dissidents, including Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina.*

Surkov and his acolytes have both nurtured and benefit from a political culture a weird blend of despotism and postmodernism, Pomerantsev writes in The London Review of Books:

In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).

This fusion of despotism and postmodernism, in which no truth is certain, is reflected in the craze among the Russian elite for neuro-linguistic programming and Eriksonian hypnosis: types of subliminal manipulation based largely on confusing your opponent, first developed in the US in the 1960s. There are countless NLP and Eriksonian training centres in Moscow, with every wannabe power-wielder shelling out thousands of dollars to learn how to be the next master manipulator.

A more recent Levada Center poll about the murder of campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya (right), found that over half of respondents believed the initiator of the crime would never be exposed, while one in four believe that the security services were responsible.

“We might conclude from these responses that Russian people are not ignorant or naïve about their government; they are just fatalistic,” writes Amy Knight, author of Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors, Who Killed Kirov: The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery, and How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies.

And yet:

In a recent interview on Ekho Moskvy, Gennady Gudkov, a retired FSB colonel who is deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Security, predicted that a severe crisis would occur within just a few years of a Putin presidency—a crisis that could, he implied, bring the traditionally passive Russian people out on to the streets. (In January 2005, there were massive protests throughout the country by pensioners against Putin because their benefits had been reduced.).

“As the Arab uprisings have reminded us,” Knight concludes, “fatalism is not necessarily a permanent state.”

But, analysts suggest, the question remains whether Russia’s inchoate democratic opposition and civil society groups can position themselves to take advantage of the looming legitimacy crisis. With Washington’s likely new envoy to Moscow affirming that the US should “do more” to assist Russia’s democrats, his appointment could not have been better timed.

The Levada Center and the Moscow Helsinki Group are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

*The head of Civic Assistance. NED supports the group’s work providing legal assistance to refugees threatened with illegal deportation or extradition to Central Asia’s authoritarian regimes.