Russian Legislation Restricting NGO's

Robert Bruce Ware

Russian legislators and government officials have recently come under widespread criticism for their efforts to restrict the operation of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).  Though critics are correct in their concerns that impending legislation to this effect is ham-fisted, obscure, and ultimately counterproductive, they have failed to see that the move is not unwarranted.  Legislative restrictions on the NGOs are, at least in part, a reflection of the fact that some NGOs have unduly restricted themselves for many years.  These NGOs have undermined their own missions, and failed those whom they have claimed to serve.  The Russian legislation is, if anything, a frustrated and belated recognition of their failure.  The legislation would require Russian offices of foreign NGOs to reregister as Russian organizations, subject to tighter financial and legal controls.  Though the bill would affect as many as 450,000 NGOs operating currently within a broad framework, critics claim that it targets groups that seek to foster democracy and human rights.  The Kremlin, they say, is concerned about western financial support for popular ("colored") political uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, and about prospects that this western strategy will soon be replicated in Russia itself to the detriment of its current leaders.  In May, for example, the head of the Russian Federal Security Service accused U.S. and other foreign intelligence services of using NGOs to spy on Russia and to foment upheaval in ex-Soviet republics.

Critics also argue that the impending legislation is an effort to silence human rights organizations that have exposed Russian abuses in the North Caucasus.  Last summer, at a Kremlin meeting attended by human rights experts, President Putin warned that Russia would not allow foreign organizations to finance domestic political activities.  The current reading of the bill in the Russian State Duma follows legal actions against groups such as the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which is funded from the United States and Europe.  An Associated Press report (23 Nov 05) cited Holly Cartner, the regional director of U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, who declared: "The express purpose of this law is to emasculate the NGO community." 

Unfortunately, groups like Amnesty International (AI), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and particularly Human Rights Watch (HRW) long ago "emasculated" their own Russian missions.  From 1997 to 1999, these three organizations, and all human rights groups, abandoned the North Caucasus.  They did so because they feared the hostage industry that was then centered in the de facto independent Chechnya.  The industry targeted foreigners for the higher ransoms that they brought, but it was also responsible for kidnapping, torturing, maiming, murdering, and enslaving, thousands of local people of both genders and all ages.  Ironically (and horribly), all major international relief and human rights organizations fled the North Caucasus because of the massive human rights abuses that were occurring in the region.  They thereby abandoned the people of this region to suffer these abuses silently, invisibly, and alone.  Not only did international human rights organizations fail to help the people of the North Caucasus to cope with the massive human rights abuses that they suffered during these years, but they also failed to bring these buses to the attention of the international community, and to explain that these very abuses were the reason that the organizations themselves had all abandoned the region.  As one of the few westerners regularly visiting the North Caucasus during the late 1990s, I was an eye witness to the toll that these abuses took on the people that the human rights organizations left behind.

In August and September of 1999, the Russian Republic of Dagestan was twice invaded by approximately 2,000 Chechnya-based militants.  Dozens of civilians were murdered, small ethno-linguistic groups were threatened with extinction, and 32,000 people were left homeless throughout the harsh winter that followed.  Not one international relief or human rights organization went to their assistance.  It was not until the following April that the UNHCR office in Moscow finally sent a shipment of food and supplies to the Dagestani refugees.  Though these refugees remained homeless for up to two years afterwards, not one international human rights organization ever chronicled their plight.  In the autumn of 2000, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Mary Robinson, canceled a scheduled visit to Dagestani refugees on the border with Chechnya, but found time on the same trip to visit Grozny and lash out a Russian abuses. 

In the aftermath of the invasions of Dagestan, Russian federal troops entered Chechnya and started shutting down the slave trade.  Only then did international relief and human rights organizations deem it safe enough to follow in the wake of the Russian military.  Yet when they arrived on the scene these organizations did nothing to investigate, document, and publicize the massive human rights abuses that had occurred in the region during the years of their absence.  Instead, they documented and publicized the massive human rights abuses that were being committed by the Russian military.  These reports consistently failed to note that human rights abuses in the region were so extensive and severe that the human rights organizations, themselves, had chosen to abandon the region until after the Russian military managed to reduce those abuses, and render the region safe enough for the rights organizations to return.

The rights organizations performed a great service when they chronicled the abuses committed by the Russian military, but they did a great disservice when they failed to place these within the context of the abuses that had long been committed by the other side.  To take just one of several thousand examples, not a single international human rights group ever investigated or publicized the two slave markets in Chechnya (one in Grozny and one in Urus Martan) that trafficked several hundred Russian citizens prior to the Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1999.  Information like this would have been important, not because it would have justified the abuses that were being committed by the Russian military, but because it would have helped the world to understand that Russian intervention had been required to stop other abuses, and because it would have helped to set us all on an honest path toward truth and justice in the region.

In 1999, when the journalists and rights organizations returned to the North Caucasus in the wake of the Russian military, there was a clear choice between two moral paths.  On the one hand, there was an even path of truth and justice, which would have required a balanced presentation by western human rights organizations and journalists.  This path might have contributed to an informed and realistic international response, which might have given the international community greater influence in Russian policies in the region, which ultimately might have done more to curb Russian abuses and to help the people of the North Caucasus.  Instead of this, western rights groups and journalists led the international community down a slanted path of half-truth, hyperbole, and hysteria, which caused Russians to turn their backs upon the West, which strengthened Russian hardliners, which thereby further diminished prospects for human rights in the North Caucasus, and which thoroughly discredited the Russian operations of the western human rights organizations.  We can never know what might have happened had reports from the region been more balanced, but things could hardly be worse than they are today.  Reports from Human Rights Watch were arguably less balanced than those of any other group, as illustrated, for example, by the unabashed hysteria of Ms. Cartner's latest claim.

