Tag: OSCE
Ukraine: civilian instruments fall short, again
The presidential election May 25 will be decisive for Ukraine. The main presidential candidates are Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate magnate with high-level government experience, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a heroine of the Orange Revolution and former prime minister with a reputation for corruption and extreme pragmatism, including cooperation with Vladimir Putin. Poroshenko is believed to be in the lead.
The outcome of the presidential election that day is not as important as whether the election occurs in the eastern and southern provinces where pro-Russian paramilitaries have taken over government facilities. Two oblasts (Donetsk and Luhansk) supposedly voted May 11 in referenda on autonomy, but both the opaque (and illegal) process and vague referendum proposition cast doubt on their significance. A decent election May 25 would confer at least a veneer of legitimacy on the government in Kiev, which was installed after the president fled and parliament took over in February.
The prospects are not good. A successful election would at least temporarily hinder Russia’s ambitions in the eastern and southern provinces and provide an opportunity for Kiev to negotiate an accommodation with at least some of the political leadership there. Few doubt that decentralization and strengthening of local and provincial governance is part of the solution in Ukraine. But getting there from the current tense and polarized standoff between a government in Kiev anxious to assert its authority and Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine will not be easy.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is supporting a national dialogue process led by former Presidents Kuchma and Kravchuk that had a rough start yesterday. OSCE has also deployed 230 human rights monitors (with authorization to more than double that number) as well as 100 election monitors, with more on their way. Russia, which is an OSCE member, could conceivably exploit its presence to try to ensure correct treatment of the Russian speakers in Ukraine and end the current crisis.
I’m not holding my breath for that. While President Putin has turned down the rhetoric in the last week or so, his objective is all too clearly to make eastern and southern Ukraine come under Moscow’s umbrella, even if they remain formally outside of Russian sovereignty. He has not moved Russian troops away from the border with Ukraine. Many of the rebels in Ukraine appear to be getting Russian support and encouragement sub rosa. Some are Russian officials. Putin’s maneuvers may be reactions to a rapidly evolving situation, but Russia’s 2013 foreign policy concept makes it clear Ukraine was slated for a key role in reviving Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet states.
European and American sanctions have already done some damage to the Russian stock market, currency and investment flows. Moscow will hesitate to do anything overt to disrupt the election in order to stave off tightening and broadening of the still finely targeted sanctions. But so long as it can plausibly deny a hand in any disruption of the May 25 election, it can bank on European hesitation to bite the hand that sends money and natural gas west.
NATO is rightly not prepared to go to war to defend non-member Ukraine. The best it has been able to do is forward deploy some minimal forces to Poland, the Baltics and other concerned member states to signal determination to protect the Alliance, should it become necessary. This is one more crisis where military means simply do not fit the bill. The civilian means required look to be beyond current capabilities. The number of monitors required in a country with a population of 46 million is easily ten times the number currently authorized. OSCE is stepping up as best it can, but it will be no surprise if its best falls short. The lesson here is clear: we need to strengthen the available civilian instruments, not only in Europe but elsewhere as well.
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Ukraine: expect worse
After many declarations of its intentions, Kiev is now trying to reassert by force its authority in eastern and southern Ukraine. It is moving gradually and slowly, trying to avoid both a popular backlash and intervention by Moscow, which has massed troops and has threatened to use them to protect Russian-speakers inside Ukraine.
This map from the Washington Post illustrates the military deployments, which heavily favor Moscow in both quantity and quality:
But those smooth curvy lines with arrows at the end are misleading. A conventional force-on-force conflict has not started, yet. Moscow is trying to achieve its purposes with more or less local forces, who have been setting up checkpoints and seizing government centers. A clash at one of these Friday killed dozens of insurgents when their Kiev-loyal antagonists set the building they took refuge in on fire. This followed the downing of two Ukrainian military helicopters, at least one by a surface to air missile not available at your local grocery, President Obama averred. Another Ukrainian helicopter was shot down yesterday.
What we’ve got here are escalating low intensity clashes between the Kiev government’s forces and local insurgents backed by Russia.
What counts in a clash of this sort is legitimacy. War is always politics by other means, but especially so when major conventional armed clashes are avoided. Moscow is denying the legitimacy of the Kiev government, claiming it was installed in a coup (even if approved in parliament) and trying to demonstrate that it lacks control over the national territory. Kiev is denying the legitimacy of Moscow’s complaints about treatment of Russian-speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine and trying to reassert territorial control.
The Odessa fire, which killed dozens, is significant even beyond the number of lives lost because it undermined Kiev’s claims that Russian-speakers are safe in Ukraine and supported Moscow’s complaints. I have no reason to believe the fire was set by government authorities. It seems to have been the act of people supporting Kiev, provoked by attacks earlier in the day. But the inability of the government to protect all its citizens detracts substantially from Kiev’s claim of legitimacy.
