Photo by  OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher

This post by Casey Michel on Kazakhstan's fake elections is a good example of the Registan formula:

1. Seem to be admitting that criticism of a Central Asian regime is legitimate

2. But then turn yourself into a human pretzel outlining various hypotheses that actually serve the regime's interest while appearing as if they are merely being studied impartially;

3. Then wheel around at the end — after you've poisoned the discourse with pro-regime jaw-flapping — to pretend that you're merely a dispassionate observer and keen analyst and are allowing the reader to judge for himself.

4. Then wave your arms angrily if anyone calls you on your back-handed craven regime-symping

So I do  call out what's going on here once again, which is lots of air time for ridiculous pro-regime and anti-Western notions. I'm all for debating with hypotheses, but the outlandish scenarios that Michel makes in this piece maligning and impugning the West and undermining Western credibility — deliberately, and diabolically — wind up bizarrely serving as an endorsement of the regime. That's wrong.

The old notion of "who will watch the watchers" is invoked here with the "monitoring the monitors" meme, implying OSCE might be less than impartial. But there's nothing whatsoever to suggest that OSCE monitors are in fact biased. After all, OSCE and ODIHR have decades of experience monitoring hundreds of elections and have elaborated a very solid body of guidelines and jurisprudence about how to make judgements. They do go soft sometimes for political reasons — one thinks of the Kyrgyz elections in 2010 after the pogroms — or they are hard when they need to be — Russian elections — but then suffer the consequences of harassment for years.  By and large they are credible — proof of their credibility is in fact the enormous efforts that the Central Asian regimes go to, in order to try to simulate democracy and comply with OSCE norms. They know the true value of the coin of the realm even if Registan pretends not to care.

A key reason Russia is always so busy trying to undermine ODIHR by trying to defund its budget or challenging its every activity or finding or judgement call is because they want to make it sufficiently weakened to be able to call the 2012 Russian presidential elections as "free and fair". And the Kremlin may succeed in doing so.

There's no serious quarrel with OSCE's election-monitoring ability anywhere — the "watch the watcher" theme has already been mined heavily for ages by less-than-democrats and Russian cynics have pushed for spending resources on monitoring US elections, for example, so that we can all be sure that everything is "balanced".

Yet in this Registan blog post by Casey Michel, everything but the obvious and the most likely is stated: that the reason OSCE found Kazakhstan's election "falling short of standards" is because… it did. Opposition parties are harassed and may have trouble registering. Journalists are in jail (one just released right before elections but intimidated); a harsh new press law was passsed. The opposition has lack of access to media and is attacked — and worst of all, at least 16 workers were shot in a provincial town where elections for 50,000 people were then cancelled. The government tried to minimize all this and placate the striking workers and fire some of their own cronies or relatives, but the fact that elections could be suspended even for a relatively small percentage of the population naturally is going to affect the judgement about its fairness.

Yet none of these things are mentioned by Casey Michel, yet another former Peace Corps volunteer at Registan. I thought that the Peace Corps was supposed to help exemplify and impart basic liberal American values and know-how to people in other countries. Yet it seems sometimes that instead of doing that, this veteran institution is imparting queasy-making reverence for authoritarian regimes masked as "cultural appreciation". Perhaps we need a pre-Peace Corps session that first imparts it to our young cynics going abroad. Perhaps the Peace Corps needs an Arab Spring of its own.

On the way, this deliverer of democracy shows his "progressive" hand by taking down recognized liberal authors of conscience like Bill Bryson because, well, I guess Peace Corps volunteers in Kazakhstan are just so much more men of action, you know?

Michel describes Kazakh friends of his: "a series of Kazakhstani friends came out in defense of the electoral results. Or, perhaps they didn’t defend it, so much as lambast the OSCE’s decision (gall?) to stand as the lone major organization opposed to the electoral process."

If your own values haven't hopelessly eroded by this point from either your poor American education, social media inanities, and a sort of Stockholm syndrome (these countries are always threatening to expel Peace Corps volunteers), that's when you stand up and challenge your friends to justify why they think an election could be sound if one area of unrest couldn't vote and opposition didn't have access to the media and the new media law sucked.

Or you would say back to your friends: "Small wonder, when the other two monitoring agencies are the Russian-dominated CIS or the Chinese-dominated SCO — no friends of democracy." And add that OSCE is credible, they call it right, and muse about how oppressive regimes always stay in power as long as they do because classes of people who benefit from their proximity to power or their support of the regime — like these very friends.

