CIC Occasional Paper No 5 - Kazakh Election: Did the OSCE fall down on the job?

October 2004


Introduction

Two hundred years of Tsarist rule followed by seventy four years of Soviet dictatorship does not provide the ideal apprenticeship for a democracy. So it would have been naive to suppose that the elections to the Majilis, the lower house of the Kazakh parliament which took place on 19th September, would be staged with the same efficiency and transparency as elections in, say, Denmark, Britain or Switzerland. Nevertheless, when I arrived in Kazakhstan a week ahead of polling day, officials appeared determined to demonstrate just how far the country had come in acquiring the trappings of a modern democratic state. Briefing sessions were enthusiastic, lengthy and covered all aspects of the Kazakh political system; no expense or effort was spared in answering the queries of reporters and official observers.

As the election campaign reached its final stages, the atmosphere in Almaty remained calm, as it did in Astana, the country’s new capital. There were no reports of attempts to close down critical newspapers or to intimidate reporters. The international press as well as observers such as myself - of whom there seemed to be a huge number given the country’s modest population of 15 million - were free to travel wherever they wished and to interview whom they pleased. One observer, a member of the European Parliament, told me that when he and colleagues had been given an unexpected interview with the Kazakh President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, he had taken the opportunity to question whether it was really appropriate for the President’s daughter Dariga, the leader of a political party standing in the election, to own a swathe of media titles. To his surprise the President had replied: “I agree with you completely – in future there will have to be a law to prevent this.”

My own impressions of the elections were that, despite a number of irregularities, for the first time in a parliamentary election the Kazakh people had been presented with a genuine choice and that there was no evidence of systematic attempts to rig the result; these are described more fully in CIC’s recent Newsletter (“Kazakhstan passes Democracy’s most important tests”).


Distorted international criticism

However, the international bodies monitoring the election were considerably more critical. By far the most important of these was the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which concluded in its preliminary report of 20th September that the elections were riddled with shortcomings and “fell short of standards set by the OSCE and Council of Europe in many respects,” a view which was subsequently endorsed by the US government. With very few exceptions, this was consequently the story told by the US and European media. The Economist (23rd September) went still further, referring sarcastically to the “results” in quotation marks thereby implying that the elections were fraudulent, a claim not borne out by the OSCE report or indeed supported by the facts.

It is true that the OSCE report “noted several improvements in comparison with previous elections.” But while the irregularities were described in considerable detail, the improvements were neither enumerated nor described and, predictably, were mostly ignored by the Western media. As the result of not even trying to give an adequate description of such advances, the OSCE presented an essentially distorted picture of the elections to the wider world.

Three independent observers who were present in Kazakhstan during the course of the campaign, former Australian ambassador to Kazakhstan Douglas Townsend, Frederick Starr and Daniel Witt, reached similar conclusions about the one sided conclusion of the OSCE findings in their brief but authoritative paper (“Kazakh Elections: A Real Step Forward” – October 2004):


“…if the goal is to encourage Kazakhstan towards further progress, surely it would have been better to identify the pluses as well as the minuses.

This they [the OSCE] failed to do. Instead, they presented themselves as stern nannies from the lands of flawless elections, wagging their finger but stingy in their praise. Besides presenting a one-sided and hence seriously distorted picture, this is, to say the least, poor pedagogy. Kazakhstan earned the sticks that are being applied to it. But it also earned the carrots that have been withheld. A more comprehensive and balanced evaluation leads inexorably to the conclusion that Kazakhstan’s recent elections mark a real and even notable step forward. The Kazakhs, and the western public, deserve to know this. Democracy in Kazakhstan is not just a hollow declaration.”

Starr, Townsend and Witt accepted that the OSCE’s criticisms were valid, although in their view many irregularities were simply the result of inexperience or technical ineptitude. Beyond question, they say, the worst irregularities occurred when some local governors and bureaucrats pressed voters to support pro-presidential parties. This problem, they concluded, is unlikely to be resolved until more local officials are elected. However, they also state that the irregularities did not have a significant impact on the result and that no attempt has been made to sweep them under the carpet. In their judgment, Kazakhstan accepts that it has much to learn from honest criticism. The election process as a whole was positive and had served to legitimize the electoral process in a country accustomed from Soviet times to dismiss all elections as charades.


Improvements in the Kazakhstan electoral process

Having acknowledged the irregularities, Starr, Townsend and Witt list ten ‘significant advances’ on earlier elections in Kazakhstan:


“First, the revised constitutional law that defines the electoral process in Kazakhstan is clearly a big improvement over its predecessor. The OSCE proposes further revisions, but nonetheless acknowledges that the revised legislation represents a significant advance.