Still, the situation of Russian speakers in Ukraine is nowhere near what would be required to justify foreign intervention. Moscow has made virtually no effort to ensure their safety and security by non-military means. The OSCE observers sent with that mission were held captive and not allowed to observe anything but the facilities they were held in against their will. They have now been released, on orders from Vladimir Putin, which suggests how independent of Moscow the insurgents in Ukraine really are.
Kiev’s best hope for a restoration of its legitimacy may lie in the May 25 presidential election. Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire “Chocolate King” who has served as Foreign Minister Minister as well as Minister of Trade and Economic Development and Chair of the central bank, is the current front runner in the polls. With more than two dozen candidates, a second round may well be needed for someone to get over the 50% threshold. Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister, is trailing and thought to be trying to get the election postponed until the fall.
The Russians will not want a successful election in eastern and southern Ukraine that would confirm Kiev’s legitimacy. We can expect a concerted effort to prevent it from happening, and to disrupt it where it does. While the administrative apparatus of the Ukrainian state still appears to be operating in many Russian-speaking areas, Moscow has already shown that it can shut down what it wants pretty much when it wants. It would be prudent to expect a crescendo of violence and disruption as the election approaches, with Kiev trying to use its forces to restore order and ensure the election can proceed and Moscow plus Russian-speaking Ukrainians trying to prevent it.
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Ukraine isn’t over
With the G7 countries issuing a strongly worded statement yesterday against Russia’s annexation of Ukraine, optimists will want to go back to worrying about Malaysia Airlines flight 370. That would be a mistake. Despite President Putin’s disavowals, there is still serious risk to Ukraine from a Russian push into its southern provinces, perhaps as far as the Russian-occupied Transnistria area of Moldova:
Why? Let me count the gains to Moscow:
- Crimea would no longer be cut off from Russia proper.
- The southern provinces of Ukraine are home to heavy industries that cater in part to Russia’s military.
- Having annexed Crimea, pro-Russian political forces are unlikely in the future to win any national elections in Ukraine, so “protection” of Russian speakers requires their incorporation into Russia.
- Ukraine would be reduced to a landlocked remnant with little prospect of being more than a burden to the European Union and the United States.
- Rump Ukraine will find it necessary to make its peace with natural gas supplying Russia.
If thinking along these lines predominates in Moscow, it is hard to imagine anything the EU and US could or would do to prevent a Russian military move. The Ukrainian army is in no position to resist. Washington and Brussels imagine that Ukrainians would mount an insurgency against Russian occupation. That could be a sanguinary affair that could last a decade or more.
It is not easy to come up with reasonable policy options. Deployment of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is already in progress, is a good idea. But if Putin decides to move, they will stand by to document how many tanks and armed personnel carriers have entered and where they are located.
Military options are out. Though the credibility of the Alliance is at stake, NATO has no obligation and few means with which to defend Ukraine, even though it is a member of Partnership for Peace. The Alliance will have its hands full protecting its Baltic and other easternmost neighbors. It may be able to provide some intelligence and logistical support to Ukraine, but that’s about it.
Thoughts fly to the money Kiev owes Moscow. Does it really have to pay its debts if Russia invades? Probably not, but it would then have to worry about where to find natural gas for heating next winter. There is no quick alternative available, so far as I know.
The ruble and the Russian stock market are already down, but that is likely to be a temporary response with no substantial long-term impact. Only if the EU and US come up with sanctions that really bite Russian banks hard is Moscow likely to pay attention. That’s unlikely, as the Europeans export too much to Russia and depend too much on Russian gas to get serious about financial sanctions anytime soon.
It looks as if we are in for a long-term response to the annexation of Crimea and whatever other parts of Ukraine Putin goes after. We’ve been in this situation before. We had no really good policy response to the Soviet occupation of the Baltics at the end of World War II, of Hungary in 1956 or of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nor have we done anything substantial about South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which declared independence from Georgia in 2008.
What we had going for us during the Cold War was strategic patience. In the 1950s, I was taught in junior high school that the Baltics were “captive nations.” It seemed quixotic at the time to imagine that they would ever be free. But they were liberated at the end of the Cold War and have since become NATO and EU members.
We have wanted to believe that the ideological contest that gave us strategic patience is gone. Unfortunately, a new one appears to be taking its place. Autocrats like Putin are not relying any longer on state-controlled economies. They are not even pretending to read Marx or Engels. They are enjoying the fruits of at least partly free economies, under the control of their favored oligarchs. We may need even more patience than in the four decades or so of the Cold War in order to see the backs of Putin and his like.
