By Maggie I. Jaruzel-Potter
There is a promising new approach to building a more robust relationship between U.S. and Russian civil societies, says Sarah E. Mendelson.
“The era where Americans go to Russia, teach, train and try to ‘fix’ Russia, which is how much U.S. assistance has been pursued for the better part of two decades, needs to come to an end, or at least it needs to be supplemented by this other approach,” Mendelson said.
“With a [new] peer-to-peer model, we hope to see Americans who work on issues in the United States coming together on a periodic basis with Russians who work on Russian problems, sharing best practices and developing recommendations.”
As director of the
Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., Mendelson authored the recently released report, “
From Assistance to Engagement: A Model for a New Era in U.S.-Russian Civil Society Relations.”
The September 2009 report,
funded with a Mott Foundation grant through its
Civil Society program, was commissioned by CSIS as a follow-up to a two-day civil society summit in Moscow in July. The event coincided with meetings between
U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Sarah E. Mendelson |
Many of the ideas explored in the summit and detailed in the report were endorsed by
Michael McFaul, special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Security Council, during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to Moscow in October 2009, Mendelson says.
CSIS -- along with the
Eurasia Foundation and the
New Eurasia Foundation (both Mott grantees) -- had designed the civil society summit because they were concerned that the formal meeting between the heads of state would focus exclusively on security issues and government relations.
The goal of the civil society summit, Mendelson says, was to provide space for American and Russian non-governmental organization (NGO) participants to discuss ways to make their relationship and work more meaningful and cooperative. This included exploring the extent to which Russian NGOs wanted to shift from the past approach that many U.S. organizations had used of going to Russia to teach and train.
The meeting convened American and Russian specialists from the fields of human rights and the rule of law, community development, youth empowerment and education, environment, press and new media, and public health. On the second day of the meeting, Obama spoke to participants and was joined by senior Russian government officials.
Overall, the Russian specialists endorsed the new peer-to-peer approach but also noted that it is not without serious challenges. While the participants are peers, Mendelson says, the conditions in which Russian activists live are clearly not equal.
Just one week after the civil society summit, Natasha Estimirova -- who worked for the Russian human rights group Memorial and also was a colleague of many at the meeting -- was kidnapped and killed. The consensus is that she was slain because of the work she did documenting abuses in Chechnya, Mendelson says.
Unlike those active in the nonprofit sector in the U.S., she says, journalists and human rights activists in Moscow and other parts of Russia are at great personal risk simply because of the work they do.
“People have disappeared,” Mendelson said.
“There is increasing worry about hit lists that target human rights activists, lawyers and journalists in different parts of Russia.”
This sobering realization is never far from the minds of Russian NGO leaders as they do their work. Hence, the previous one-way style of Americans teaching and trying to help build and strengthen Russia’s civil society sector (of which she was a part while working for the National Democratic Institute in Moscow in the 1990s) is outdated and ineffective, Mendelson says.
While troubling signs remain for NGOs operating under Russia’s harsh laws for foundations and other nonprofits, there appear to be signs of potential change, she says. For example, in April 2009, President Medvedev gave his first official interview as president to a reporter from
Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its investigative reporting that exposes government corruption, political manipulation and human rights abuses.
Four of its reporters have died in recent years, either slain or dying under suspicious circumstances. By granting his first interview to that newspaper, Mendelson says, Medvedev showed respect for the work -- and the lives -- of those who died.
Another encouraging sign, she says, is that Medvedev reassembled the Presidential Commission on Human Rights and Civil Society and asked the commission to review Russia’s NGO laws because they were “too draconian.”
Unfortunately, people who were extremely knowledgeable about the topic were not permitted to participate in discussions about changing the laws, Mendelson says.
“Some believe that the changes to the NGO law may have been drafted before the commission ever met. Therefore, it is possible that it was some sort of window dressing.”
While Russian NGO leaders agree that changes haven’t been broad or deep enough, some things are moving in the right direction, Mendelson says.
Sarah Mendelson of CSIS regularly shares her expertise on human rights and security issues with national and international audiences. |
She called it an important first step that CSIS and others were able to convene the civil society summit without interference from Russian authorities -- and that the event included human rights activists from organizations such as Memorial and Moscow Helsinki Group.
For Mendelson herself, the Russia of today is decidedly different from the Soviet Union she first visited as a high school student 30 years ago. It was a two-week trip -- with classmates from Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia -- that initially piqued her interest in what has become part of her life’s work.
“Back then, one of our group members was intensively questioned by the KGB, and we were routinely followed by the authorities. That country -- the Soviet Union -- no longer exists,” she said.
“But 2009 has been a terrible year for human rights in Russia. Nine colleagues have been killed, and another six or so have been badly beaten. Real challenges remain for NGOs working in Russia.”
Her hope is that the July meeting was an initial opportunity for activists to meet on a periodic basis, separate from presidential summits, to talk about the challenges that exist and generate solutions. Following those discussions, she says, participants could feed their recommendations into the public policy process.
“Peer-to-peer engagement is a good first step, but we need to do this in a way that acknowledges and addresses the asymmetries that do exist in our legal and security structures,” Mendelson said.
“Together with our Russian colleagues, there is a lot of promise.”