Police reforms are ineffective in Central Asia, according to a report released April 11 that evaluates OSCE-sponsored programs which encourage regional law-enforcement agencies to adhere to the rule-of-law.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has operated police reform programs (PRPs) in the five post-Soviet Central Asian countries for the past decade. The organization signed its most recent memorandum of understanding with Tajik officials on April 8 in Dushanbe. The Dushanbe initiative will concentrate on “reforming police along universally recognized democratic principles of policing,” according to the OSCE ambassador there.
The April 11 report, titled Reassessing the Role of OSCE Police Assistance Programing in Central Asia, argues that OSCE-sponsored programs “have mostly failed to achieve real reform in security services, and have often compromised OSCE ideals by supporting forces that have been accused of human rights abuses and high-level corruption.” The report was published by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and written by David Lewis, a senior research fellow at the University of Bradford. [Editor’s Note: EurasiaNet.org operates under OSF’s auspices].
For the OSCE reform initiatives to be effective, genuine political buy-in is needed, the report says. Such buy-in is currently lacking. The PRP targets “transnational crime,” but the region’s leaders do not have a vested interest in promoting reform because “many Central Asian regimes use aspects of organized criminal activity [including drug trafficking] both for self-enrichment and to maintain political control,” the report says.
“Corruption is one of the reasons why attempts at police reforms have tended to stall,” the report continues. “Institutional reforms threaten to undermine lucrative sources of income for ordinary policemen and high-level officials alike.”
The report repeatedly describes OSCE reform efforts as “ad hoc,” and alleges that the organization has “no clear criteria about the kind of political environment in which police assistance programs might be effective or appropriate.”
To reinforce his contention about the ad-hoc nature of some initiatives, Lewis cites PRP programs in Uzbekistan, which, according to a wide variety of rights groups, as well as the US government, is home to one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. A 2007 “project appears to have mainly provided ad- hoc technical aid to the Police Academy (an internal cable television system, for example) and a study tour: Uzbek police officers visited Ireland in November 2007 to familiarize themselves with Irish policing techniques. Even within this study tour there was no mention in the official documents of any emphasis on democratic policing or human rights protection,” the report says.
In some instances, the OSCE’s PRPs may have actually helped authoritarian-minded governments tighten controls on their respective societies. To highlight that risk, Lewis examined outcomes in Kyrgyzstan, a country where the OSCE has been very active in encouraging police reform. The report argues that PRP assistance may have facilitated a crackdown by former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev on political opposition, as well as the tightening of political and religious rights, as his administration began drifting in an authoritarian direction in 2007. “The widespread reporting of police involvement in these abuses, however, had no apparent impact on the implementation of the OSCE’s PRP,” Lewis says in the report.
By 2009, available evidence suggests that Bakiyev’s administration had ceased trying to reform law-enforcement agencies. Bakiyev’s efforts to strengthen executive authority drew criticism from local non-governmental organizations, but did not prompt the OSCE to reevaluate its PRP program in Bishkek. “There appeared only a limited reaction by the OSCE to the growing authoritarianism of the government, with the PRP carrying on regardless, despite this sharp deterioration in the political situation,” the report states. Bakiyev’s regime collapsed in 2010 amid popular protests.
Citing the Osh events last June as an example, Lewis identifies what he describes as the “disconnect between the glossy brochures and videos produced by the OSCE PRP and the reality of everyday policing on the ground.”
Lewis also questions the OSCE’s methodology for evaluating the success of PRPs. “The OSCE still uses statistical outcomes such as counting ‘activities’ as evidence of progress,” the report states. “There appears to be a lack of reliable indicators that might demonstrate real progress.” In one cited example, these “activities” included “merely organizing or attending conferences and workshops.”
