The collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to hopes for a new era of democracy and human rights in the region. In the eight countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, these hopes have, for the most part, been dashed.

Once dubbed "countries in transition," almost all of them have in fact already completed their transitions away from communism. However, the transitions have been not fully to democracy but to various forms of authoritarianism that will jeopardize human rights protections in the foreseeable future. It is time to hold their governments to tougher standards.

The regional governments’ most glaring mistakes have been in failing to disavow past abuses – including corruption and power-mongering in all branches of government and impunity for military, police, and security services -- and abusive Soviet-era institutions, such as the Procuracy.

Access to power in the region means access to state resources. With billions of dollars in energy-related investment and credits being pumped into Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, in particular, the incentive for heads of state and government elites to remain in power is staggering. Most regional leaders cling to their authority by jailing opponents, banning opposition political parties, censoring the media, and manipulating elections. The governments of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have banned genuine opposition parties and imprisoned or forced into exile nearly all dissidents. Last year, Kazakhstan kept the only viable opposition candidate off the presidential ballot. And Azerbaijan has committed widespread electoral fraud in all five of the nation-wide elections since the 1993 coup.

Most of the regional governments have also failed to learn from another classic Soviet mistake: that grievances should be redressed, not silenced. Even though that failure was largely responsible for the outbreak of brutal armed conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Tajikistan in the 1990s, some regional governments continue to stifle peaceful political, social, religious, and ethnic movements today.

In 1998, Tajikistan aggressively quelled the northern-based opposition, triggering retaliatory violence. Azerbaijani forces violently quell demonstrations aimed at a more transparent electoral process, making peaceful political consensus-building elusive. The Uzbek government’s prohibition on free expression has forced social discontent to find an outlet in Islamic groupings; the authorities then ban these groups and arrest thousands of alleged adherents.

Abusive Soviet-era institutions continue to function today with impunity. In most of the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, such basic rights as habeas corpus do not exist. The responsibility for upholding defendants’ rights remains in the hands of the Procuracy, the very agency responsible for prosecution. Police torture is widespread throughout the region, but access to an impartial court to complain about it in a timely way is non-existent. (Throughout the region, executive branches closely control the judiciary.) And corrupt law enforcement agencies resist judicial authority. Last year in Georgia, for example, reformers attempted to create a fairer criminal justice system by allowing better access to the court system. However, the government then retracted this access to maintain the political support of the police and other security agencies.

All of the governments of Central Asia and the Caucasus depend heavily on bilateral and multilateral assistance to finance their energy exploitation and transportation projects or simply to keep their failed economies afloat. The international actors who provide this assistance in turn pursue their own economic and strategic interests: winning political cooperation to bring oil and gas to Western markets and to stem the perceived threat of Islamic "fundamentalism."

All too often, they sacrifice the human rights agenda to these competing economic and political agendas. For example, Central Asian governments, notably in Uzbekistan, have successfully played "the Islamic card" to re-orient Western policy away from democracy-building to anti-terrorism. This trade-off may undermine human rights protections and long-term stability in the region.

The principal international actors in the political arena – the World Bank, European Union, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the U.S. government, and (for the Caucasian nations) the Council of Europe – are generally open in their criticism of the regional governments’ human rights practices. Respect for human rights is, indeed, mandated by the "good governance" mandates of the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. But these institutions often squander their influence, for example, by failing to condition implementation of their recommendations for human rights improvements on non-humanitarian assistance. Regional governments thus are free to adopt these important recommendations selectively and expediently.

The international community should condition assistance on progress on human rights, such as the release of political prisoners and the implementation of institutional reform. Without the involvement of the lending agencies, in particular, there is little hope that governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia will comply with their human rights obligations in the foreseeable future unless it is in their narrow self-interest to do so.

Editor’s Note: Rachel Denber is Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. She has worked there since 1991, serving as Director of the Moscow Office from 1992-94 and 1995-97. She has a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Political Science from Columbia University.

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Posted June 21, 2000 © Eurasianet
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