Sprogformidling
Short term observation in Pakistan?
The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs just invited me as an observer for the national and provincial assembly elections that are anticipated to be held in Pakistan during the first two weeks of January. I accepted the short term mission.
If all goes well, I shall spend 11 days in Pakistan in January 2008. It will be as an international observer to for the national and provincial assembly elections, where I shall be representing the European Union.
Two major European supra-state organisations deal with elections observations — EuropeAid, a part of the European Commission, and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), a subdivision of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The EU and OSCE have divided the jobs between themselves — OSCE commits its ODIHR observers to member states of OSCE, whereas the EU observes the rest of the world — when the rest of the world consents! This will be my first mission representing the European Union and the fifth on my list of experiences.
Long-term and short-term observers
There are long-term observers and short-term observers. The latter do observations in a precinct on elections day(s); they go from polling station to polling station and observe how elections are going on. They work in teams of two, because "two pairs of eyes do better observations than just one" (same goes for the long-term observers), and always from different countries if they are from supra-national organisations (ODIHR, Europeaid, for example). A team spends preferably 20 minutes in the polling station and then passes on to the next. They fixate their observations on special report sheets, which are faxed three times every elections day to the mission core team in the capital. There, the reports will be processed by optical recognition computers and by humans.
Long-term observers have two types of tasks. One is to pave the way for the short-term observers by reserving hotel rooms, finding them local drivers, cars, and interpreters, make introductions to the election districts. The other type of tasks consists in observing the pre-election process by observing rallies, posters, political meetings, interviewing political agents (policians, party officials, government officials [election bodies, police, courts]), news outlets.
As usual, the observers are not told to which part of the country they shall be deployed, so preparing myself for the local tongues is an issue for me as a linguist. I guess I shall pick the official language of Pakistan, Urdu, by linguists considered a variety of Hindi with the only difference that Hindi is written with the old Sanskrit alphabet and Urdu uses Arabic.
Long-term observers: hippies and establishment guys
The missions as international observer would be a favourite career of mine if I hadn't had children. Long-term stationing abroad is hard to the family life for practical reasons (taking the kids to kindergarten and school, &c) as well as emotional (we miss each others). Very few long-term observers in the OSCE and EU systems are family men (the majority are males, and the females have no children, often no husbands either), and when they are, they are either east Europeans from countries where migratory work is a part of the cullture, or they are Scandinavians like me with degrees in philologies and desperate to find any work according to their qualifications. Most of the Europeans on my missions have backgrounds that can be divided into two groups
- university graduates in philologies, history, anthropology, aged
28-60
- retired government officials from Ministries of Defence (army
officers, agents from intelligence services) and of Foreign Affairs,
sometimes even senior police officers, aged 45-70
Or in other words, a mix-up of hippies and guys of the system. Both
groups have long international experiences and deep respect for each
others. Friction can arise when a country sends observers that do not
pertain to those two groups, e.g., business people, politicians.
A long-term mission is very stressing, but it is stress in 1st class
surroundings (by the local standards). One of my short-term observers characterised the short-term missions as a well-paid tourist trip
. They are rid of a lot of complications, because the long-term observers have done most of, if not
all, the preparations. You just have to learn the local elections
legislation.
Erik Thau-Knudsen
2007-10-22
This mission was postponed to February 2008 because EUROPAID could not guarantee the safety and security of the Elections Observation Mission for the elections on January 8, 2008. More info in my Danish article Pakistan kalder (2008-01-23)
