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InvisibleArp
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The OSCE Criticizes Russia: Double Standards, Not “Gold Standard”
    #7716467 - 12/04/07 05:14 PM (16 years, 1 month ago)

The Russian parliamentary elections, held on 2nd December, have been the object of scathing attack by international observers. First among the attack dogs has been the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The leader of the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly, Göran Lennmarker, said, “It was not a fair election.” Observers from the Council of Europe and other Western bodies have made similar damning statements.

Western readers may not be aware that this OSCE is the same organisation whose Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), two weeks before the Russian poll, said that it could not send a team of observers at all to Russia because the authorities had been so obstructive (by not issuing visas in time) that it would be unable to conduct a meaningful observation mission. Welcoming that decision, which it may well have inspired, the US State Department said that the OSCE and specifically ODIHR were the “gold standard” of election observing.

If you are wondering how one part of an organisation says it cannot observe a poll properly, and yet another part of the same organisation did observe it and criticised it harshly, then read on. Far from providing a “gold standard” of election observing, the OSCE’s evaluations on elections are in fact a worthless paper currency which fluctuates alarmingly, and not according to market pressures but instead as a result of direct political control. Indeed, I predicted that the OSCE would interfere in these elections when speaking at a discussion with a leading United Russia politician, Oleg Morozov, in Moscow in September.

The OSCE’s elections reports simply reflect the political imperatives of the West: allies hold good elections, enemies bad ones. These reports are in any case are always written before the poll has taken place: I know, because I discovered one once in a hotel bar in Montenegro in 1998, the day before the elections. This time round, the Russian parliamentary elections which were condemned in advance by one British Labour MP, a frequent OSCE observer, in October, when he said that there was no way they would be fair. I also know numerous observers, for instance in Belarus and Ukraine, who have been part of OSCE missions but whose observations, when going against the party line, have been simply removed from the final report. Indeed, it would be a good project for an M.A. student to ask for the documentation from an election observing mission (for instance, from the time of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004) and to examine to what extent the final reports are actually based on the notes actually made by the observers themselves. My view is that they are not at all.

The result is breathtaking double standards. This is the same OSCE which welcomed the 2004 presidential elections in Georgia as having “brought the country closer to international standards for democratic elections,” in spite of the fact that the by then incumbent president, Mikheil Saakashvili – who, for the first time since Hitler and Stalin, had made his party’s flag the national flag of the country he governs – won 96.24% of the vote, and in spite of the fact that that election, like most in Georgia, was marred by corruption, intimidation and violence. I confidently predict that the new elections called in Georgia for January 2008, will be treated with similar indulgence the OSCE, even though the original euphoria of the “rose revolution” of 2003-2004 has now evaporated: the heroes of that hour have fallen out and become enemies, emergency rule was introduced last month and we were treated to the edifying spectacle of the army and police deploying tear gas and water cannon against impoverished Georgian protesters. But Saakashvili must be kept in at all costs, since he has promised to bring his country into NATO: he is “our son of a bitch”.

The tactic of not sending an observer mission, on the pretext that conditions are so bad that the election cannot even be monitored, has been deployed at least twice by the OSCE, once in Albanian in 1996 and once in Belarus in 2000. As with the Russian parliamentary elections on Sunday, this did not stop Western observers from condemning those polls anyway. It is a tactic customarily employed when the West knows or fears in advance that the outcome of a poll will be politically uncomfortable for it. As even President Putin’s bitterest enemies admit, he is immensely popular in Russia and any party he leads is bound to do well in the polls.

On occasions, the OSCE even turns against democracy completely. In September 2006, for instance, the tiny secessionist territory of Transnistria held a referendum on independence from Moldova (from which it has been de facto independent since 1992). A massive majority of Transnistrians voted for the continuation of the country’s current course away from Chişinău (with which it has no common history at all, except as a joint member of the old Soviet Union) and towards Moscow. But the OSCE Chairman in Office, the Belgian Foreign Minister, Karel de Gucht, pronounced that the result of the referendum itself would never be recognised because the West supports the territorial integrity of Moldova.

The interference of the West in the political development of post-Communist Europe is a matter of public record, and bogus election observation reports are an integral part of this strategy. That is extremely disagreeable for the nations of Eastern Europe, who have suffered enough from Eastern imperialism not now to merit Western. But the OSCE has also started to observe Western elections too. In particular, it observed the June 2007 elections in Belgium – the very ones which have failed to produce a government, which is in turn making the break-up of the country a possibility. Given that the OSCE allows itself to pronounce both on the regularity of elections (it welcomed that poll) and on the right (or not) of territories to secede from the states to which they belong, it would not be foolish, I feel, to predict that the OSCE will take more than a passing interest in any future poll on the independence of Flanders.

source: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2737


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InvisibleArp
roving mycophagist
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Registered: 04/20/98
Posts: 2,191
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Re: The OSCE Criticizes Russia: Double Standards, Not “Gold Standard” [Re: Arp]
    #7716501 - 12/04/07 05:21 PM (16 years, 1 month ago)

What do you guys think? Pretty scary if it's true


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