Europe Stumbles Over Its Values in Central Asia

On May 30, Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the European Council, delivered remarks after meeting with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon in Dushanbe.

“Mr. President, there are many commonalities in Poland’s and Tajikistan’s histories, and our fights for the freedom of our nations. Human rights are an essential part of this history,” he told Rahmon in the only public remarks the EU president gave in the country at which journalists were denied an opportunity to ask questions.

“The highest goal of every politician is to ensure security but also human rights and freedoms. To achieve that, strength, courage and good will are needed. You have it all, Mr. President,” Tusk said.

Tusk’s travel to Tajikistan, as well as subsequent stops in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, intended to highlight the EU’s recently revised Central Asia Strategy. Instead the trip, the Tajik stop in particular and the EU’s note of congratulations after the Kazakh presidential election on June 9, hit a discordant note with regional observers and human rights advocates.

Human Rights Watch, in its 2019 World Report released earlier in the year, had called out the European Union, the United States, and others for largely resisting the enactment of “any serious policy consequences for Tajikistan’s abysmal rights record,” accusing these governments of being “reluctant to alienate Dushanbe given its geostrategic position along the border with Afghanistan.”

But Europe’s disregard of human rights in Central Asia goes beyond the Afghan frontier in Tajikistan.

On June 11, while Kazakh police were still arresting protesters and random people in public squares in Almaty and Nur-Sultan, Tusk’s office issued a letter of congratulations to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

“On behalf of the European Council, I congratulate you on your victory in the presidential elections in Kazakhstan,” Tusk wrote.

Tokayev officially took 71 percent in the June 9 snap presidential election, which he called two weeks after assuming the interim presidency following Nursultan Nazarbayev’s surprise March 19 resignation. Election day was marred by protests and an estimated 500 arrests, including of journalists. Three days after the election, police were still out in force in Kazakhstan’s major cities. Journalists on the ground shared via Twitter dozens of images of people being carted away by police, everyone from young men to old women. By June 13, Kazakh official numbers pegged the arrests at 1,000 – though at the same time the Interior Ministry denied any arrests on June 12, when journalists were still documenting dozens being pushed into police vans. On June 18, the government said 4,000 had been arrested over five days of protesting around the election.

In its preliminary report, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) election monitoring mission made clear its assessment that the election was neither free nor fair: “While there was potential for Kazakhstan’s early presidential election to become a force for political change, a lack of regard for fundamental rights, including detentions of peaceful protestors, and widespread voting irregularities on election day, showed scant respect for democratic standards.”

In the June 11 congratulations letter, Tusk tossed in the obligatory human rights comment without any reference to the election-day arrests. “The European Union looks forward to deepening our bilateral cooperation with Kazakhstan under your leadership, based on a commitment to democratic principles and human rights.”

Europe’s fig leaf is laughably small and shriveling.

Ironically, Europe has become the home base for exiled Tajik politics. While Russia traditionally had served in that role, in recent years a number of dissident Tajiks vanished in Russia and reappeared on planes headed for Dushanbe. It has become increasingly clear that Russia isn’t a safe place and the Russian authorities, while perhaps not interested in cracking down on dissident Tajiks, also have no qualms about sending back individuals sought by Dushanbe.

As migration researcher Yan Matusevich noted in an article for The Diplomat in 2016, that year saw a veritable explosion of Tajik migrants seeking asylum in Poland, the closest point of entry into the European Union space from Belrus and Russia, where Tajiks can travel without visas. Three years later, Matusevich noted that the flow has slowed but rising resistance to taking asylum seekers in Poland has trapped a number of Tajiks in so-called reception centers, awaiting decisions on their asylum applications and possible deportation.

In September 2018 – three years after the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT) was hounded out of official politics and branded an extremist group – its leader, Muhiddin Kabiri, heralded the launch of the National Alliance of Tajikistan, a consortium of opposition groups, in Warsaw.

While Europe has increasingly become the home base for Tajik exile politics, European leaders are traipsing across Central Asia uttering the words “human rights” and “democracy” and doing precious little.

The EU’s new Central Asia Strategy, an update on the 2007 version, was released in May but contained little that was new. While European officials included language about supporting democracy, the so-called specific initiatives suggested – like “[d]eveloping training opportunities on human rights and advocacy skills for civil society activists and human rights defenders and promoting cross-border contacts among them in the region, as well with their counterparts in the EU and Eastern Partnership countries” – seem far out of step with the reality on the ground.

In May, while writing about the new strategy, I asked: “What good will training Kazakhstan’s civil society activists do if they are denied permits to demonstrate by the state and then jailed for going ahead with their protests?”

What good has the EU done those civil society activists by giving Nur-Sultan a pass on the recent election without mention of the arrests or allegations of ballot-box stuffing? What good has the EU done by denying reporters the right to ask questions of a top EU official in Tajikistan while he lauded the “good will” of President Rahmon?

Arguably, Europe’s strategy is one of quiet diplomacy behind closed doors – where sensitive issues may be raised but are never brought to the public light – and friendly smiles for the camera.