Contrary to Ms. Cartner's claim, the international human rights organizations "emasculated" themselves when they abandoned the people of the region in 1997.  Since then it has become clear that, at least in the North Caucasus, their agenda has only peripherally to do with human rights.  These groups have failed to tell the world the truth about what happened in the North Caucasus because their agendas are implicitly and self-destructively ideological.  They have unselfconsciously immersed themselves in an otherwise obsolete mindset that must always present Russia, not just as the villain that it has sometimes been, but as a mindlessly, monochromatically, and irredeemably aggressive monstrosity.  It is convenient for some western human rights groups to find evil in the Kremlin; it gets those press releases published and it helps with fund raising.

And who is ever going to doubt it?  We've been told all of our lives that the Kremlin is evil, and that's what we are told today.  Not one of the many articles on the Russian restriction of NGOs has discussed any of the above issues.  Not one major American media outlet will ever publish or air any of the broader considerations outlined in this commentary.

The hard fact is that international organizations such as HRW, AI, and MSF restricted themselves years ago when the sacrificed their mission as neutral moral arbiters in order to pursue a narrow and slanted ideological agenda.  They restricted themselves when, instead of reporting all sides of the story, they reported only one.  The impending Duma legislation is little more than a belated recognition of their self-restriction.

The common defense of the human rights organizations is that they monitor only states, and that they therefore do not monitor non-state actors.  Since the Chechen hostage industry was perpetrated by criminal gangs, and since those who invaded Dagestan were not acting on behalf of a state, this argument concludes that human rights groups are justified in overlooking these abuses.  Of course this argument ignores the fact that Shamil Basayev, who led the invasion of Dagestan, had resigned his post as one of Chechnya's highest ranking officials only a few months earlier.  But that is the least of the argument's problems.  A greater problem for the argument is that anyone might have been forgiven for thinking that the question of whether non-state actors are capable of massive human rights abuses was settled once and for all on September 11, 2001.

But the biggest problem is that groups like HRW and AI who attempt to draw this distinction between state and non-state actors have also repeatedly condemned the U.S. government for making the very same distinction in its detention of "enemy combatants".  According to AI and HRW, the U.S. government is wrong when it distinguishes between state actors and non-state actors in its detention policies, but AI and HRW are right when they distinguish between state and non-state actors in order to explain why they have not attempted to investigate or document, let alone condemn, rights abuses committed against Russian citizens by non-state actors in the North Caucasus from 1997 to 1999.  This patent hypocrisy has cost AI and HRW any moral authority that they might otherwise have wielded to their own advantage, and to the advantage of minorities, in Russia.  The truth is that these organizations have, in Ms. Cartner's metaphor, undercut themselves.

But the real tragedy is that human rights are now in greater jeopardy than ever in the North Caucasus.  The people of the region are desperately in need of help from human rights groups with genuine moral authority. Certainly not all international rights organizations are guilty of the same excesses as AI and HRW, and many of them do important work under difficult circumstances.  But it seems that the worst are always the loudest and the least balanced, and now these have undercut all of the others.  They have thereby done a tremendous disservice to the people that they claim to help.

But of course, groups like AI and HRW never really cared about the people of the North Caucasus.  Otherwise, they would not have abandoned the region.  At the very least they would have let the world know why they abandoned the region, and when they returned to it they would have documented what had happened while they were gone.

What about those foreign NGOs that promote democracy in Russia?  Just as with human rights, there is no question that the people of the North Caucasus need more, not less, democracy.  So there is plenty of room for help, just as long as it is honest and informed.

According to (former) Senator John Edwards and (former) Congressman Jack Kemp (speaking on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations), the Russian legislation "would roll back pluralism in Russia and curtail contact between our societies."  Yet it does not seem that even John Edwards should be too young to remember the scandals that rocked American elections in 1996, 1998, and 2000, when there were revelations that relatively small amounts of money had found their way from China and other foreign countries into American political campaigns.  Outraged leaders of both American parties, and indignant editorialists in all of the same American dailies that are now condemning the Russian NGO legislation, declared that foreign money should never be allowed to influence American elections.  Yet these same opinion leaders thought it was fine when the American government openly spent USD 45 million to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian election.

Blatant hypocrisy of this sort demands an exposé.  Yet articles that discussed the democratic implications of the Russian legislation in critical terms, and that appeared on November 23 in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press ( to name only three), never mentioned it.  So when their foreign money enters our American electoral campaigns, then it's a scandal.  Yet when much larger sums of our American money enter their foreign electoral campaigns, then it's the kind of "pluralism" that fosters "democracy" as well as "contact between our societies".  If we want to foster democracy then why do we undermine self-determination?  Who in their right mind would want to have political "contact" with a pack of self-complacent hypocrites?

For reasons that I have never understood, Russia pluralistically permits Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America to operate in its territory, despite their relentless criticism of the Russian government (and despite the outrages that these organizations have committed as recently as last July, when an RL reporter sold an interview with terrorist leader, Shamil Basayev, to ABC).  On the other hand, Al Jazeera offices were bombed into oblivion in Kabul and Baghdad.  As I write, the BBC is reporting claims that President Bush suggested the destruction of Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar.  Perhaps he was interested in a bit of pluralistic "contact between our societies".  But if we wish to foster pluralism and democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, the North Caucasus, we might to best to lead by example.  For the last five years, we have done very little of that.  Much like the human rights organizations in the North Caucasus, America has squandered its moral authority, and it will be unable to foster anything helpful in the world until that moral authority is somehow recovered.

Robert Bruce Ware is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, who specializes in the North Caucasus.

Updated 12/6/05