Kyrygstan Protests Redux of 2005

Back in 2005, a series of protests rocked the landlocked Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, and eventually unseated the government of President Askar Akayev. Now, angry mobs carrying weapons have filled the central square in Bishkek, not far from where the United States maintains a key airbase, and the country’s president appears to have fled the capital. Is this a repeat of events in 2005, or does the violent unrest in Central Asia portend something new and more worrisome?

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/#ixzz0kVgkJmri

The events in the Kyrgyz Republic have unfolded rapidly and news organizations have been struggling to provide relevant context and analysis. This blog will attempt to provide some insight and analysis from the perspective of a practioner and academic who has lived and worked in the region.

More updates will be posted later today to this blog.

Kiev to Moscow: Diverging Views of Democracy

In the early morning hours after the recent parliamentary election in Ukraine, I struggled to stay awake in a cramped, over-heated old Soviet Cultural Center in a small village south-east of Kiev. As an election observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), my team and I had observed voting and ballot counting for almost 24 hours throughout the region. Bleary-eyed, I paced along the table where hundreds of long, brown paper ballots were stacked on tables in front of me meticulously counted by the exhausted members of the local election commission. As I watched the process two words came to mind: tedious and transparent.

Elections are a long and tedious operation; like sausage making, not a pretty process to witness. Ukraine has been building its election muscles over the past few years with the most well publicized held in the winter of 2004—the “Orange” revolution. The image of tens of thousands of citizens camping in the snow for weeks became an international symbol for the new spirit of democracy in the former Soviet states.

From my team’s perspective, the election process was transparent and conducted in an open manner. We observed no major violations in the areas we visited, a reality reflected in the OSCE preliminary report. In 98 per cent of polling stations visited “observers assessed the voting process as good or very good.” The transparency of the recent election demonstrates Ukraine’s hard worked at creating a western style democratic electoral process.

A week after the Ukrainian elections, I stood in the cold, rainy streets of Moscow and watched a few hundred protesters gather to remember the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and listen to angry speeches denouncing President Putin. Thousands of Special Forces and police surrounded the beleaguered protesters and the streets were blocked by Armored Personnel Carriers and other military vehicles in a clear message of intimidation from the Kremlin. President Putin’s recent decision to head a political party for the upcoming Parliamentary elections as well as his not so subtle hints at taking the position of Prime Minister next year have all been warmly received in the local Russian press.

In long, intense conversations with my Russian friends and colleagues, they regularly complain about the waste of time of elections and the cumbersomeness of the democratic process. They point at the deadlocked U.S. Congress and the often paralyzing effect of partisan politics. They deride the inability of Ukraine to maintain a stable ruling coalition over the past few years and point to the street protests in the Kyrgyz Republic as indicative of the disaster that can happen when people are allowed to express their own opinion. They see the competition of ideas and the difficulty of parties reaching compromise as a failure, rather than a natural outgrowth of the give and take of political parties and competing ideas. From one perspective, they are right; semi-authoritarianism is much easier and in the short-run is more efficient then a large unwieldy democracy.

This authoritarian approach symbolizes the Russian attitude towards democracy; they aren't against elections per se, but they want order, control and efficiency. They are interested in neither a tedious nor a transparent process. The danger is that the voice of the people will be lost in the search for great efficiency and control.

Yet in Ukraine, a country that has decided that it’s willing to go through the time consuming slog of establishing a rule of law, an electoral procedure and protecting the rights of the individual, the hard work has only just started. The West has provided its support, the citizens have fulfilled their role in peacefully voting, and it is now up to the political leaders to prove that they can manage a government that acts in the interest of the people— one of the most basic tenets of democracy.

Screaming Fire in an Empty Theater

On July 19^th, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) released an official statement charging that the international journal Foreign Affairs (FA) had “censored” an article submitted by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov.

“An article of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was offered to the editors of Foreign Affairs in May for publication. The Russian minister had wanted to directly address the audience of this prestigious magazine to explain Russian foreign policy and our vision of contemporary international relations and of ways to ensure a positive direction in the evolution of bilateral Russian-American relations, including interaction in international affairs.

