Translated material
Two eyes less
OSCE refuses to monitor the presidential elections in Russia
Attempts by the Chairman of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, to prevent a scandal surrounding the issue of the work of international observers in the March 2 presidential elections failed. Yesterday, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) announced that an observation mission would not be deployed . This happened on the fourth day of difficult negotiations that were conducted between Mr. Churov and representatives of the bureau who arrived in Moscow. Moreover, another organization, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, unexpectedly refused to monitor the presidential elections. And if the ODIHR has already boycotted the parliamentary elections on December 2, the Parliamentary Assembly is doing this for the first time. In Russia, the reaction to the refusal was emphatically harsh, although this decision does not threaten the legitimacy of the vote, and official representatives of the Russian authorities constantly accuse the OSCE of bias.The formal reason for the ODIHR’s refusal to monitor was the conditions of the Central Election Commission regarding the timing of the mission’s work. The CEC suggested that observers come to Russia two or three days before the voting date; bureau director Christian Strohal insisted that experts needed at least three weeks to fully work. During the negotiations, the Russian side made serious concessions: they were ready to receive a pilot group of observers in Moscow today, and the size of the mission was increased from 70 to 75 mandates. After this, ODIHR spokesman Kurtis Baden said that four logisticians had left for Russia to prepare for today's arrival of 18 more experts. It seemed that the parties managed to reach a compromise, but yesterday European officials changed their minds. “We have made every effort to direct our mission, even taking into account the conditions imposed by the Russian authorities,” Mr. Strohal said in an official statement. -- The Russian Federation has created conditions that are not conducive to monitoring. Time restrictions no longer allowed us to observe many important components of the electoral process, starting with the registration of candidates and including the activities of the media.” The statement also says that allegedly “visas were denied to members of the advanced group of observers.”
In turn, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly did not bother itself with such detailed explanations. “Circumstances have developed such that we cannot take part in observing the Russian presidential elections,” says a statement sent to the State Duma on behalf of OSCE PA Secretary General Spencer Oliver.
As one would expect, the Russian authorities reacted to these demarches quite painfully. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko noted that the information that European observers were allegedly denied visas was “not true.” According to him, “all instructions on issuing visas were given to the Russian embassies in a timely manner,” and five ODIHR technical officers sent the day before were already in Moscow yesterday. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke out much more sharply, regarding Mr. Strohal’s conditions as an “ultimatum” that Russia, as a self-respecting country, cannot accept. According to Mr. Lavrov, the Bureau of Democratic Institutions invented “its own, absolutely non-transparent rules” for organizing election monitoring and, in general, initially prepared the ground for subsequent refusal. The head of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, Mikhail Margelov, also called this step on the part of the ODIHR a “demarche.”
And the chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev, even contrived to turn the decision of the Parliamentary Assembly in favor of Russia. He said that in a telephone conversation, Spencer Oliver justified his refusal to observe by saying that “the OSCE PA very rarely, as an exception, monitors presidential elections” if the campaign is complex and there are grounds to suspect violations. Thus, in Mr. Kosachev’s interpretation, it turns out that the PA will recognize the March 2 vote in advance as democratic and legitimate. Mr. Kosachev added that “the elections on March 2 will be held in any weather and in strict accordance with the law.”
Representatives of the expert community share a similar opinion. “The degree of legitimacy of the elections will not change whether these observers are present at the elections or not, since in any case they come with ready-made conclusions,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, director of the Politika Foundation, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. “The question of the legitimacy of elections arises when the voting results are not accepted by society itself, as was the case in Ukraine, when society believed that it was being fooled, and the verdict of international observers legitimized the “Orange Revolution,” says Igor Bunin, General Director of the Center for Political Technologies. “But we don’t have a single Orangeman in sight.”
Nevertheless, some experts are surprised by the tough position of the Russian authorities regarding the timing of observation. “The Russian authorities are acting somewhat out of inertia, believing that we should not give in, but the main task is to make these elections as legitimate as possible,” Igor Bunin told a Vremya Novostei correspondent. - If I were the authorities, I would simply give in to their demands. When and in what quantity ODIHR observers arrive does not matter.”
“Elections are not a process of putting ballots into a slot; observers are interested in how candidates use television, how equal they are in rights,” Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute for Strategic Assessments, told a Vremya Novostei correspondent. — There is nothing wrong with the ODIHR’s requirements, although one could argue that the conditions of observation are not specified clearly enough. Formally, we act within the rules, but this is a demonstration not of strength, but of weakness, as if we are afraid of something.”
In fact, the stumbling block was the extra five days that Christian Strohal required for the mission, and the Russian side refused to provide them. It is hard to believe that these five days resolved the issue of Russian sovereignty, which the Russian authorities constantly suspected the ODIHR of committing an attack on. It is obvious that, by and large, both sides during the negotiations sought not so much to find consensus as to demonstrate their principled position and slam the door in time. So that the moral advantage remains on their side.
In this sense, the curator of the international direction of the Central Election Commission, Igor Borisov, was right when he yesterday called the bureau’s refusal to monitor “a demonstration of a principled position.” At the same time, Mr. Borisov sees this position as “a refusal to have a constructive dialogue on resolving issues of the implementation of political rights and freedoms of citizens, an unwillingness to fulfill the functions assigned to the bureau and failure to fulfill obligations.” Political scientist Alexander Konovalov evaluates the “principledness” of Europeans differently. “They don’t want to isolate us or exclude us from somewhere,” he noted, “but they make it clear to us that there are lines beyond which we cannot go, and things that we cannot turn a blind eye to.”