Big Fat Liars by Matt Taibbi the eXile www.exile.ru
Give them credit: the Moscow Times last week hit it out of the park. In a stunning display of old-school investigative journalism, the paper released a massive expose proving more or less incontrovertibly that the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency last spring was an elaborate, out-and-out fraud.
Using a team of reporters who traveled around the country, the Times in its September 9 piece entitled "And the winner is..?" built its case in the manner of a criminal prosecutor's office, compiling a wide range of evidence, both documentary and testimonial. They compared official figures from local voting precincts in several regions and compared them to the figures released by the federal government. In a number of cases, the two sets of official figures did not match (with the federal figures ballooned in favor of Putin), providing the paper with an instant prima facie case proving the fraud. The paper catalogued anecdotal evidence from officials who saw people leaving voting booths with sacks. One of their reporters claims to have found ashes, the remains of burned ballots. The paper also noted the sudden appearance of 1.3 million new voters between the time of the Duma elections last fall and the presidential vote a few months later, a statistical super-impossibility in a country with a rapidly-declining population. The Times even had photographs, for God's sake, of voters who claimed they'd been coerced. Marcia Clark couldn't have done better. Oh, wait-she didn't.
That Vladimir Putin stole the election was no big scoop, of course. Virtually everybody in Russia knew that there had been fraud at some level in the election. Allegations of election fraud had already been piled very high in Democratic Russia's short history, dating back in particular to the 1993 constitutional referendum, which Boris Yeltsin is widely believed to have stolen. The level of overt media manipulation has likewise risen at a parabolic rate in the past few years, to the point where anyone who has lived here for any time at all knows that the judgement of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that the press in this country "remains pluralistic and diverse" is absurd on its face.
Nonetheless, there is a big difference between knowing something, and proving it. The Times appeared to have proved its case. So what should that have achieved, given that almost everybody in this country knew or suspected the truth anyway?
Well, at the very least, it should have made it impossible for Western governments to cling to the lie that the Russian elections were free and fair. Unless we here at the eXile are very much mistaken, that was the point of the Times's exercise-to disprove the official line that has been fed not only to Russians, but to the Times's primary audience, the West.
That hasn't happened, unfortunately. The press response to the Times expose has been very weak, particularly among the Americans. At press time, the only major American publication to follow up on the story has been the Los Angeles Times, which did so under the deflating headline, "Russia Election Chief Rejects Fraud Claims in Presidential Vote." The rest of the big papers-with the conspicuous inclusion of the New York Times and the Washington Post-have ignored the story entirely. In contrast, three British heavyweights, including old buddy Giles Whittell of the Times of London, Helen Womack of the Independent, and the BBC, picked the story up the day after the Times expose hit the streets.
Why has the response been so quiet? Why has the primary Western election observer, the OSCE, refused to comment on the Times story? To understand, one has to explore the peculiarly mercenary propaganda mission of the West's election observers in places like Russia-- and the symbiotic relationship they enjoy with their primary consumers, the Western media.
That a free and fair election is in the eye of the beholder is something that virtually everyone in the world outside America understands instinctively. For proof of this all one has to do is listen to the responses to questions about the Times story made by officials of the type who think lying for a living is a virtue-like the press officer at the LDPR, or the president of he KGB Veterans' club.
The latter figure, former KGB general Valery Velichko, was a coup plotter in 1991 who for the last nine years or so has been a grumbling fixture in the rolodexes of most reporters in town. A bitter enemy of the Yeltsin regime, he is one of many KGB vets who sense that the rise of their fellow spook Putin might give them a chance to get back to the show. We called him with the aim of getting a former Russian intelligence heavy's perspective on Western election observers in general. Does the Russian intelligence community view organizations like the OSCE as fronts for Western secret services? Do Western election observers have as their primary mission the fulfillment of their nations' diplomatic initiatives, rather than their stated function of seeking out rigged elections?
"Absolutely not," said Velichko. "If you're referring to the election of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then you are wrong. We followed this vote carefully and our opinion is that there were no violations. This was a fair vote and Putin had the support of Russians from the very lowest working classes on up."
So the OSCE was not wrong when it said in its report that the Putin vote "provides a framework for pluralist elections and for a significantly high level of transparency in all phases of the electoral process"?
"Of course not," he said. "If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting, you're wrong." Here Velichko paused, and went on to make what by any standards is a remarkable statement for a xenophobic Russian ex-spy to make: "Obviously you buy any Russian official for nothing. But Foreign election observers can't be bought. How can they be? They make enough money as it is."