>>snip

Editors at the magazine, citing their own requirements, subjected the article to heavy editing if not to say censorship.

Subsequently the Minster withdrew the article and then bizarrely posted the Foreign Affairs edited article entitled "Containing Russia: Back to the Future?" on the MFA website implying that Foreign Affairs was restricting the publication of this article, which in fact Lavrov had refused to allow to be published.

“To show the Russian and American publics that there is nothing in the article of Sergey Lavrov that would be harmful for adult Americans to read, below is published its “sanitized” text in the English language . . .

Foreign Affairs magazine promptly responded with their own editorial response in which they flatly denied the allegations and claimed that the MFA had agreed to all of the changes through the process.

“The unfortunate assertions emanating from the Russian foreign minister's office regarding Foreign Affairs are utterly erroneous. The foreign minister's essay on Russian foreign policy was accepted for publication and then put through the magazine's normal editing process to clarify points, eliminate redundancies, and not in any way to change its political content. The edited draft was sent back to the foreign minister with instructions to make whatever changes he felt necessary to convey his intentions — the same instructions given to all contributors. The text was returned with a number of changes, all of which were incorporated into the final draft.

And just when you though the story was already strange enough, the Russian MFA statement concludes:

“The original, “pre-censorship” text of the article will come out in the July-August issue of the journal Russia in Global Politics.

Ok, so let’s check out the Russia in Global Politics website . . . drum roll, first, James Hoge, Jr., the venerable editor of Foreign Affairs is on the editorial board.

Second, Foreign Affairs participates in the publication of the Russian-language edition.

“The journal’s widely distributed Russian-language bimonthly version is published with the participation of Foreign Affairs.

So let’s see if I can get this straight, the article that Lavrov wrote, FA edited, and Lavrov agreed to, Lavrov then withdrawals from publication accusing FA of censorship and then to prove his point allows the publication of the “censored” article that in fact he has prevented from being published. Then Lavrov declares that he will publish the “uncensored” article in a journal that the FA editor sits on the editorial board of! HUH?

If Lavrov was so upset about the editing why would they release that “censored” version? Why release the “unedited” version in a magazine that the original editor who they claim censored the piece sits on the editorial board? Confused? Doesn’t make a whit of sense? Great, now we are beginning to understand Russian foreign policy.

Sooooo, does this minor diplomatic/journalistic spat actually mean anything, or is it just another speed bump on the already bomb-cratered road of U.S.-Russian relations? Without trying to read too deeply into the burned tea leaves of this lone event of Russian foreign policy machinations it appears to this peripatetic pundit to be a small, minor event that captures the fundamental randomness, capricious, and often just bizarre behavior that represents much of current Russian foreign policy attitude toward the West.

Like someone who screams fire in an empty theater, it's a completely meaningless act under the pretense of responding to a real situation.

We will always surrender--Moscow Sidewalks

In Moscow a rule you will learn very quickly is that you--the poor plebeian pedestrian who obviously is a nobody since you are not driving (or being driven in) a new BMW, Lexus, Rolls Royce, or Land Rover have absolutely no rights, none, zip, zero, nada. Not just while trying to cross the road, but most importantly while trying to walk on the sidewalk. I jest not. I’ve been back here just over three weeks and almost been run over five or six times while walking on the sidewalk! Because of the explosion in the number of cars in Moscow, there are almost no parking spots, so drivers park on the sidewalks and drive at high speeds down the sidewalk looking for parking or avoiding traffic jams. You do not dare walk slowly in front of them, they WILL run you down.