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Pragmatic Kosovo!
I enjoyed a conversation at SAIS yesterday with two of Kosovo’s finest: Deputy Prime Minister Slobodan Petrovic and Foreign Minister Enver Hoxhaj. Slobodan has led Serb participation in Kosovo’s government for the past three years, holding also the portfolio for local governance. Enver, a political science professor, has participated in many of the international negotiations that Kosovo has undergone over the past twenty years.
The watchword was “pragmatic.” Both speakers are clear about their goals. Slobodan wants improvement in the lives of Serbs who live in Kosovo. Enver wants the Kosovo state to have a well-recognized place in the international community. They have worked together to achieve these goals, but both are ready to compromise along the way, so long as things keep moving in the right direction.
Enver thinks normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade means eventual mutual recognition and exchange of ambassadors, but for the moment Kosovo has taken what it could get: an April agreement that recognized its constitution should govern in all of Kosovo and exchange of liaison officers located in the respective capitals’ European Union missions. Belgrade won’t accept Kosovo passports, but it has accepted its identity cards. The other “technical” agreements are also steps in the right direction.
Slobodan thinks the municipal elections held for the first time under Pristina’s authority in Serb-majority northern Kosovo were far from perfect: intimidation and even assassination determined the outcome, which favored a Belgrade-sponsored Serb list. But Petrovic’s Liberals got more votes than ever before and captured what seats they could. The international community should have taken a stronger stand against irregularities and supported those who have been committed to the political process. Next time, he hopes.
In the foreign minister’s view, Kosovo faces some difficult issues in 2014. It wants to get into NATO’s Partnership for Peace but needs to overcome resistance from the Alliance’s non-recognizing members. Kosovo also needs to decide the size, composition label for its security forces. It has passed the halfway mark in gaining recognitions from members of the UN General Assembly and hopes to make it to the two-thirds mark, but it will still face a veto by Russia in the Security Council. Kosovo hosts too many international missions. The UN has been superfluous for some time; the OSCE is overstaffed and undertasked.
The EU rule of law mission is still necessary to handle sensitive cases like that of the recently arrested mayoral candidate Oliver Ivanovic, but the deputy foreign minister thought it important that the remaining cases of this sort be settled expeditiously. In his view, 2014 will be important for the fall parliamentary elections. A gentleman’s agreement to maintain reserved seats for Serbs and other minorities, which were to be phased out after two election cycles, should be respected, not abrogated.
Asked whether the Pristina/Belgrade agreement and recent election results might presage “Bosnia-ization” of Kosovo into two ethnically identified entities, both Slobodan and Enver think not. The already functioning Serb municipalities south of the Ibar will not want to give up what they’ve gained. The northern municipalities are beginning to see clearly that they will gain from operating under Pristina’s authority, as they will retain a good deal of local control as well as substantial resources. If the agreement is implemented in good faith as written and the EU remains the guarantor, the risks are minimal.
I remember a time when I could not have imagined such a conversation. Enver reminded our audience that the war was fought between the Serbian state and the Albanian population of Kosovo. That may be true, but there were long periods when it seemed you could count on one hand the number of Albanians and Serbs willing to have a civilized conversation with each other. Now more than a handful are using democratic institutions to govern together. I know the challenges are still great, but pragmatic can go a long way with time.
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Solid kernels in a not so good idea
My SAIS colleague Ed Joseph and Aaron David Miller earlier this week put forward a proposal for a Union of Arab Democracies that merits examination despite its deep and fatal flaws. There are nuggets therein worth preserving.
The idea in their words is this:
Egypt and its fractious neighbors desperately need a unifying vision that can inculcate respect for democratic norms across glaring differences. Although Arab nations have no interest in joining the European Union or NATO, the Arab world can draw on the model of Eastern European transition, with fledgling Arab democracies devising their own supra-national organization dedicated to advancing democracy. Like the E.U. in its infancy, this Union of Arab Democracies (UAD) could start with limited objectives and evolve toward ambitious goals, including, ultimately, pan-Arab political union.
Waving their magic wand, Ed and Aaron then tell us all the good things that would happen if such an organization were to come into existence, despite the shambolic history of pan-Arab political union proposals.
If Egypt and the other Arab uprising countries were capable of creating such an organization, they wouldn’t need it. The weakness of the proposal is all too apparent when Ed and Aaron get to proposing that Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority (known to me as Palestine) would be the leading democracies, with transitioning countries (Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen) and supposedly “liberalizing” countries (Morocco, Jordan and possibly Oman) tagging along. What a democratic club! Several are more likely to find themselves joining an Islamic union than a democratic one.
