Kk-Forum,
"... For over the
last decade, election observing has become little more than a tool for
powerful states to interfere in the internal affairs of weak ones. Monitors
delegitimise elections which elect a candidate the west does not like,
while turning a blind eye to the deficiencies of polls that produce the
desired outcome. ..."
Om norske og andre valgobservatører.
Knut Rognes
**********************
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,669291,00.html
Who observes the observers?
The west's condemnation of Zimbabwe's election process is a breathtaking
case of double standards
John Laughland
Monday March 18, 2002
The Guardian
The chasm that opened up between the various teams of observers at the
Zimbabwean elections shows the urgency of reformulating one of the oldest
questions of political philosophy: who observes the observers? For over the
last decade, election observing has become little more than a tool for
powerful states to interfere in the internal affairs of weak ones. Monitors
delegitimise elections which elect a candidate the west does not like,
while turning a blind eye to the deficiencies of polls that produce the
desired outcome.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking - and not least because we in Britain do not
allow observers at our own elections. For instance, British TV viewers may
have been surprised to see Nigeria's Abdulsalam Abubakar reading out the
Commonwealth's condemnation of the democratic process in Zimbabwe. But
Nigerians will have been even more surprised. General Abubakar was military
dictator of Nigeria from 1998-99. Now facing accusations of stealing more
than $2bn from Nigeria's foreign reserves, Abubakar shares responsibility,
as a member of Nigeria's top brass, for the cancellation by the military of
the elections there in 1993. The man who won those elections died in prison
while Abubakar was president.
Less well known is the record of Kare Vollan, the head of the Norwegian
observers, who denounced the Zimbabwean poll as unfair because of pre-
election violence. This same Kare Vollan found that the Ukrainian
parliamentary elections in 1998 "were managed with professionalism" while
his team "did not call into question the results" - despite what he
described as the "violence, intimidation and harassment during the run-up
to the election". Maybe it was because Ukraine was then the west's
favourite former Soviet state that the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, for which Vollan works, was happy, unlike in
Zimbabwe, to trust the Ukrainian authorities to investigate these allegations.
Another charge levelled at Zimbabwe is government control of the media. But
this did not bother the OSCE at the Montenegrin parliamentary elections in
1998. There, the local Mr Big, Milo Djukanovic, has received tens of
millions of dollars in western aid - not bad for a country with half the
population of Birmingham. Apart from using the money for his gigantic
police force of 30,000, and for ensuring to tal state control of the media,
Djukanovic habitually ensures that he is the only candidate with any
election posters. For the west, though, he was a useful thorn in the side
of Slobodan Milosevic.
But even this cannot compare with the stifling of democracy in Russia with
which the west wholeheartedly cooperated throughout the 1990s and in 2000.
Having welcomed the shelling of the Russian parliament to put down
recalcitrant backbenchers in 1993 the west and the OSCE turned a blind eye
to the massive fraud in the subsequent constitutional referendum, which
reduced the power of the Russian parliament to that of a library reading
room. One observer, the Tory minister Kenneth Baker, declared that poll a
resounding success - even before it had closed. It later turned out that
millions of votes had been added to the turnout to render the vote valid.
All through the 1990s, western observers turned a blind eye to the
government's grip on the broadcast media. At the 1995 elections, the OSCE
and Council of Europe even managed to ignore the fact that 17 people were
killed in campaigning. And at Putin's election in 2000, the west ignored
reports that millions of votes had been added to achieve the desired result.
In Slovakia in 1998, the west - via the OSCE - was determined to unseat the
incumbent prime minister, Vladimir Meciar, even though (or maybe because)
he is the most popular politician in the country. The main charge against
him was bias in the state TV. When I asked the OSCE chief (Vollan again)
why no one mentioned the greater bias in favour of the opposition of a far
more popular foreign-funded private TV station, he promised "scientific
proof". When it came, in the form of a statistical survey by an Italian
media-monitoring organisation, the figures actually showed the state
channel to be a model of neutrality and the private channel to be grossly
partisan. But facts would not move Vollan. He just said icily: "You have
the figures. Maybe your interpretation is different."
The Zimbabweans were vil ified for the queues at polling stations in
Harare. But at the Italian parliamentary elections last May, the socialist
government reduced the number of polling stations by 30%. The chaos was so
severe that the last Italian to cast his vote did so at 5am. So why were
Francesco Rutelli's friends not accused of trying to stop Italians voting
for Silvio Berlusconi?
Western election monitoring has become the political equivalent of an
Arthur Andersen audit. This supposedly technical process is now so
corrupted by political bias that it would be better to abandon it. Only
then will other countries be able to elect their leaders freely.
· John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group:
www.bhhrg.org
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