Recently a new BMW headed towards me as I walked along a sidewalk eating an ice cream cone with some friends. I refused to spring like some feudal peasant of old diving to the side as the Queen’s chariot raced through. The BMW refused to slow till the last second as it laid on the horn and the two female princesses behind the wheel yelled at me and made threatening gestures at me for daring to continue walking and not groveling in obeisance. My friends reminded me that there is nothing noble in being run down by a rich Russian in their latest toy on the sidewalks of Moscow, no one will put up a plaque for me, this is not Tiananmen Square. Probably my insurance won’t cover it either, so I guess I will have to pick other battles to fight and learn to jump at the sound of a high powered motor coming my way. It’s the newest code of survival in Moscow, we will be run down on the streets, we will be run down in the fields, we will be run down on the sidewalks. We will always surrender!

Punitive Force—The Moscow Metro

Moscow has a very efficient Metro system. I never wait more than a few minutes for a train, it is fast and relatively cheap--possibly the best deal in an exorbitantly expensive city. The Moscow Metro is second only to the Tokyo system in average number of passengers served, it has 172 stations and moves an average of 7 million passengers a day—having stood for more than 15 minutes in a scrum trying to get up an escalator I really believe this is true. It is not as high-tech or fashionable as the Tokyo system, but the trains are quite efficient. Someday, I’ll write my book about how you can interpolate the attitudes of a city based on the methods of the mass transportation. But for now, let me provide some explanations before I come back to the Moscow Metro.

Let’s take the metro system of Washington, D.C. This is an uptight and conservative (in fashion and attitude—not only politics) city and the architecture and structure of the Metro reflects this. The D.C. Metro always seems to me to have been built by 1960’s Communist designers who had extra concrete slabs left over from some forgotten city in Siberia and sent them to D.C. as a goodwill gesture. It wins hands down for the most clearly boring, ugly, and staid metro of a major city in the world—even the Tube in London has a bit more character and to get beat by the Brit’s in terms of uptight conservative architecture takes some work. Also like the business of the city—politics—the Metro doesn’t run very efficiently. Some line is always under constant repair and the time between trains seems to increase in direct correspondence with the severity of the weather as you wait outside. Like the politicians it has an attitude of, “hey, we’ll get you there when we feel like it, you have to trust us that everything is being done in your interest for your safety. So quit your complaining and wait!”

Or take another example from the U.S.—the New York City Subway. It is loud, dirty, confusing, old, and yet reasonably efficient and fast. Like the city it says, “I’m brash and in your face, so deal with it”, there is nothing subtle about it. No high-tech smooth Euro trains here. It’s old fashioned and it works pretty well. A bit like the city, it's a bit rough around the edges, but in the end New York City will always get it done. It always does.

The pricing and payment system also reflects attitudes toward their citizens. In New York and D.C., you buy a card, pass it through or over a reader and the barrier or turnstile opens. In Italy, the relaxed Italians have no gates, no turnstiles and no barriers that I have ever seen on the subway in Rome. You buy a ticket that gives you travel within a fixed amount of time, you get it punched as you get on to start the clock and then you can ride any public transport (buses, trams, etc.) within that time. Random stops and checks and severe fines for violating apparently are enough to have everyone buy their tickets. I was amazed at the process. The trust factor in having responsible citizens buy their tickets is amazing. All of which leads me back to the Moscow Metro.

What was cruelly and harshly brought to my attention earlier this week is the punitive nature of the system. Rather than the U.S. system of pay and a gate opens or the high trust Italian system of pay and no gates, Moscow has a “if you don’t pay you will get slammed by large iron gates” system. You buy a pass and walk between two metal barriers. If for some reason it didn’t read your card (as happened to me) or if you are trying not to pay, big metal gates slam shut on you. They are timed to catch you perfectly in mid-stride. I have bruises on my arm and hips to attest to the severity of the reminder. I now have this fear every time I use the metro (about 3x’s a day) that I’m going to be caught again in the metal pincers although I am a very law abiding citizen who carefully paid full price for a monthly pass.

It is a severely punitive system designed to make even those that are following the law extremely nervous and fearful. It appears to be quite reflective of the Russian government’s attitude towards individuals and the population in general. Having law abiding citizens in constant fear of judgment and persecution is a seen as a beneficial state of affairs.