Thank you for the question.
My work in Tajikistan is the focus of the political party development work that I did overseas. Tajikistan is a former Soviet state. It's the poorest of the former Soviet republics. I was there for the second parliamentary elections in the country's history. It gave me great pleasure...you mentioned I was part of the OSCE observer mission. That was very interesting and educational, but what was terrific about the experience was that I had spent the previous three and a half months in the country working with all six of the registered political parties.
In a way, they're fortunate to only have six, although I know there's demand in Tajikistan to have more political parties, and it's significantly controlled and constrained by the government. It did mean that we could work with all parties on what an election platform is, and how you would bring disparate parts of even your own membership together to create consensus around the kinds of policies you would put forward in an election campaign. They were pretty green. We had to teach them what it meant to go out and knock on doors. They weren't sure if they'd be allowed to do that. The transition from a former totalitarian state to a democratic, elected state is still going on in many of these countries.
One of my objectives in serving on this board is... You know, the organization is called Rights and Democracy, and my area of experience and professional background is in the democracy part. We have others on our board who are human rights specialists. My observation with Rights and Democracy is that our actual project work has been more heavily tilted to the human rights end and less to the democracy end. I'd like to find a more even balance between the two, because it is inherent with our name. It's the passion that I bring to my position on the board in saying, what can we do in some of these states in order to assist the political process? We do a little bit of political party work. We've brought Bolivian parliamentarians to Haiti and we've created some back and forth. So I think there's a lot more that Rights and Democracy can do in this area, and I look forward to being a part of it.