Virtual Reports from Virtual NGOs

Nicu Popescu had a post a few weeks ago about an entertaining development, if rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things, titled "Transnistria: a new virtual study."

Another Transnistrian propaganda report - published (according to the report) in Brussels, on the web page [created for the purpose of publishing this report] of a virtual institution called EODE ["Ngo European Observatory for Democracy and Elections"], in (rather broken) English and French, with the bombastic title "The ‘Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublika’: Building of an [sic!] European State and Experiment of Direct Democracy." In English this sounds sort of like "cultural leanings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan. The report's author, Luc Michel, is a marginal leftist, a self-declared fighter against American-Zionist imperialism. Apparently he was invited by "Nashi" to Lake Seliger. The other authors (if they even actually contributed anything) are just as bizarre.

This report is almost certainly intended as a counterweight to the fascinating and extensive report (prepared by actual legal specialists, including two professors at good law schools and a US Circuit Court judge) published last year by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and titled "Thawing a Frozen Conflict: Legal Aspects of the Separatist Crisis in Moldova." As such, it will likely be about as successful as the report promulgated last year about Transnistria by a fake NGO called "ICDISS" (a report which was disavowed by all of the academics and specialists it falsely cited as authors and contributors) which was exposed by Edward Lucas in a series of articles last year:

It seems more likely that the ICDISS is a bunch of lightweight opportunists in Washington DC, paid for by tycoons and goons in Transdniestria, perhaps with the encouragement of sympathisers in Moscow. The same money probably pays for the other websites [tiraspoltimes.com, pridnestrovie.net, visitpmr.com and transdniestria.com], and also subsidises ‘Breakthrough’ [Proryv], a local youth movement that apes similar pro-Kremlin efforts in Russia. Coincidentally or not, similar stunts are being pulled in the Caucasus and the Baltics.

Fake think-tanks, spurious reports and manufactured protest movements were common currency for both sides in the old Cold War; now they are popping up in the new one. Unprecedented money, effort and brainpower are now going into pro-Russian mischief-making in Europe’s backyard, to general indifference.

Whether you see it as merely entertaining, or outright sinister, the information war disguises hard questions for both sides.

Lucas himself posted an example of one of the other bits of disinformation floating around there which was likely organized in support of Russia - the spurious psychiatric assessment of Georgian President Saakashvili.

Of course, both de facto and real countries are capable of doing this without help from Russia or anyone else - all it takes is a bit of money and a good imagination - but more and more, such attempts are being outed, even when undertaken by real professionals.

Unfortunately for the PMR or whoever financed this "EODE" Report, it hardly looks like professionals of any sort were involved, and the final product doesn't pass the laugh test. For one thing (though I admit this is superficial), the organization's logo looks like it was designed by a 1970s-era 10-year-old - and whoever designed it doesn't know that NGOs don't usually include "Ngo" right at the front of their names.


It is littered with misspellings, and it cites publications and organizations that are impossible to take seriously, such as the Tiraspol Times and the "Community for Democracy and Human Rights." Sometimes the passages from the Tiraspol Times are just clumsily inserted without citation or editing, resulting in strange passages like "The outcome was seen on Wednesday in Tiraspol..." Fully half of the 150-page report is taken up by appendixes, which include two Tiraspol Times articles; the full text of the PMR's "Constitution"; two articles by and an interview with the Chairman of the PMR's "Constitutional Court"; and maps taken without citation from both the Economist and the CIA World Factbook.

Even better, two of the esteemed members of the bar who are listed in the report as having assisted in its preparation have bios that don't make them seem like they'd be particularly objective on questions involving the West's relationship with Russia (see page 12): one of them is listed as being "the legal consultant of Russian President Putin, of the State of Belarus and of the Government of Sudan"; another is "In particular lawyer of several Libyan State Bodies, he was also the legal consultant of the 'International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic' (Paris)."