What would prompt a stone-hearted non-defector KGB hack to call Westerners incorruptible, and blast his own people as thieves in the same breath? Political necessity, of course. While maintaining several times that Western election observers never made mistakes, Velichko went on to slip and add the following:
"Really, the Putin election was a clean affair. It was, in fact, the first fair election we've seen. The other ones were all frauds."
The OSCE, of course, called the 1996 Yeltsin vote free and fair as well. Somebody has to be lying. Again, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
As members of his party are wont to do, the LDPR spokesman helped us get a grip on the essential nature of things with a witty, concise sound bite:
"Of course, the Western election observers are all working for certain organizations, are totally fraudulent, and are fulfilling a political end," he said. "On the other hand, the Putin election was absolutely honest from start to finish."
The natural conclusion to be drawn from the Times expose is that the OSCE is either completely corrupt, or totally incompetent. No other explanation is really possible. In order to make its case, the Times hardly had to rely on hidden camera footage, phone taps or high-level whistleblowers. All it did was look at numbers that were very obviously floating out there in the public domain.
One might expect the Western press corps to miss massive discrepancies between local poll results and federal returns, or fail to note that 1.3 million new voters-termed "Dead Souls" in the Times Piece in a badly-conceived metaphor (Gogol's Dead Souls were really dead; the Putin voters were just plain imaginary)-had appeared on the rolls. But a lavishly funded international organization whose sole mission during the elections was to seek out vote fraud? Only a conscious deception or a catastrophic failure could explain their missing a fake that brazen and obvious.
The OSCE declined to answer our questions about what exactly its 380 informal observers actually did in the way of "observation" during the Putin vote. There is evidence, however, that the organization restricted its activities to surveillance of the sort that would miss just about anything outside of an armed attack on a voting booth.
Andrei Kasminin, a spokesman for Yabloko, summed up his party's experience with Western election observers as follows:
"We saw foreign observers at the polls," he said. "But at the actual polling booths, everything looked fine. As a result, they wrote that the vote was conducted without violations. But actually, the violations were committed on a much higher level."
So did the OSCE miss the fraud because they didn't see it, or because they didn't want to see it? The communists, of course, have their own opinion on that score.
"Obviously, the foreign observers had an agreement with the Electoral Commission," said Rashid Arslanov, an aide to Alexander Saliya, the KPRF deputy who monitored the elections. "It was agreed that Russia is a democratic country, that elections here are also democratic, and that therefore, everything must have been democratically done."
No wild conspiracy theories are needed to link the OSCE with the kind of shenanigans the communists think they were involved with in the Russian elections. Last year, the eXile reported that a widely-reputed CIA official named William Walker had been instrumental in uncovering a supposed "massacre" that provided NATO with a rationale for conducting the air attack on Kosovo. Nearly a year later, on March 12, 2000, New York Times reporters Tom Walker and Adrian Laverty reported that the CIA had admitted to using the OSCE as a cover to help train and prepare KLA guerillas for war. William Walker was the OSCE head of mission in the area at the time. Here's an excerpt from that story:
'When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head of mission. "The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE," said a European envoy.'
That an American contingent of the OSCE was involved with covert military operations in an Eastern European hot spot does not automatically mean, of course, that the Russian OSCE delegation consciously falsified its report on the Putin vote. But it certainly suggests that it's not outside the realm of possibility.
Why would an organization sponsored by democratic nations consciously give its stamp of approval to burgeoning dictatorships like the Putin regime? The Moscow Times touched on the matter in its own short section addressing the OSCE report. Quoting Novaya Gazeta reporter Boris Kagarlitsky, the Times gave vent to the opinion that the OSCE weighted its report in order to lend support to the political allies of its sponsor nations-in particular the "reform" program of Anatoly Chubais, which still survived largely intact under Putin.
The OSCE's record in recent election coverage certainly suggests that they take an "eye of the beholder" approach no less obvious than, say, Velichko's. The organization consistently denounces the elections held by unfriendly regimes while praising the elections held in countries formally allied with the West-even when more or less exactly the same violations are observed.
Compare, for instance, the OSCE's report on the Serbian presidential elections in December 1997 to the Russian elections last year. In that report, the OSCE strongly condemned the Serbian vote, writing in the very first paragraph that the elections were "fundamentally flawed" and noting soon afterward that the process was characterized by "blatant election fraud", resulting in a vote that "offered a distinct advantage to the candidate of the Left Coalition", i.e. Slobodan Milosevic.