Second, the elections were clearly competitive. That fully a third of the contests went into runoffs would never have happened if systematic manipulation had occurred. And the polling produced some real surprises. The Asar Party set up by the President’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, was supposed to sweep to second place, assuring her succession in the event of her father’s death. It enjoyed seemingly limitless funding and easy access to the media, some of the largest outlets being owned by Ms. Nazarbayeva herself. In spite of this, Asar finished a weak third, behind the moderate opposition party Ak Zhol. And the bloc of liberals and Communists failed even to pass the 7% barrier.

Third, fully 57% of registered voters showed up at the polls. Earlier, the OSCE had intoned that “public interest does not seem to be high,” George Soros’ Open Society Institute predicted a turnout of only 29% in Almaty, and the Institute of War and Peace Reporting speculated about “voter fatigue.” In spite of these sour predictions, Kazakhstani voters acted on their conviction that elections really count.

Fourth, the official registration of fully ten parties and blocs, including genuine opposition groups, far surpassed any previous election in Kazakhstan. As the OSCE acknowledged, this “gave voters a real choice,” which may explain why so many voted in a parliamentary election.

Fifth, whatever their imbalances in funding and media access, parties were for the first time able to make their case in debates aired on national television. Seven closely structured debates were held. Judging by voter comments, these convinced many to change their decisions on which party to back.

Sixth, for the first time in Kazakhstan, official observers representing all the participating parties were able to monitor the elections and vote counting. Knowing that their legal rights were defined and protected, these thousands of volunteers took their role seriously, and are the source of many of the complaints now being vetted by the Prosecutor’s office.

Seventh, even the limited experiment with electronic voting machines must be considered an achievement. It would have helped if the decision to use them had been made earlier, and more training offered beforehand. Yet the overwhelming majority of voters who used them experienced no problems. Many proudly pointed out that few voters in Europe and America enjoy the same opportunity.

Eighth, for all the complaints about unbalanced coverage in the media, no papers were closed, no stories suppressed, and no journalists harassed, as occurred in earlier elections in Kazakhstan. The OSCE admitted, albeit in passing, that this represented real progress.

Ninth, of the 700 candidates up for election, fully 17% were women, a significant increase from earlier elections. President Nazarbayev took to the airwaves to encourage voters to consider seriously female candidates, whatever their party. It is almost certain the runoff votes will send more women than ever to Kazakhstan’s parliament.

Finally, 1029 foreign observers came from as far away as India and Thailand. This appears to be a record for elections in all countries of the former USSR. When the Kazakh government invited them it knew full well that these international monitors, like the thousands of domestic poll watchers, were bound to turn up improprieties, which indeed happened. Yet Kazakhstan clearly believes it has nothing to hide, and much to learn, by exposing itself to honest criticism.”


The OSCE preliminary report published the day after the elections contained references to three of the most important improvements listed above – the improvement to the Election Law, the fact that elections were ‘competitive’ and the fact that journalists were not subject to harassment – but these were perfunctory in the extreme. Whether or not elections are genuinely competitive and thus enable voters to express a choice is a matter of fundamental importance, one surely meriting more than half a sentence. As for the other improvements listed by Starr, Townsend and Witt, these were ignored while the tone of the report was almost unremittingly negative.


Questions raised by the OSCE

The obvious weaknesses of the OSCE report raise important questions about the nature and purpose of the organisation’s role in monitoring elections. In performing this task, the OSCE purports to invoke a universal democratic standard. This should not, however, prevent those responsible for compiling its reports from setting both shortcomings and advances against a background of recent political change and from making objective comparisons with previous elections; but in the case of Kazakhstan the OSCE appeared strangely reluctant to do this. Without the historical and cultural context, however, it is impossible to achieve a balanced evaluation of what has been achieved.

Quite plainly, the OSCE also has a duty to ensure that such criticisms as it makes, either its post-election reports or those which are made by its spokesmen during the course of an election, rest securely on a comprehensive factual basis; and, if there are significant errors or omissions, that these are corrected as quickly as possible. But this imperative was not always observed in the case of the elections to the Majilis. For example, an OSCE report issued during the course of the campaign focused on alleged public disquiet at the introduction of e voting in some urban areas - which helped make the issue one of the most controversial in a campaign that was short of newsworthy items. It failed to report, however, that no more than 10 per cent of polling stations would be testing the pilot schemes for electronic voting; nor did it report that voters who did not want use the new system would still have the choice of voting by traditional means. If the OSCE was aware of these facts, it should have included them in its statements; if it was not aware of them it plainly ought to have been.

