Kazakhstan Gives CIS Monitors the Boot

by Nathan Hamm on 11/21/2005 · 6 comments

I saw this story yesterday, mentioning again the US position that a fair election will prove Kazakhstan the leader in Central Asia, and briefly considered posting about it. But it’s not particularly notable in any way other than that it shows the US is (intentionally or not) playing to Kazakhstan’s desire to be recognized as a mature and valuable member of the international community.

But suddenly, the story becomes a little more interesting with the news that Kazakhstan has denied the CIS Elections Monitoring Organization permission to observe the presidential elections. (CIS-EMO is different from the regular CIS observer missions.)

Deputy Prosecutor-General Askhat Dautbaev explained that Kazakhstan allows international organizations to monitor its elections, but he said the CIS-EMO is “a foreign NGO registered in Russia in accordance with that country’s laws,” Khabar reported.

“We made a mistake [in originally accrediting CIS-EMO],” Kazakh TV1 quoted Election Commission Chairman Onalsyn Zhumabekov as saying.

Is this a slap at Russia for signing the new defense treaty with Uzbekistan? Perhaps. But perhaps it’s taking advantage of an opportunity to keep to a minimum the number of “phony” observers around for the election.

Update: A point worth making that I forgot about earlier is something mentioned at neweurasia a while ago. Nazarbaev is fairly certain to win handily in a free vote and fixing the vote clearly does much more harm than good.

Also, the ODIHR’s latest interim report on the election (PDF) just came out.

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KZblog :: Election Update :: November :: 2005: 11/22/2005 at 9:54 am

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1 qadinbakida 11/21/2005 at 9:46 pm: ENEMO is not in anyway afilliated with Russia, though it certainly has Russian monitors in its delegations. It is a coalition of democratic election monitoring NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the caucasus. Its monitors — who are more knowledgeable about about the ways NIS elections get stolen that westerners and usually speak the local language — played a critical role in all three Ukraine elections and were active in Kyrygzstan’s election as well. They are not analogous to the CIS “monitors” who came to AZ to monitor and reaffirm official results. IT receieves a lot of US funded and should absolutely not be put in the “phony” category. That’s why it got its accrediatation pulled.
2 Nathan 11/21/2005 at 9:56 pm: Great, but ENEMO isn’t who RFE/RL is talking about. Anytime an election monitoring organization that gives the Russian version of events shows up, it gets a little confusing. Perhaps this clears things up a bit.

In December 2003, a group calling itself the CIS Elections Monitoring Organization (CIS-EMO) was registered in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, as a nongovernmental organization; a spokesman for the group said it has no ties to the official CIS monitors.

The reasons for the founding of this group are unclear. One possible explanation is that after so many discrepancies between CIS monitors’ conclusions and those arrived at by OSCE election observers, a “neutral” NGO was needed to lend legitimacy to the official CIS reports and to thereby reinforce Russian policy goals.

A certain amount of confusion resulted from the fact that this NGO had a very similar name to the official CIS monitors, and that its reports were almost carbon copies of those filed by the official CIS monitors.

The CIS-EMO played a minor role as an observer in the Ukrainian elections in 2004. CIS-EMO leader Aleksei Kochetkov complained that he had been beaten by people wearing orange armbands, a complaint that was dismissed as a ploy by many people.

In the February Moldovan parliamentary elections, a trainload of CIS-EMO observers were not allowed into the country — being turned back at the Ukrainian-Moldovan border. Earlier, Moldova had also rejected the presence of official CIS monitors.

If they’re the same, I’d expect Moldova to be mentioned on the ENEMO website.
3 qadinbakida 11/22/2005 at 12:21 am: would be very coindicental if it’s not the same. ENEMO just got their credentials pulled over the weekend.
4 Nathan 11/22/2005 at 1:02 am: I trust RFE/RL not to make the mistake. I can’t find anything on ENEMO getting their Kazakhstan credentials pulled (but it’s late and I’m not looking incredibly hard).
5 KZBlog 11/22/2005 at 9:51 am: As far as I get from the news, they haven’t had their credentials pulled but they are looked at unfavorably. And they don’t get to monitor this on. the indicated list of observers is here