The OSCE, incidentally, appears to reserve this kind of language exclusively for its assessment of certain regimes. For instance, the report it released on the last Uzbek parliamentary election of last December, which by virtually everyone's assessment was a truly criminal, stone-age affair, used language significantly more ambiguous than it used in the Serbian report. Here is its preliminary conclusion about that vote:
"...the election of Deputies to the Oliy Majlis of the Republic of Uzbekistan fell short of the OSCE commitments for democratic elections enshrined in the 1990 Copenhagen Document. In particular, the commitments for free, fair, equal, transparent and accountable election were breached."
Note the language here. The elections were bad, the OSCE agrees, but in conclusion, all it says is that they "fell short" of the OSCE commitments which were "enshrined" (enshrined?) in the 1990 Copenhagen document. Fell short-not even "fell far short". Nothing like the phrase "blatant election fraud" could be found anywhere in this report. This is despite a genuinely Soviet statistical profile which involved a 93% vote in favor of the registered state parties, and an astonishing 98% turnout.
Such nuances in language sound insignificant, but in fact they mean a great deal. The OSCE reports, after all, are primarily designed for consumption by the mass media, which as a rule takes the OSCE's lengthy reports and reduces them to sound bites and headlines. Thus phrases like "fundamentally flawed" strike the ear quite differently than phrases like "fall short", which can easily be squeezed in to a news report which takes the line that Uzbekistan is, say, "struggling in its transition to democracy", as opposed to being a villainous totalitarian regime, as Milosevic's government is often called.
Getting back to that Serb report and how it compares to the OSCE summation of the Putin vote, it is hard not to notice how many of the same violations appear in both elections-only to be described in different ways. State television news broadcasts in Serbia, the OSCE reported, demonstrated a "clear and consistent bias", while opposition voices were severely limited "by the fact that the government has made it practically impossible for independent broadcasters to register for the necessary broadcast frequencies." Nonetheless, the report noted that "there was a commendable effort to provide all the candidates with free political advertising, in proportion with their representation in parliament" and that opposition radio stations and other media did exist.
Compare this to the Russian media situation, about which the OSCE said the following: "the media in the Russian Federation remain pluralistic and diverse." If you lived here in Russia during the past year and a half or so, you know that state television and radio programming not campaigned exclusively in favor of the Putin regime, but actively assassinated its political enemies, most notably Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. A broadcast of "Vremya" last fall in which Sergei Dorenko showed viewers a doctored image of Luzhkov with Monica Lewinsky's hair morphed onto his head comes to mind as an example of the approach Russian state television took to opposition political forces.
Furthermore, there was no "commendable effort" of any kind to provide other candidates with free political advertising. In fact, even very viable candidates like Gennady Zyuganov and Grigory Yavlinsky were more or less kept hidden from public view in the run-up to the election.
And that was only the national media. As anyone who lives here knows, the press in the Russian regions could hardly be farther from being "diverse and pluralistic." To put things in more concrete terms, one need only read the post-electoral commentary by Robert Coalson, director of the National Press Institute. Decrying the OSCE report, Coalson wrote in the Moscow Times earlier this year:
"Let's take a look, for instance, at Tambov region, an area with a population of 1.3 million only about 500 kilometers from Moscow. According to the best information I have, this region is served by 35 general newspapers. Of that total, 29 are directly controlled and financed by local governments. Of the remaining six, one is published by the Communist Party and five are commercial papers, all of which are published and distributed in the city of Tambov. The total weekly circulation of all six nonstate newspapers is 95,000 copies, of which almost half is the Communist paper Nash Golos. The next largest circulation nonstate paper in this entire region is Tambovsky Kurier, with a weekly press run of just 20,000."
Another striking feature of the OSCE report on the Serbian election is its concern with discrepancies in vote counts. In its overall summation, the report concludes:
"The Republic Election Commission seriously neglects to publish preliminary and intermediate post-election results, including voter turn-out figures. It has relinquished this role to the parties which often reported contradictory figures."
Later on in the report, the organization writes in more specific terms, noting discrepancies in the tally of votes for opposition candidates:
"Experts recall that on December 8, 1997 at 13.15 hours the SPS Spokesperson announced that on the basis of approximately 100% of the election results the candidate of the Social Democracy, Mr. Vuk Obradovich, had received 122,967 votes, while the final official REC figure was 115,850 votes (at 15.19 hours on December 10, 1997)."