In issuing statements while election campaigning is in progress, the OSCE hopes to exert a benign influence. In the instance referred to above, however, the OSCE appears to have influenced the campaign agenda, which is scarcely its task. In elections in CIS states it is not exactly uncommon for parties to allege foul play by their political opponents and for much of the election campaign to be consumed by such matters – with the result that the task of formulating and presenting alternative policies is neglected. In the case of the 19th September Kazakh elections the OSCE team – whose statements were seized on by opposition parties - appear to have accentuated this tendency so that in the end the biggest election issue was the manner of the election itself.

Inevitably, the statements of the OSCE have caused resentment among parties supporting the Kazakh government, some of whom appear to have concluded that the OSCE is, in some ill-defined sense, hostile to the government in Astana or simply anti-Kazakh. The Olympian posture adopted by the OSCE in delivering its judgments may also have rankled; those reading its lofty conclusions could easily be forgiven for wondering how any country could ever have come to democracy except by way of the OSCE, or for assuming that its leading member states have all along possessed perfectly functioning democratic systems.


Western double standard?

Moreover, there are other reasons why Kazakh citizens may feel justifiably aggrieved. When monitoring elections the OSCE may claim to apply a common standard. But there would appear to be some notable exceptions. In the case of the elections in Afghanistan on 9th October, for example, the OSCE volunteered the view - even though that country is not even a member - that there had been irregularities but dismissed out of hand opposition demands for a new poll. This followed the remarkable discovery that the ink used to stain voters’ fingers in order to prevent multiple voting could be washed off. The discovery did not, however, prevent the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, the Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, from declaring that the success of the Afghanistan elections “exceeded all expectations”; while the first leader to visit the country following the elections, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, all but declared Hamid Karzai the winner before a single vote had been counted (Associated Press, 12th October). The US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, praised the elections as an “an enormous accomplishment.” Plainly, when evaluating the elections in Afghanistan the OSCE, in common with most Western political leaders, wished to bend over backwards to take into account the country’s lack of familiarity with the democratic process.

Similar understanding is likely to be extended in the case of the forthcoming elections in Iraq in January 2005, which is likely to occur against a backdrop of continuing terrorist violence and intimidation. But this is not to criticise US policy towards Afghanistan or Iraq; the fragility of political institutions in those countries explains the desperation of US politicians to give what support they can. It is only to point to an inconsistency that is likely to leave transitional states such Kazakhstan feeling that they have been harshly and unfairly criticised and wondering why this should be. Even if Kazakhstan has advanced considerably further down the road to democracy than either Iraq or Afghanistan, democratic habits there are not yet ingrained and the political reform process remains incomplete. If a lack of familiarity with democratic ways can be taken into account in some countries, why not in others?

In the absence of a more credible explanation, many Kazakhs may believe that the negative and grudging tone of the OSCE’s comments are a reflection of Western ambitions in the region, and may consequently attribute to it motives that do not exist. This is a development which is more likely to produce an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion than to foster good relations with Western countries. Nor is it likely to encourage the process of democratic reform - indeed, the cause of mutual security and cooperation which the OSCE exists to promote.

To the accusation of double standards Kazakh citizens may well be entitled to add the charge of hypocrisy. For it is clear that Western states do not themselves invariably regard democracy as the supreme political value, recognizing that there may be situations in which it may be desirable to uphold values that conflict with democracy. To give one example: despite the best efforts of Europe’s political elites, no way has been found to reconcile the EU goal of ‘ever closer union’ with the goal of democratic accountability, and in this ongoing contest between the two it has been the latter that has been trumped. The result has been Europe’s so-called ‘democratic deficit’ - i.e. a system of decision-making that is profoundly and universally acknowledged to be undemocratic – so much so that a former EU Commissioner has suggested that if the EU applied to itself the criteria for new applicants it could not be admitted!

However, in all of this we should not lose sight of the most probable explanation for the harsh and unbalanced nature of the OSCE’s judgment of the Kazakh elections. This can be found in the tendency of large international organisations to acquire institutional interests quite distinct from the purposes they were originally intended to fulfill. In the present circumstances, it would seem that the OSCE has decided that when called upon to monitor elections its interests require that the bar be set at as a high a level as possible in order to maximize its own future role and influence – a rule which it takes care to follow on all occasions except, of course, on those when to do this would bring it into conflict with a major power.