Judging by this RFE/RL article, it looks as if the much derided CIS Election Monitoring Organisation may soon learn about the principles of natural selection at first hand and observe their very last election.
CIS election observers have popped up at each and every significant election in the CIS, giving their glowing stamp of approval to any election which returned a pro-Kremlin candidate. So biased has their reporting been in recent years that Bruce George, an OSCE mission chief, was moved to make probably the most astute observation of his career:
"They haven’t ever seen a good election and wouldn’t know one if it hit them in the face."
So bad is their reputation that Ukraine (the second largest CIS member state) has decided not to send its nationals on any further CIS observer missions.
And it appears that Russia, too, is now losing faith in this PR disaster of an organisation, and is in the process of setting up an NGO to ‘independently’ observe elections in the former Soviet Union.
In December 2003, a group calling itself the
CIS Elections Monitoring Organization (CIS-EMO) was registered in
Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, as a nongovernmental organization; a
spokesman for the group said it has no ties to the official CIS
monitors.
However…
A certain amount of confusion resulted from the
fact that this NGO had a very similar name to the official CIS
monitors, and that its reports were almost carbon copies of those filed
by the official CIS monitors.
The CIS-EMO played a minor role as an observer in the
Ukrainian elections in 2004. CIS-EMO leader Aleksei Kochetkov
complained that he had been beaten by people wearing orange armbands, a
complaint that was dismissed as a ploy by many people.
In the February Moldovan parliamentary elections, a trainload
of CIS-EMO observers were not allowed into the country — being turned
back at the Ukrainian-Moldovan border. Earlier, Moldova had also
rejected the presence of official CIS monitors.
Sadly for Russia, the world isn’t quite as gullible as those in the Kremlin obviously believe.
(Hat tip: Robert at Publius Pundit).
{ 1 trackback }
Comments on this entry are closed.