The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. And in May 2008, Hezbollah forces battled Lebanese government troops to re- tain its right to keep an independent militia. Hezbollah has been called a “state within a state” in Lebanon. It wanted a violence-free election and, for its own tactical reasons, gave government offi- cials and international monitors free access to the areas it controlled. But since the election, Hezbollah has ig- nored calls by the international com- munity, includingWashington, to abide by U.N. Resolution 1701 and disarm. The 2005 Lebanese elections were observed by the European Union but not by other international monitoring organizations. The E.U. report no- where made reference to the existence of Hezbollah’s independent military force and its relevance to the climate of security in which the elections took place. In contrast, the report of the Na- tional Democratic Institute (of which I was a member) on last year’s process acknowledges that “every step toward better governance in Lebanon is ten- tative, and the existence of weapons and armed groups outside the control of the state gives rise to a fear that achievements could be quickly over- ridden or reversed.” The omissions in the E.U. report are very significant, for they appear to represent the dominant trend in inter- national monitoring, which is to narrow the focus to election administration. In light of the increasing importance of universal standards, we need to ask what international observor reports are meant to do. Is their purpose to ana- lyze the state of democracy in a given country or praise how well election ad- ministration went? On the technical side, the “Princi- ples and Code of Conduct for Interna- tional Observation” emphasizes the importance of verifiable and quantifi- able data in reports by observer mis- sions. Its excellent guidelines were used successfully in Lebanon, as in many other elections monitored by in- ternational observers. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 Any government’s trustworthiness in international negotiations depends on the transparency of its institutions.