Arggh.
Just when it looked as if we might have a chance to retire the McFaul-Surkov Commission, a vehicle for misplaced hopes about the "Russian reset" about which I've been highly critical (they were right when they translated that term incorrectly the first time as "overload") — our government is doing a stupid thing.
The State Department is revising and continuing the commission, now with two new co-chairs, Tom Melia, deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights, and Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian commissar for human rights.
In recent testimony before the Senate, Melia in part justifies the continuation of the commission by citing his consultations with unnamed civil society activists in Russia. But no, I don't care what Yuri Dzhibladze, the Moscow human rights establishment's emissar to foreign conferences, cares about this.
Protests are raging in Russia — manipulated, to be sure, but still with some authentic sentiment — and instead of ceasing our propping up of the Kremlin, we're extending it. We should not be doing this.
As the blogger Oleg Kozlovsky put it on Twitter, all Russian protesters ask of the West these days is to stop supporting Putin — "we'll do the rest," he says.
Indeed. So why aren't we dismantling this silly commission instead of giving it more shelf life? Worse, why are we extending it when the Russians have replaced one disreputable figure with another?
On our side, Michael McFaul is stepping down because he's been nominated by President Obama as ambassador to Russia — although his confirmation is held up in one of those holds that so often happen to stop progress in foreign policy. Sen. Kirk, who has done this sort of hold-up before, is asking for confirmation that the US will not give sensitive technological information to Russia in the BMD talks (if I understood correctly) to ensure that they won't hand it to Iran.
Given that the Russians just found some nukes at the border they've confiscated –– although curiously, didn't detain the person taking them to Iran (?!), this isn't a trivial matter at all. I actually don't understand why Obama couldn't give Kirk the assurances, but there may be more about this I haven't heard.
In any event, McFaul is in waiting, and in his place has been appointed Tom Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (see his recent testimony). Melia was previously a program director at Freedom House, and since joining the Obama Administration has put on a lot of frequent flyer miles taking part in unpleasant human rights bilaterals, raising cases and issues with the envoys of the world's despots. All well and good. His testimony says all the right things — except the two-track policy (not of his making). "Two-track" means State Department officials attempt to contort themselves into pretzels to talk to both rude, outrageous Kremlin officials and sometimes accommodationist civil society leaders — and this strikes me as increasingly unnecessary these days.
That is, the problem with the Commission as I've always aid is that it reifies a process that doesn't need to be institutionalized as a flawed, unrepresentative body that is compromised in its activities. You can arrange bilateral talks with Russia about burning human rights issues without creating a joint commission — that's a Sovietism. You can hold a meeting without having to accept the constant constraints of commissariats. The problem with creating the commissariat is the it spawns feel-goods like technology fairs and happy speeches about using technology to build civil society, and it spawns those civil-society-for-export types speaking English that don't really represent their country.
I keep seeing before me the video clip of Alena Popova, a woman of what you might call the loyal opposition in Just Russia, warbling about tech and start-ups and contacts at one of Mike's commission meetings, and then the Facebook picture of her being beaten up by Moscow riot police despite her "candidate" badge. Are we getting beyond commissions here, and just a bit more grown-up than the "civsoc 2.0" stage would have us infantalized at?
I've been particularly critical of the selection of topics in the "civil society working group" because I think they deliberately tended, especially at first, to the non-confrontational and vegetarian, like child rights and anti-corruption. That is, sure, these topics, when done seriously, are very much a challenge to the government, but they happen to be two areas that the government has successfully coopted, and where figures like Navalny, the star anti-corruptioneer, has some suspect aspects to him (nationalism, xenophobia).
Prison conditions sounds a lot more promising, but even that topic got converted to one of those deals where we go over there with the ACLU and talk about our prison problems…then wait while they talk about theirs. It's not sincere.
