COMMENTARY
by Gordon Hahn
The debate continues on this side of the Atlantic between those who would place human rights at the center of U.S.-Russian relations and those who prefer to treat it as just one among many important aspects of the relationship. Conservatives and human rights activists are vocal in criticizing President Barack Obama’s ‘reset’ policy with Moscow, arguing that the administration has not emphasized the issue in its engagement with Russian President Dmitrii medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In effect, they are requesting that administration officials or President Obama himself publicly criticize and even condemn violations of Russian citizens’ political, civil, and human rights.
The administration has countered that it does address these issues, but it does so privately through the venue of the joint U.S.-Russian presidential commission and its working groups on human rights and civil society, believing this is a more productive approach.
There is a way to square this circle. The Obama administration should consider some public criticism of the most egregious Russian failings on human rights such as the failure to indict those responsible for the death in prison of Hermitage Captial lawyer Sergei Magnitskii. However, any such criticism should be prefaced by an acknowledgement of the positive changes that have been occurring in Moscow’s domestic and foreign policies and perhaps behind-the-scenes offers of concrete benefits in terms of trade and other economic policies that would be forthcoming should the reforms expand and the most serious failings in rights’ protection be redressed. The Obama administration’s public statements, much like the U.S.mainstream media, have ignored the ongoing, gradual liberalization during Medvedev’s presidency under the so-called Medvedev-Putin tandem that in April 2008 I predicted would occur and have tracked ever since.
Although certainly not yet a democracy or even a ‘tandemocracy’, policy changes in Moscow have been significant and are becoming more so with each passing day. Just a few of the most recent examples include Medvedev’s draft bill introduced to the State Duma that will rollback Putin’s counter-reform of raising the portion of votes from 5 to 7 percent that a political party needs to win in order to take a share of the seats in the State Duma for its 2016 elections. The raising of this threshold was widely criticized as a mechanism for preventing opposition democratic parties from gaining seats. Medvedev proposed further that after the 2016 elections lowering the barrier to 3 percent would be considered. Another positive development was a Moscow court’s acquittal of Oleg Orlov, the director of the Russian human rights group ‘Memorial’, on libel charges filed by the head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov. The fact that some things remain the same cannot negate the fact that these and tens of other small incremental but important political and economic policy changes have been made since Medvedev’s arrival in the Kremlin.
At the height of the Cold War and much more tense relations with Moscow President Ronald Reagan not only demanded but rewarded Moscow when Mikhal Gorbachev’s perestroika responded with concrete domestic and foreign policy shifts. The failire of the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations to match Gorbachev’s even more radical changes and later the dismantling of the Soviet regime and state contributed to the extremely dangerous revolutionary form of that regime change; one that barely averted Armageddon and led to a corrupt oligarchy and a deep and politically dangerous economic depression, which discredited democracy and markets across much of Russia. Ever since, the Russian regime transformation has been more authoritarian than democratic.
To date, Moscow has received very little in terms of verbal recognition of its gradual liberalization in Russian domestic policy or concrete benefits in its relations with the U.S. as a result of its thaw in foriegn policy. In U.S. relations, the advantages for Moscow have been largely negative ones: no NATO expansion and no anti-missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic.
In the war against jihadism, Moscow acquiesced in a series of concessions – opening the northern supply route through Russia and Central Asia to NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan and providing debt relief and other forms of assistance to the Afghan government and in the war against the Taliban and Al Qa`ida. In response, Moscow had to wait until last month to have the Al-Qa`ida-allied Caucasus Emirate mujahedin put on the U.S. State Department’s list of specially designated international terrorist organizations, even though in just the last three years alone, the Caucasus jihadists have carried out some 1,500 attacks, killing approximately 1,500 and wounding some 2,500 police, servicemen, officials, and civilians.
One offer Washington should make at some point is a declaration of support for Russia’s entry into NATO, if Moscow fulfills all the democracy and other requisites, including the resolution of sovereignty disputes, such as the one with Georgia over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. To be candid, however, this issue may no longer be possible to resolve, at least to Tbilisi’s liking. More immediately and more easily, Washington must once and for all terminate the Jackson-Vanick amendments. It should also seek to end Georgia’s obstruction of Russia’s entry into the WTO.
By publicly acknowledging the many small and increasingly significant steps that the Kremlin has and will be taking, the Obama administration could influence the tandem’s decision as to whether Medvedev or Putin will stand as the Kremlin’s candidate in the March 2012 Russian presidential election and support continuation of the present gradual liberalization in Russian domestic policy and thaw in Russian foriegn policy. Such acknowledgement could make it possible to engage in some public criticism of bad, persistent policies. Open criticism, however, should be delayed until after the presidential elections, be used sparingly to address the worst of the authorities’ encroachments on Russians’ rights, and should not overwhelm the acknowledgements of domestic progress and rewards for international cooperation.
We are once again at one of those pivotal crossroads in Russia’s long and torturous road west. A single misstep or overreaction can be a tipping point in which Moscow turns away and reverts to its more authoritarian and anti-Western traditions. Washington needs to be careful, forthcoming and fair to all concerned parties in its dealings with Moscow.
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