OSCE: U.S. Envoy Sees Some Progress In Building Democracy

Julie Finley at RFE/RL's Prague headquarters today (RFE/RL)

PRAGUE, April 2, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Julie Finley, the U.S. ambassador to the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), discussed
with a number of RFE/RL correspondents the role of the OSCE and its affiliate institutions in
promoting democracy in the post-Soviet region and the challenges it
faces.

RFE/RL: Russia, in recent years, has been very critical of the OSCE, especially when it comes to the organization's election monitoring and assessment. Has Moscow become an impediment to democracy-building efforts across the region?

Julie Finley: Before I left Washington to go to Vienna to represent the United States at the OSCE, everybody in Washington said: 'Oh, your biggest problem is going to be the Russian Federation. Oh dear, they don't move at all....' And that's not true. It hasn't been my biggest problem. The European Union has been my biggest problem. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the Russian Federation is very clear about where it stands on things.

RFE/RL: So where does Russia stand?

Finley: I think the Russian Federation has become harder and firmer with regard to its positions and its unhappiness with ODIHR [the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights] and I think if you look at President [Vladimir] Putin's speech at the security conference in Munich in February, where he took two or three sentences to criticize the OSCE, he actually meant ODIHR. And probably this was a prelude to not inviting the OSCE to monitor the Russian Federation elections.

So as we've got closer to 2008, they've become harder and harder in their criticism of the human rights basket of the OSCE. I will say that they are cooperative and interested in forwarding economic and environmental matters in that basket, and also political-military [matters], which is essentially why they wanted to have this organization founded in the beginning.

RFE/RL: And why does the EU pose such a problem?

Finley: The EU has been a problem because it takes a long time for the EU to come to a conclusion and make a decision on a lot of things. And by the time sometimes the EU comes to a conclusion, it's so late and the conclusion itself is so watered down that it's almost...the whole thing is irrelevant.

Now, those are problems within the EU, but it makes it difficult to operate within the framework of the OSCE for a country like the United States not to be able to build a consensus, or not to be able to build even a large majority because the EU is 27+8 and that bloc within [the] 56 [OSCE members states] is considerable.

RFE/RL: Has there been a rollback of democracy in many CIS countries? Or is there cause for optimism over the long term that democracy will take root? Let's look at Central Asia, for example.

Finley: Some of these countries that have had extremely repressive regimes are coming up from the bottom level of freedoms. And I think Tajikistan has made some strides in the human rights effort. But it's not enough. They deserve to be praised for the progress they have made. But it's not nearly enough.

RFE/RL: How do you view development in the region's most repressive state, Turkmenistan, after the demise of President Saparmurat Niyazov?

Finley: I was in Ashgabat last fall. I'm going back again in June. I think you have to wait for a bit. I'm encouraged by what I see the new president is trying to do. Again, it's not enough but any centimeter of progress is progress.

RFE/RL: ODIHR, which you mentioned earlier, does a lot of election monitoring. Are fair elections the litmus test of a democracy?

Finley: Most of these countries refuse to grasp or understand that having what they consider a fair election on election day is [not] it. They refuse to understand that it is about the weeks, many weeks, before the election day. That everything that goes on in that period is as important as how election day runs.

And all of those things have to do with freedom of assembly, freedom of media. Do they all have access on the television? Do they all have access to the radio? Do they have the ability of their supporters to gather in a town square to discuss?

RFE/RL: How do you answer the accusation, by some, that the United States should do more to promote democracy and that, in fact, Washington overlooks human rights violations in some countries -- like Azerbaijan -- because it is more interested in energy resources?

Finley: It's a very complicated question...I submit that you have a number of friends, some of whom are closer than others, some of whom have more faults than others. But for a variety of other reasons, the characteristics that are not faults but that are strengths, cause you to maintain that friendship. And I don't think it's really different between nations.

(RFE/RL's Armenian, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and Romania/Moldova services contributed to this report.)