Nevertheless, there is a core idea here that is important: transitions need a destination. When the Berlin wall fell, the former Soviet satellites of eastern Europe and the Baltic “captive nations” quickly set their aim on meeting European Union and NATO standards. This gave direction and impetus to countries that would otherwise have wandered as aimlessly as the North African revolutions are doing today.
The way to answer the question “transition to what?” is not to have nascent Arab democracies try to figure it out for themselves. They cannot reasonably aim for membership in NATO or the EU, but they should be able to aim at two easier targets: the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe or, as my Turkish colleague Aylin Unver Noi suggests, the Council of Europe.
OSCE comprises 57 states and plays an important role in the Balkans and the more Asian parts of Eurasia. Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia are already among its “cooperating partners.” Several OSCE members are no farther along in democratizing than their Middle Eastern partners. With 47 member states, the Council of Europe regards itself as the continent’s leading human rights organization. It has a human rights court with some real enforcement capacity that could provide minorities in the Middle East with real recourse if their mother countries were to join.
The idea of extending OSCE and the Council of Europe to the southern littoral of the Mediterranean may seem far fetched, but efforts to construct more ad hoc arrangements have not worked well. Neither the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership nor the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative gained much traction before 2011, Aylin says, and their relevance will be further reduced by the Arab uprisings.
Another of the world’s more restrictive clubs, the rich people’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , has opened its doors to newly developed states like Korea and Mexico, much to their benefit and the benefit of the organization. Opening the OSCE and Council of Europe to new Middle Eastern members, who would need to meet clearly defined criteria in order to get in, would be a worthwhile experiment. It would give the Arab uprisings, if they want it, a destination as well as a tough-minded qualification process, which is really what Ed and Aaron were calling for.
So “no” to the Arab Democratic Union. “Yes” to Arab democracy that aims to meet the not too exacting standards of the OSCE and respects human rights as defined by the Council of Europe.
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Delaying the inevitable
Blic Online late last night published what purports to be a draft text of a Pristina/Belgrade agreement, one supposedly agreed by the EU and Pristina. It seems to me, as one would expect, consistent with the Ahtisaari plan in many of its details, and it follows the spirit of the Ahtisaari plan in ending at least some of the Serbian campaign against Kosovo membership in “international bodies” with
economic, cultural, and social (including sporting) purposes. Serbia shall not block Kosovo’s membership in the OSCE.
But it falls short of Kosovo membership in the United Nations.
It is difficult to comment on a text that was likely prepared originally in English, translated by Blic and retranslated into English for me by a kind reader. Nor is it clear where the original came from or how close to a final agreement this text may be. Is it being published now to test Serbian and Kosovar reaction? Does it genuinely represent something Pristina can accept?
I don’t know. Nor am I likely to know, as the diplomats will not want to discuss in public the status of this text.
What it shows, however, is that the two sides, one way or the other, are dealing with key issues: how can the Serb population of northern Kosovo participate in Kosovo institutions and still avail itself of the Ahtisaari plan’s provisions for governing themselves? How can Kosovo’s interest in maintaining a single judicial and security framework be satisfied while allowing wide latitude to local governance in the other respects provided for by Ahtisaari?
The devil here is not so much in the details. It is in the broader context. While this text purports to be status neutral, it would in principle allow Kosovo to join a lot of international bodies, some of which are open to membership only to sovereign states. That is, so far as I know, the case for the 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Here there is a problem. The text obligates Serbia not to block (or encourage others to block) membership, but others would of course be free to continue to do so. The European Union has five non-recognizing states any one of which might block Kosovo membership. It is my hope that there is a clear and unequivocal understanding that none of the EU member states will block Kosovo membership.
That still does not solve the problem, because Russia could still be an obstacle where it is a member, including the OSCE. What this shows it seems to me is the difficulty of partial solutions that purport to be status neutral. Kosovo membership in the UN would end all discussion of its eligibility for membership elsewhere. Taking a step-by-step approach is fraught with difficulty, and inconsistent with the spirit of the original Ahtisaari plan, which foresaw universal recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign and independent state.
The simple fact, recognized almost as much on the streets of Belgrade as on the streets of Pristina, is that Kosovo is no longer part of Serbia and will never again be. Delaying the inevitable may be the best that can be done right now, but it means a continuing uphill struggle for a state that needs to focus on other things: jobs and economic development, the fight against corruption and organized crime, proper treatment of its Serb citizens and other (numerical) minorities.
It would be far preferable–and less painful in the long run–to end Serbia’s empty sovereignty claim. There may be five non-recognizing EU members that can block Kosovo’s entry into international organizations, but there are 22 EU members that can block Serbia’s eventual entry into the EU. Delaying the inevitable makes life harder not only for Pristina, but also for Belgrade.
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