After the Revolution

Recently headlines are starting to give me deja vu. 

Last week the electoral commission of Armenia declared Serzh Sarkisian, until then the country’s prime minister, winner of Armenia’s presidential election.

According to the count, Sarkisian won a couple of points over 50 percent of the vote, just enough to avoid a run-off. But many say the voting process was seriously flawed.

The Organization for Security & Co-operation in Europe, which observed the election, deemed it “mostly in line with international commitments,” though it stated that “significant challenges” remain, according to an article from EurasiaNet.org.

Sound familiar?

Almost the exact same thing happened in Georgia earlier this year when on Jan. 5 Georgia’s incumbent leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, won a second five-year term with 53.5 percent of the vote.

Observers reported all types of fraud, but the OSCE still deemed the election results acceptible [see previous post]. Georgians continue to protest, though the opposition’s earlier hunger strike threat has proved to be a bluff [see previous post].

Critics are starting to wonder what the point of all this monitoring is if the OSCE is going to keep giving passing grades after such shoddy performances.

One political party leader in Georgia accused OSCE election observers of showing up to the polls drunk.

The OSCE is the newest incarnation of the former Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, which was created in 1973. The name and the goals of the organization changed in 1994 in response to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R.

Here is how it describes itself:

With 56 States drawn from Europe, Central Asia and America, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is the world’s largest regional security organization, bringing comprehensive and co-operative security to a region that stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

It offers a forum for political negotiations and decision-making in the fields of early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, and puts the political will of the participating States into practice through its unique network of field missions.

The OSCE approach to security is comprehensive and co-operative: comprehensive in dealing with a wide range of security-related issues including arms control, preventive diplomacy, confidence- and security-building measures, human rights, democratization, election monitoring and economic and environmental security; co-operative in the sense that all OSCE participating States have equal status. Decisions are taken by consensus on a politically, but not legally binding basis.

The OSCE will observe Georgia’s upcoming parliamentary elections, according to a press release on the OSCE Web site.