So on our side, I find a certain amount to criticize, although there are things that have been done right — the visa bans for those who participated in the murder of Magnitsky in detention; the…action…against Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal leader of Chechnya (if I read the testimony right — it's not clear that "denied opportunity to showcase his wealth" means the same thing as "visa ban"), and the regular statements on human rights violations — to be sure, often exiled to the pages of the US mission to the OSCE, or humanrights.gov or some other burial ground, and not on whitehouse.gov, but still…
But now let's look closer at who we're getting on the Russian side as the new commissar — and why this commission therefore should be disbanded or at least stalled indefinitely.
Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, is to replace Surkov. At one superficial level, this is a good thing — he's the more appropriate counterpart for the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour than the Kremlin's grey cardinal, Surkov. Surkov (Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, born Aslambek Andarbekovich Dudaev), was the president's chief of staff, in a system where that job had more power even than it does in the White House.
But Dolgov is associated with two bad things — supporting anti-gay legislation in St. Petersburg and ranting about alleged US "interference in internal affairs" for protesting against the legislation, which would discriminate against LGBT.
On the first issue, you might think that as the Kremlin's human rights commissar, Dolgov might be forced to support a piece of legislation actually consistent with the majority of conservative Russian opinion on this controversial subject.
But in fact, commissars, even in Russia, don't have to do such things. They can allow papers to get lost on their desks. They can dodge and stall and wait — they are well-practiced at doing such things. They can just do nothing — and that can be progress, when it comes to a bad bill like this.
You don't see Lukin, Russia's human rights ombudsman, saying anything about this legislation — pro or con. And that's how you do it in Russia.
As gay.ru reported (translated by africa.ilga.org), the ombudsman's human rights report contained not a single word about LGBT. That's terrible, and cowardly. But, as I said, in a situation where you have officials actively taking anti-gay positions and supporting discriminatory legislation, that's a bit of progress.
And Dolgov, even being the president's human rights commissar (as distinct from the country's ombudsman, nominated by parliament), could have done nothing, too. He didn't. Instead he took a very vocal stance.
As for the anti-Americanism and outrage at "interference" that came along with the anti-gay stance, that was also unnecessary.
Dolgov called the State Department's criticism of the law "incorrect," and then
“We are perplexed by the American side’s attempts to interfere in the legislative process in Russia, especially publicly.
“We consider these attempts inappropriate and inconsistent with the practice of interstate relations.”
The 1975 Helsinki Final Act and all the subsequent agreements of the CSCE and then OSCE established that expression of concern about human rights in another state is not interference in internal affairs, but rather upholding of the universal standards by which all are bound.
The Russians often bristle at these "interferences" and then treat it as a game — they've even got an old perestroika stalwart installed in New York in an institute that is supposed to monitor human rights and democracy in the US and comment, much the way Freedom House and other groups comment on Russia critically. They aren't sincere in these types of efforts, so the results are predictable.
Dolgov himself, abandoning all his principles about "non-interference," was happy to bash the US this week for the alleged police crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Of course, we missed him when the Moscow police were doing worse to orderly protesters just coming for the day to Moscow parks to protest the failure to ensure Art. 31 of the Constitution. (There's a huge difference between the arrests in Moscow for lawful peaceful assembly and New York police dispersing long-term urban campers documented as disturbing the peace, or deliberate stagers of civil disobedience actions such as closing bridges or blocking traffic who have to expect a police arrest. There's also a world of difference between the remedies available in the US in the form of independent lawyers and courts who can address actual cases of police brutality when they occur — and get action, as they already have with OWS-related abuses — and the Russian system. So let's be clear on that, and not look down at our shoes, please.)
Obama himself on his first time out to Russia didn't get this "no non-interference" Helsinki principle right — the human rights community was cringing when he conceded to his Russian interlocutors at the time that the Khodorkovsky case was an internal affair — even as he did the right thing by raising it in the first place. That took awhile to undo.
And here we all are now. At a time when the US has issued a criticism of this anti-gay legislation, and gotten a very sharp rebuff from the commissar not only regarding the law, but their criticism — not to mention all the demonstrations in Moscow — it's just not the time to be bilateralling.
Instead, stall. Hold side meetings and side trips without this commission. New people might be along sooner than you think.
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