July 05

Zeitgeist Postcard

Barbara Standal is a graduate of Gonzaga Law School and a member of the WSBA. Two years ago, Barbara retired from her successful practice in employment/civil rights. For the five years prior to retirement, she was a senior supervisor in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s litigation unit. She came to Kyrgyzstan in November 2004 to live for a year as a Rule of Law Liaison representing the American Bar Association Central European and Eurasion Law Initiative (CEELI). Barbara writes: “The election observer job is only one of many fascinating experiences I have had while in Kyrgyzstan. This is a complicated, poor, struggling part of the world — a former Soviet Republic with all that that implies. I work in an office in Bishkek with two Kyrgyz attorneys, both of whom have lived and studied in the U.S. They are as skilled, knowledgeable, and dedicated as any attorneys I have ever worked with. I would recommend this experience to any attorney who has a taste for adventure, a desire to make some small contribution, and the time to do it.”

Kyrgyzstan is a Central Asian country of incredible natural beauty and proud nomadic traditions. Kyrgyzstan was annexed by Russia in 1864; it achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Officially the Kyrgyz Republic, and sometimes known as Kirghizia, it is landlocked and mountainous, bordering China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The capital is Bishkek.

The following is Barbara’s account of recent events. Her partner, Tom Lucas, is also a member of the WSBA.

On Sunday, March 13, I participated in a historic event here in Kyrgyzstan. I was one of 50 official election observers for the national parliamentary elections for OSCE, an organization that plays prominently in worldwide elections. (OSCE is usually the organization quoted in American newspapers on whether an election was conducted fairly.) I had been trying to get selected from the time I arrived in the country, and I was very disappointed not to have been selected for the first round of parliamentary elections, which occurred on February 27. As it turned out, the runoff elections in which I participated were more exciting.

As you may know, President Akaev, initially the most democratic of all the despots of Central Asia, has gradually assumed more and more power. Most Kyrgyz expect that he will engineer running for an unconstitutional third term in October. He had seven family members running for parliament seats in this recent campaign, including his famous daughter.

I had given up hope of being an observer and had begun to plan a quiet weekend before Tom arrived when I received a call from David Greer, the deputy director of a USAID agency, on Friday afternoon. David is a big, good-natured, friendly man, an American lawyer from Chicago, who has worked here and in the Balkans for the past seven or eight years (another refugee from American big-firm law practice). He told me I had been selected as an observer, and that he and I would be partners. He said he would furnish the car, driver, and translator and that we were assigned the district in Bishkek in which Akaev’s daughter would be running. I could hardly believe my beginner’s luck! David told me to be ready at 6:45 on Sunday morning so we could open the first polling station at 7:00. He warned me that I may not get home until 2:00 the next morning (I groaned, since I had a lecture scheduled at American University at 8:00 on Monday morning).

On Saturday, OSCE had an orientation for observers about a mile from where I lived. I had a glorious walk on Saturday morning to begin this strange, surreal weekend. We met in the conference room of a typical cheap new building here in Bishkek, located on a busy highway. The OSCE ambassador from Vienna was there to discuss the political situation. On my right sat a young Brit, next to him sat a Turk from Istanbul, across the table two congenial Japanese men who barely spoke English. My supervisors were old hands — Giulana and Andrea, from Sweden and Germany, respectively. For a couple of hours, they advised about the job and what we were expected to do. It was far more complicated than I had realized. I had to fill out checklists for every polling station we were assigned to, following every single procedure, then ranking the procedures and the polling station. I was to record the number of precinct members, their sex, the chair, and his/her sex. We were to observe ballots, ballot boxes, voting, inking, checking for prior inking, opening, closing of stations, other observers, police and military presence and activity, protesters, and then also write a narrative on any unusual activity.

The next morning at 6:45, David; Ainura, the translator; Mahmoud, our driver; and I set off to open our first polling station. The morning was dark and overcast. OSCE had assigned us eight polling stations within one district, including one of the universities where we expected to see some action. We arrived at a large, imposing public building, walked up wide marble steps, and stepped into a grand marble foyer. Incongruously, three cheap, flimsy plywood ballot booths, painted gray, stood at the top of more wide steps, underneath a huge oil painting (as wide and high as the ballot booths) of a smiling President Akaev. A long table with ballots and inking material sat along one wall with large letters in Cyrillic spaced out the length of the table behind where the polling workers sat. Voter registration booklets sat neatly on the tables.

