Here we go again with this dubious instrumentality regarding the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) — and a curious double standard where the US can criticize one Central Asian regime but not another
The Kazakh foreign minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov is in town and met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Evgeny Zhovtis, a human rights leader is being released from prison, so we're supposed to believe that somehow the "transactional relationship" is being "sweetened". I don't think so.
Of course, Kazakhstan could have let Zhovtis out long ago if they wanted to be sweet — and since they got the Astana summit agreement from the US back in 2010, they should have let him out — President Obama himself (!) asked publicly for Zhovtis to be released back then, and NDN overflight permissions were being negotiated then in the summer before the summit — and granted without any movement on Zhovtis' case (no incentive). The Kazakhs didn't release Zhovtis back then, out of spite, or maybe because they didn't get Obama to come to the summit, but only Hillary.
(This was a case, like the ill-fated Durban World Conference Against Racism, when, as it was explained to us once aptly by an NSC staffer, "the prestige of the presidency of the United States should not be lowered" — and rightly so in both cases.)
What's just as fascinating about the meeting this week, however, is that Clinton is being forthrightly and publicly critical about Kazakhstan's human rights record. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the minister Wednesday. She urged Kazakhstan to expand freedom of the press and religious freedom—and to hold an open investigation into the strike violence and ensure that responsible officials are held accountable, according to the State Department.
It's good that the US is doing at least that much, while the events are still fresh in the mind — the US has given up such live, public mentions of the need to investigate the Andijan events since Obama came to office, although it is still mentioned passively in the State Department's Country Reports.
It's also interesting that Clinton could also mention press and religious freedom so explicitly — despite depending 100 p ercent on Kazakhstan's transit to the war in Afghanistan, as we know from EurasiaNet.
So why can Clinton criticize one NDN partner on whom the US fully depends, but not another, on whom the US equally depends? Is it because Tashkent is more touchy and grouchy about these things and Astana more sophisticated and cynical?
Kucera then quotes Caspian energy envoy Richard Morningstar on what he likes to call the "right" way to raise human rights problems (soon we'll hear Joshua Kucera finally explaining that this is in fact what he meant all along about what human rights activists were "doing wrong"):
“Problems in the human rights area will have an effect overall on our relationship. But I also think that we need to do a better job of how we frame that issue. Countries don't like to be preached at,” said Richard Morningstar, the US special envoy for Eurasian energy issues, speaking at a January 31 conference on US-Kazakhstan relations in Washington. “The issue needs to be framed in terms of, what's in their interest. Whether you're Kazakhstan or anyone else, all you have to do is look around the world at what's happened over the past few weeks, and how do you avoid that? What steps can you create to make a more open society that can avoid those types of situations?”
This is accommodationist and even moronic. Let's not be silly here — it's not in the interests of an authoritarian regime to allow free press and free association — that will create alternatives and bring down the government, or at least significantly weaken it. The lesson of every democracy movement in the world in the last 30 years ought to teach us that, if nothing else. It's faux-collegiality and duplicitious 21st Century Statecraft to claim that not jailing critical press and opposition is going to "help" the regime. It won't, and we all realize that. This is a constructed fiction.
And if anything, the lessons from "looking around the world the last few weeks" might run like this, "Let's keep the army strong because even if the leader topples the regime can remain in place with its armed men" or "let's not let these revolutionaries get out of hand, they might usher in extremists."
The sell-by-date for touting the Arab Spring as a "lesson learned" for the Central Asian regimes is likely past, even though I believe it continues to be a worthy discussion — and even if it's more about the US itself continuing to "learn lessons" from it all. But the Central Asian regimes can afford to let it pass, or make the same moves that those in power in the Middle East ultimately have made. Let this one go, keep that one.
BTW, the Wall Street Journal gives a nod to the alternative reporting of Elena Kostyuchenko on the death toll (although mistakenly saying "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" when in fact it was Novaya Gazeta — unlike EurasiaNet (which reported only the official death count and never covered Kostyuchenko's report) or Registan (which actively agitated to undermine Kotsyuchenko's reporting):
The arrests come amid increasingly bold challenges to Mr. Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989. On Dec. 28, Ruslan Sembinov, the local head of the opposition party Alga! in Astana, the capital, was arrested and accused of possessing drugs. On Jan. 23, Vladimir Kozlov, president of Alga!; Igor Vinyavsky, editor of an opposition weekly, Vzglyad; and activist Serik Sapargali also were arrested and charged with inciting social unrest, which carries a penalty of up to seven years, drawing a protest statement from Freedom House, the Washington-based nongovernmental organization.
The three were accused of involvement in riots that unfolded Dec. 16 in the western town of Zhanaozen, where an oil-workers strike has been under way since last May. The government said 16 people were killed that day, but a reporter for the independent Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted a witness as saying she counted 64 bodies at the hospital morgue.
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I'm just a wee bit concerned that Clinton keeps showing up for these meetings both in Central Asia or with Central Asian leaders in the exact same nubby white and blue suit. Is it silk? Below, Clinton at a town hall meeting in Dushanbe in November 2011. Photo by State Department.
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