Michel gets it about the CIS and SCO observers, but he won't accept the basic Western consensus about the impartial nature of OSCE — which is, after all, a hybrid East-West organization — and he won't admit that Kazakhstan is venal here:

However, such legitimacy as an observational organization seems to extend only so far. The locals with whom I’ve spoken see shades of imperialism, of a West carrot-and-stick-ing its way to cajole Kazakhstan into their ranks. (They also see the Kazakhstani political opposition as either hustlers or farce – and, without having vetted any of the opposition candidates to the same measure you’ll find States-side, perhaps they are. But whether or not they are worthy of the vote doesn’t matter in this context.) These locals refuse to believe that the OSCE didn’t carry underlying and underhanded motives, that their verdict is evidence of something altogether dishonest. And they’re entitled to those views. Still, the fact remains that the OSCE – again, the only organ of legitimacy in the monitoring – slammed these elections as a failure of progress and promise. The illegitimacy of Kazakhstani democracy perdures.

Disgusting. Hustlers? Really? All of them? And, um, what sort of vetting beyond what the Kazakh secret police already do is required?

Farce? Because they dare to run against a brutal tyrant?

And imperialism? Huh? Why is monitoring an election and describing it as unfair "imperialist"? It's just applying the same standards to which Astana ostensibly is bound in the Copenhagen and other OSCE agreements. Standards about free media (which Kazakhstan doesn't have), about registration of parties (problems for sure), and, you know, not shooting workers.

Casey then embarks on "scholarship" worthy of the permutations of Michael Hancock-Parmer, speculating that maybe OSCE has a burr in its saddle left over from the awful Kazakh chairmanship. No doubt they do — and that's ok, given that Kazakhstan only worsened on its own watch, jailing the chief human rights critic and a critical journalist, and then did nothing during the Osh pogroms. It helped keep Turkmen dissidents out of the review conferences leading up to the summit, and locked down Astana to make it impossible to go there freely — all hotel space was controlled by the state, and the NGO conference was forced to make a series of compromises even to go ahead, like having the Kazakh state-sponsored GONGOs and ambassador speak on their platform.

Michel then tries to hypothesize that it might be a;; about oil (the vulgar Marxism of the young and the Peace Corps-trained!), but then settles on the idea that the bad call on the elections was payback for Putin having the temerity to make a Eurasian Union — which our newly-baked geostrategist tells us "isn't really" reassembling the Soviet Union. Um, okay.

And then here's the final pretzel twist — if the West (really OSCE, but he thinks of it as merely a thin scrim for "the West") really wanted to pressure Kazakhstan more successfully, they've gone too far, because Nazzy only reacted by announcing that he will block all future monitors. That should be your cue to definitely realize the elections weren't fair, if you were having trouble before with the propaganda blizzard from the regime and its sympathizers, but for Casey Michel, it's his cue to Blame the West First.

Now the Peace Corps pundit winds up for the pitch:

Now, it is entirely possible that the OSCE did manufacture the results, and that the (short-term) result simply backfired. Perhaps they were banking on Nazarbayev’s ego to force him to jump through the OSCE’s hoops, and that some off-hand, middle-run political gain can be found after he’s calmed down. But that’s not simply risking much reputational capital – it’s also sorely misreading the situation. As seen time and again, Nazarbayev and Astana prefer (and construct) appearance over substance, and jabbing Kazakhstan’s image can only result in a tightening of Astana’s ranks

Of course we're now so far removed from reality, and so deep into the toxic bad faith for which the odious Registan is infamous, that it's hard to know right from wrong anymore.

So it's important to get back into touch with that reality, and read what OSCE said. They didn't call this election unfair because they are evil imperialist running dog oil-seeking haters who also can't be as subtle and crafty in influencing events as the gang at Registan *cough*. They called it unfair because it wasn't — and as the Hungarian dissident writer Haraszti eloquently put it, if they really had the pluralism they claimed, they wouldn't have to fake it so much:

This election took place in a tightly controlled environment, with serious restrictions on citizens’ electoral rights. Genuine pluralism does not need the orchestration we have seen – respect for fundamental freedoms will bring it about by itself,” said Miklós Haraszti, the head of the Election Observation Mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).