As we entered, off to our left were about 15 chairs. Several people were seated. They were observers from various NGOs and political parties. OSCE had told us that observers had the right to walk around as long as we did not disturb the voting process. However, a very stern-looking, brisk woman met us and immediately told us to sit down. She was the chair of the polling station. At first I was intimidated and sat down. Later, we ignored her and walked around. Soon voters began to arrive and check in. Many old people came. I was particularly touched by the old Russian women and men. So many were themselves refugees from Soviet terror who fled to Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan from the 1930s through the 1950s. Some were seeing a ballot with more than one candidate for the first time in their lives. They looked proud, confused, and earnest.

We watched the sealing of the transparent ballot boxes, one fixed, one mobile, to take to disabled voters, with real sealing wax and a plastic tie, then a paper stamped with an official stamp over that, all done with great fanfare. I could not help thinking about my own polling station where the old women could never get their act together on time, the ballot boxes were cardboard boxes, and we voted by punching cards.

Right on the dot at 8:00, the station opened for voting and people began filing through. People came in one by one, checked at the door with an ultraviolet light to make sure they did not have invisible ink on their hands. They moved to the voter registration table where they were duly checked off in the registration book, and their passports or picture IDs examined. Then they put out their left thumbs where the polling worker squirted invisible ink right at the base of the thumbnail. The voter then went to the ballot booth, made his or her mark, walked to the transparent ballot box, folded the ballot, and dropped it into the box.

We stayed for about an hour and watched people vote. More observers arrived. At times, there were more observers than voters. I kept thinking of Florida during the presidential race of 2000 and wondered if any voting place in the United States could withstand such scrutiny. David said the saying in Chicago was: “Vote early, vote often.”

We moved on to polling station after polling station to much the same scene. Of all the polling stations we visited, seven of the eight, all but one of the polling chairpersons were women and almost all polling workers were women. They are a universal type: busy, active, well organized, and attentive to details. The chairpersons were generally very businesslike, professional, some defensive, all also very organized. On two occasions, the chairpersons were the teachers of the school where the polling station was located. They, too, were a universal type of grade-school teacher with that kindly body language, smile, soft way of speaking, and in English she would have spoken in short sentences, using simple, third-grade vocabulary. Her Russian-speaking counterpart I have no doubt had a similar style. Ironically, only three of the 75 parliamentary seats were won by women.

During the course of the day, it appeared to me this was an incredibly well-organized, clean voting process with few irregularities. But then we came to Kyrgyz National University. The voters were almost all students, and things seemed to look and feel different. The students arrived in waves of about 15 minutes each. All carried what our translator told us were the “invitations” sent out to each voter to participate in the election, which contained their names, addresses, and precincts. Each student carefully unfolded the invitation from his or her passport — the invitations were carefully collected and put into an envelope — then the inking, balloting, and voting. However, we noticed each ballot had writing on the back of it unlike any other ballots we had seen. We were also ordered to sit in a specific place. David speaks fluent Russian but could not get any student to talk to him. Ainura told us as we were leaving that her sister attended that university and had been told that after she voted, she was to go see her dean and tell him she had voted.

We had heard rumors for months, particularly in my office where we have so many students, that students were being bribed to vote for certain candidates. Students also bribe their professors for grades, or the professors will ask for a bribe in order to give the student a decent grade. University professors are paid the equivalent of about US$25 to $50 a month. They are notoriously corrupt, as are prosecutors, lawyers, and judges, who are also poorly paid. (We pay our office manager $350 a month.)

