How to Tarnish A Hard-Won Reputation

It's not a household name in the United States, but in the former Soviet Union the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is a source both of irritation and solace. The distinction depends on whether you are one of the region's autocrats or one of its independent thinkers.

Whichever the case, the OSCE -- financed in large part by the U.S. -- has played a hard-fought, 16-year role as Europe's official conscience.

Until now. The OSCE has bafflingly jeopardized its reputation as Europe's premier human rights watchdog in order to satisfy an understandable if misguided campaign by Kazakhstan for the prized chair of the organization.

Last Friday, the OSCE for publicly unknown reasons succumbed to Kazakhstan's full-court press on the issue, and announced that the Central Asian republic will take over the one-year chair a little over two years from now, in 2010.

Kazakhstan is hardly the region's worst human-rights violator. But neither is its record worthy of holding up as an example, which is what the chair represents. This is a country that has never held a fair election; although President Nursultan Nazarbayev has led the country since 1989, there's no way to know for sure that he actually ever won a contested election.

Nazarbayev has never permitted a genuine opponent to run against him, and like his neighbor to the north, Vladimir Putin, he has routinely beefed up the election results to show swelled support. He recently signed a law allowing him to serve as president for life. And there's no evidence that, short of his own death, Nazarbayev will ever agree to give up the post; to the contrary, the probability is that he'll stay on the job for years to come.

If the OSCE states wished an example from the former Soviet Union, why not choose Ukraine? For all its flaws, it has been holding truly competitive presidential elections for some 13 years. Or better yet, how about Georgia? There, Mikheil Saakashvili has actually stepped down from the presidency in order to run in a snap election next month.

Kazakhstan ran its OSCE campaign through its own offices and the paid help of lobbying groups like APCO in Washington. It's not clear to me what precisely turned the tide, but the OSCE decision is appalling, in my opinion. It will be hard-pressed to recover its reputation.