The OSCEs of Central Asia

ABSTRACT

Central Asia is the ‘best customer’ of the OSCE. It is the area of five post-Soviet OSCE participating states that are in significant need of support by the organization that prides itself on cooperative security and that have many shortcomings primarily in the humanitarian dimension, which the organization should foster to change. Central Asia has demonstrated less political and socio-economic transformation since its independence than it could have. While it receives reduced interest due to the declining importance of those two matters that contributed to it (rich natural resources and energy bearers and the vicinity of Afghanistan), the OSCE is the organization where Central Asia is ‘at home’. Central Asian states would like to face less soft persuasion (and even less hard pressure), but they would like to benefit from the assistance of the organization and its participating states. It is for this reason that there is more than one OSCE in Central Asia trying to meet the different needs of the area.

KEYWORDS:

• Helsinki Final Act
• CSCE
• OSCE
• Central Asia
• human rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The text of the Astana Commemorative Declaration towards a Security Community states: ‘We reaffirm our full adherence … to all OSCE norms, principles and commitments, starting from the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris, the Charter for European Security and all other OSCE documents to which we have agreed, and our responsibility to implement them fully and in good faith’ (OSCE 2010, 1).

2. The CSCE made an attempt to accept a consensus-minus-one and later a consensus-minus-two rule in the early 1990s. However, as now participating states with different agenda are not isolated and belong to groups (integrations and alliances), the consensus-minus-one rule is not applicable in practice.

3. Though this has been widely known, it was still unusual when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on 29 August 2014, pointed out that ‘the Kazakhs never had any statehood’. Putin’s remarked angered the Kazakh leadership and sparked reaction (Najibullah 2014).

4. Memorably, Kazakhstan declared its sovereignty on 16 December 1991, two weeks before the Soviet Union was dissolved and just four days before the so-called Almaty meeting in the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was held.

5. It is for this reason that Martha Brill Olcott (2005) concludes that Central Asia has missed its second chance as well.

6. While Kyrgyzstan hosted a US airbase in Manas, essential for transit to and from the US-led war in Afghanistan, Washington was certainly not in a position to be in the lead of challenging Bishkek on human rights. With respect to Uzbekistan, Washington had to temper criticism in spite of evidence of Tashkent’s atrocious human rights record due to its cooperation with the US; and criticism of Kazakhstan was often muted because of the country’s significance as a trading partner and source of international investment. This was the view of the second George W. Bush administration.

7. It is important to understand that in the ‘redoubling’ of institutions in the first 15 years the CSCE, the West and the socialist countries had parallel regional security organizations and economic integrations.

8. Aside from the Foreign Agents Law, which Kyrgyzstan emulated from a near-identical 2012 law in Russia, as of May 2015, Kyrgyzstan followed Russia’s lead and became the fifth member (after Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan) of the Eurasian Economic Union (Russia Insider 2015), a Russia-led economic community, which its members hope will eventually compete with the EU. In May 2016, however, the Kyrgyz parliament failed to approve the Foreign Agents Law, with 46 votes in favour and 65 against (ICNL 2016).