Finally, about 6:00 p.m., we arrived at what turned out to be our last polling station, in a school gym. A very bossy chairwoman met us with some suspicion. At least 25 other observers were also there. We milled around for awhile, and then heard that a hearing would take place on a complaint of one of the observers. About a half hour later, a woman judge arrived in her long black robe and went into a small office. We crowded in along with the complaining observer, other witnesses, the beleaguered chairwoman, and an attorney representing the observer. The complaint was that the chair had ordered the observer to sit down and not bother the voters. It felt a great deal like a lot of other administrative hearings. The judge looked stern and professional as she sat at a big desk with her laptop in front of her. I couldn’t quite forget I was not in Central Asia, however, with wires from printers, computers, and other electrical devices strung across the floor, the desk, under chairs, on top of the desk, the backs of chairs, and up the walls. Frankly, it is a miracle there aren’t more fires. The fuel and water pipes outside buildings have the same random spreading everywhere like a nest of snakes.

Speaking of facilities, I had avoided using any during the day, despite having the bladder of a mouse. Central Asian bathrooms are some of the worst in the world, according to Robert D. Kaplan, who should know since he has been almost everywhere. All older buildings have the footplate with the hole in the floor. Most bathrooms are located in the basement, and you can smell them a good 100 feet before you get to the outer door. In the school, the bathroom was in the main hall, but the women’s bathroom had no light. So the outer door stayed open, even though the stalls had no doors. I could peek out from my stall and watch people walk up and down the corridor; it was little comfort they could not see me, because I was in the dark.

Later that evening, David and I rushed back in to hear the judge read her decision in the fastest Russian I had ever heard. We were joined by the observer, the attorney, the chairwoman, looking as indomitable as ever, and a witness. Oddly, no other observers ever figured out what was going on. Incongruously, the judge’s cell phone went off at least twice, playing the overture to some classical piece, which she simply ignored and went on reading. Then the piercing ring of the phone on her desk went off; she never missed a beat but simply reached over, picked up the receiver, and put it down again. She ruled against the observer.

At 8:00 p.m., the polling station closed. Our assignment was to observe the counting of the ballots, all of the signoff procedures, then accompany the polling people to where the ballots are dropped off, then on to the tallying center. Since this was one of the stations with the fewest voters, many observers had decided to stay there and observe in the hopes that they would be done early.

There is no way to describe what happened after 8:00. There was a great deal of moving of furniture and setting up and organizing. Final counting of ballots did not begin until at least 9:30 p.m. Each of the 10 counters was given a pile of ballots. By the end of that interminable evening, they must have counted their pile and their neighbor’s pile 20 times. I remember sitting through a water district meeting one time that had that same slow-motion quality to it.

Finally, the chairwoman announced the ballots she had disallowed due to the voter having voted for both candidates. Fair enough. She then announced the “preliminary” count. For Miripov — 403. Akaev’s daughter had a slim margin — 430. By that time it was about 11:00 p.m. The chair was on her cell phone often. David muttered ominously. I thought he was being unnecessarily suspicious, since the chair seemed so earnest and was trying to please the observers too. Two hours later, after more and more and more counting, unaccountably Miripov’s final count was down to 363 and Akaev’s had miraculously risen by about the same number. They wrapped up. David and I were the final observers. We accompanied their car to the tally station. David was muttering more about fixes and suspicious behavior. I naively asked how was it possible with 30 observers there. He just kept talking about their having worn everyone down. The streets were deserted as Mahmoud, our faithful driver, drove me through the streets of Bishkek at 1:45 a.m. with a semicomatose Ainura alongside me in the back seat and a silent David in the front.

I wearily climbed the dingy cement steps and stepped into the heat of my lovely apartment. My clock in the kitchen read 2:00 straight up. In another six hours, I had to be standing in front of a group of students trying to sound entertaining about the American Trial Experience.

And that is another story. I got to sleep around 3:00 a.m. and was up at 5:30.

My assessment four days after the elections is that the fix was generally outside the polling stations. The chair at our final station found herself in a situation where she had to give Akaev 10 percent of Miripov’s votes and managed to do that. The university turned out students in the hundreds. It was enough to make a difference. Akaev’s daughter won.

It makes me sad for Kyrgyzstan and the people here. The presidential election in October should be equally interesting and perhaps generate more Western press interest. In the meantime, ABA/CEELI works with law students, some of whom have assured me they are a new generation and things will be different.