Memorial for Estemirova, July 16, 2009. Photo by tigerclaws.

Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has a defiant piece published on Foreign Policy containing the details of the appalling threats to HRW's Russian researcher in Moscow, Tanya Lokshina.

I believe these threats — coupled with a variety of other threats, beatings, arrests of human rights activists and civil society figures in general in Russia — mean it's time to close the HRW office and do work on Russia from abroad, with occasional visits and help to local monitors.

I realize this won't be a popular position — and I also realize that in the sacred human rights movement, one is never supposed to violate the 11th commandment and criticize another human rights activist. So be it. I think the human rights movement needs critics, and I think their reports need reviews.

I'm also aware, having debated Roth at times over the years or seen others take him on such as in this New York Review of Books discussion, that he will have a hundred lawerly objections, scholarly corrections, and the force and might of George Soros, Skype and all HRW's many other powerful backers and funders, and the media such as the New York Times behind him. So be it. I have to express what I believe about this.

I worked at Human Rights Watch for 10 years in the 1980s and 1990s in a very different era. And I've worked at other human rights groups since and travelled to Russia and other countries in the region many times. But I haven't wanted to go back to Russia in recent years for purely instinctive reasons: I don't think it's safe. Everybody has their own threshold for this perception, but the problem with war correspondents and human rights activists working in dangerous and violent zones is that they suffer a kind of addiction — and they can become the proverbial frogs in the pot of boiling water.

 

Ken,

I'll tell you what's the miscalculation here: keeping Human Rights Watch's office in Moscow open,  exposing the staff to harm, and making it seem as if high-profile, well-funded international organizations with lots of media coverage can face down the KGB. It’s important to remember that when it comes to dealing with deadly regimes, they are professionals and we are amateurs — they possess the resources and the information that even the best-resourced group abroad cannot muster, even with Havel’s “power of the powerless”.

When Natalya Estemirova was assassinated — and Tanya Lokshina had stayed at her  home the night before and was working in this dangerous zone — some of us thought you should have immediately extracted her and her husband and any other staff out of Moscow. You didn't, citing her own wishes to stay. While your protests about this murder of a researcher involved directly with your reports were made then and later, they haven’t been at the forefront of HRW’s work — troubling, given that in the history of HRW, no one else associated with staff was ever murdered. When there have been US-Russian summits, you don't seem to protest.

In fact, your Russia policy stressed attempts at cooperation or at least dialogue with the government, a notion crafted by Tom Malinowski, a former Clinton Administration official now serving as Washington office director for HRW. There was a theory that Russia was a country you should "engage" with, and was in a different category than other countries with abusive regimes — which was as misled as Obama‘s own reset, although obviously HRW leadership thought it should be pursued at that time.

On July 7, 2009, HRW and other liberal human rights advocates from the US and Russia made the decision to participate in the "Civil Society Summit" in Moscow cunningly staged by Putin to distract from his human rights crimes — a meeting at which President Obama spoke and which was emblematic of his "reset". You tried to use that occasion to try to have serious human rights meetings with Russian officials. The result? Well, Estimirova was killed a week later on July 15, 2009. There couldn't be results. They are not serious; they weren't then, they aren't now. You don't engage with killers.

Malinowski's policy, evidently a function of “progressive” politics, might have been justified as a kind of gimmick — like trying to engage the Burlatsky Commission in the 1990s. But to keep it up past the sell-by date is wrong. It has to go. It's not working. By keeping the office open, you maintain a pretense that you can have business as usual in Russia. It's like the very prolonged quiet diplomacy you had with Tashkent in 2011, when your researcher was strung along — you should have closed and re-opened in Bishkek or even Vienna, announcing that work is impossible in oppressive Uzbekistan before enduring the ignominy of being expelled.

The same is true now with Russia — it's time to close and decamp to Vienna, where all the OSCE ambassadors are located and advocacy work can continue, and stop feeding the Kremlin's facade. The idea that local activists gain protection from foreigners is now outdated — they are already called foreign agents for having any foreign ties or funding, and the "foreign card" that we have always sought to play with Moscow for 30 years is rather shopworn and may even draw fire. Yes, local activists need protection and collaboration – but that can happen in other ways — foreign human rights advocates can get 30-day visas for temporary visits and can approach various high-profile delegations going to Russia to take up issues — it doesn't have to mean that you become a sitting duck with a target painted on your back.

I have the greatest respect for Tanya and know of her incredible dedication and determination. But you have to take precautions for staff on their behalf, and not let a pregnant woman — or even a young man without a family — go into a war zone and investigate enforced disappearances when your local colleague was murdered there, when other activists and civilians alike have been killed, when all human rights activists are being called “foreign agents,“ and when it is not necessary to get the story. Quieter less visible local monitors are doing the job still.

You can redouble your efforts to document and publicize human rights violations, but it doesn't have to be by exposing foreign and local staff to attacks with a permanent office.

The phrase "Allah Akbar" is sometimes spelled with only one "l" in this region as you can see on Google and Youtube — although I agree that this is likely the Russian intelligence services pretending to be Islamists, not real Islamists.

I don't think anyone wins any contests by being the last foreign office standing in Moscow, just as they didn't in Tashkent, as one by one, all the internationals were picked off. We should not grace them. We should shame them. Shaming takes place by leaving, not staying.

Then there are a whole host of advocacy actions that can be taken — lobbying to have the dysfunctional and misleading US-Russian Commission closed down, as a fiction particularly on human rights and the rule of law; supporting sanctions under the Magnitsky Act and other human rights legislation; publicizing the reports of local monitors such as Memorial Society, Nizhny Novgorod Committee Against Torture, Caucasian Knot more, and so on.

Russia today is not like the Soviet Union that Helsinki Watch began working in more than 30 years ago. There is today as you say a vibrant civil society and even independent TV, not to mention blogs. These are all under threat, but those involved aren't passive and are hardening themselves for the struggle.

But Russia is actually more deadly than it was in the Soviet era precisely because of the breakdown of order and the presence of so many factions and rogue agents and militants. A Putin parody that shows all the outrageous crimes he is associated with in a 12-minute span sums it up (a decoding can be found here).

A great deal more work should be down to stress Russia's ownership of the mass crimes against humanity in Syria, and to shift the pressure from the US and EU, which HRW always naturally gravitates to, toward Russia, at the UN and other international arenas. No, there should be no more talk of a "reset" — and no more engagement from HRW, either.