As the Moscow Times report showed, exactly these kind of violations occurred in the Russian election. The Times noted the difficulty it had in obtaining election figures from local precincts; this is exactly the kind of behavior the OSCE complained about at a federal level in Serbia when it wrote that the government "neglects to publish... post-election results, including voter turnout figures."
Furthermore, while the OSCE complained about "contradictory figures" in Serbia, it paid no attention at all to what the Times discovered were fairly obvious contradictions in the Russian election. This kind of selective scrupulousness makes it very hard to accept the explanation that the OSCE simply failed to notice, or failed to inquire, about election returns in Russia. In fact, having read both reports, it's hard to come to any conclusion that does not involve a conscious effort on the OSCE's part to whitewash a dirty election.
The OSCE's mission when it observes elections is essentially propagandistic. Its conclusions, and the conclusions of other similar foreign observers, are the stuff that sets the tone not only for public debate over policy towards the countries in question, but for the tone of economic assessments of a country's investment climate. It is no coincidence that the bounce the Russian stock market received after Putin's elections came on the heels of the thousands of media reports which quoted the OSCE's assessment of the vote as relatively free and fair.
But the Moscow Times's report raises an interesting question about the nature of these assessments. Given the complexity of the electoral process in countries as vast as Russia, and the capacity of governments, should they be so inclined, to commit fraud in any number of ways, it would seem irresponsible to submit any kind of verdict about a vote's legitimacy with the speed the OSCE habitually demonstrates. It took the Moscow Times six months to uncover what it did and dig up the necessary evidence to make its case, and even then, it surely didn't catch everything. So how could the OSCE responsibly make any kind of judgement within weeks of the election?
If the OSCE is irresponsible in releasing judgements so quickly after elections, then the media, obviously, is even moreso. Investigations like the Times's are rare; instead, reporters tend to rely almost exclusively on organizations like the OSCE to make judgements on the fairness of elections. Worse, the response to the Times report proved that the American press not only routinely accepts the OSCE word as gospel when its reports are issued, but hesitates even to breach the issue of incompetence or corruption within the organization when evidence of such things arise.
Even this past Tuesday's article by Maura Reynolds of the L.A. Times-which despite its dismissive headline did manage to list the Moscow Times's allegations in detail-tiptoed carefully around the issue of the OSCE's role. When Reynolds did mention the OSCE at the end of her piece, she cast its performance in the most positive light possible:
'In a preliminary report on the election, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe--which sent nearly 400 officials to observe the balloting--noted that irregularities had been seen but that they "did not appear to have an impact on the outcome of the election."
However, in its final report, the OSCE described the fraud allegations as serious. The group said it did not have the means to evaluate their validity but urged Russian authorities to investigate.'
Three things about this one short passage. First of all, the inclusion of the OSCE quote about the irregularities not having an impact on the election is almost certainly a preview of the party line to come on the issue. If the Times expose ends up having any impact at all, the OSCE will probably concede at some point that fraud occurred, but that Putin was still the real victor.
This attitude toward elections is a strange one to begin with, of course. It would seem that the real issue in weighing the legitimacy of a vote is not whether or not the fraud had an impact on the result, but whether the fraud occurred at all. A regime which fixes an election it would have won any way is still neither democratic nor legitimate. To call an election "relatively fair", like calling an auction "relatively fair", is, as we've noted before in this paper, something akin to saying a woman is "relatively pregnant". An election is either fixed or it isn't.
Next, Reynolds in the one additional paragraph she devotes to the issue notes that the OSCE's final report did eventually describe the fraud allegations as "serious". While true, the editorial decision Reynolds made to include this fact while ignoring the obvious shortcomings of the OSCE report (i.e. the classification of the media as "pluralistic and diverse", which Reynolds surely knows to be untrue) says a lot about where her sympathies lie as a reporter.
Finally, Reynolds notes that the OSCE urged the Russian authorities to investigate the matter, while failing to point out that an impartial authority asking a government to investigate itself is plainly absurd. Foreign observers in theory exist precisely in order to make outside judgements about a government's legitimacy. If the OSCE ultimately asks us to wait for the Russian government's verdict on the matter, it is admitting its own superfluousness in the whole process.
It is certainly good to finally have proof, if we even needed it, that the Putin regime is corrupt and undemocratic. But it would be even better to see a discussion begin about our own commitment to democracy. If our own observers are liars about the level of democracy in other countries, what does that say about the health of our own democracy? Surely it can't be a small thing when our interests and our ideals are shown so clearly to be two different things.