Attached hereto is the first of several briefing memos which I am preparing
for you or Jerry,2 as part of my orderly
departure program which, albeit a failure in Vietnam and Cuba, ought
nevertheless to be a success in the NSC
staff.
As you know, Mary is arranging a series of luncheons in the White House Mess
this month where I would like to have you (Jerry in his areas of future
concern) to have a chance to meet informally with key figures with whom I
have been dealing in the bureaucracy.
Attachment
Paper Prepared in the National Security Council4
THE NSC AND HUMAN RIGHTS
POLICY
You will also want to read a very thoughtful and provocative memo which
Tom Thornton left for me a
year ago on this subject.5 Philosophically it stands up
well. Some of the specific policy issues, with their typically long
halflife, linger instead of speedily decaying. (Perhaps the people do
the decaying, while the problems remain?)
[Page 628]
Two facts dominate this policy scene:
1. Human rights policy has clearly represented one of the principal
personal policy commitments of President Carter. Therefore it has been operationalized virtually
across the board. As an outsider, I observed an explosive but somewhat
unguided takeoff in early 1977. Cy
Vance’s Athens, Georgia speech of July 1977 provided the
needful midcourse correction, explaining that of course the policy could
not be applied without modulation everywhere, at all times, friend and
foe alike. When security requirements crowd in, human rights take second
place, being invoked pietistically rather than operationally.
2. The other central fact is that bureaucratically, the human rights
policy is somewhat of an orphan child, or maverick, perhaps because by
contrast with the HAK approach it was new, and
controversial. Applying the “human rights criterion” still tends to line
up the bureaucracy on predictable sides. Its central agency—HA in State—is clearly not staffed by the
most promising FSOs. On the contrary, under Patt Derian—an activist if there ever was one—the whole
HA team soon acquired the opprobrium
throughout the buttoned-down elements of the bureaucracy as “the Human
Rights Mafia.”
Operationalizing and institutionalizing this new (restored?) component of
policy includes codification into a variety of laws by the Congress (you
will find all the legislative references on my shelves).
The Congress in a sense outdid the President by writing into law the
requirement that foreign economic assistance and, to a more limited
degree, foreign military assistance, could not be given to countries
whose governments were guilty of a gross and consistent pattern of human
rights violations. The effect is that far from consisting of optional
rhetoric, each specific aid decision has to be filtered through a human
rights test, with the burden legally placed on those who would award
grants, loans, aid, etc. to gross and consistent violators. The
exceptions in the economic case are projects that would clearly benefit
basic human needs in a given country, and in some other cases (e.g.
OPIC investment insurance, FMS, etc.) a certification that national
security considerations override. Needless to say, recent deterioration
of the security situation has made the human rights criterion secondary
in several recent FMS decisions.
The instrumentality for dealing with economic assistance choices is the
interagency committee on human rights chaired by Warren
Christopher, involving wide
representation of the bureaucracy (including myself). I have usually
circularized my regional NSC colleagues
to get their views on controversial cases prior to going to a meeting,
and they have sometimes accompanied me. (On the military side, I have
not been involved. Perhaps for that reason the system tends to operate
by raison d’état and force
majeure, rather than droit de
l’homme!)
[Page 629]
If Patt Derian leaves (Hodding
already has),6
much will depend on her replacement. Her number one Deputy Mark Schneider was a very bright
activist. After he went over the side he was replaced by Steve Palmer,
who is much calmer and introduces a more conservative note
stylistically, although he is quite committed to the cause.7
Chris himself is also a strong advocate of the President’s human rights
policy, but so judicious in temperament that he creates the illusion
that a fairly jumpy policy is in fact purring along like a well-tuned
Mercedes.
Clearly the policy is not agony-free. The case of
Argentina is a prime example of pulling and hauling between those
pressing for letting up on the pressures on policy grounds of wheat
sales, fencing off from the Soviets, hemispheric defense, et al, versus those who feel that Argentina is still an
egregious human rights violator. The NGO community is much exercised about this, as is US Representative to the Human Rights
Commission Jerome Shestack. (Tom
Thornton and I recently recommended that State prepare a
public clarification prior to Bill
Bowdler’s late July visit to Buenos Aires, in order to
correct distorted news stories based on leak and rumor, and also to
stiffen everyone’s spine when Bill goes to Argentina so the human rights
component of our policy doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. ZB and DA
vetoed the idea, and doubtless Bill will make it all plain to the
Argentines when he visits.)
The UN Human Rights Commission is
backstopped by IO and HA in State, but Jerry Shestak has made a practice of
staying in touch with me. He has a big ego, and also a long track record
as an outside human rights activist. This makes his role slightly
ambiguous, particularly since it has never been clear that the US Rep to the UN Human Rights Commission is an instructed
representative.
As for the NGO’s, they can be an
important source of support for the administration. I was astonished at
their pleasure when I went over to State this spring to participate,
albeit briefly, in a daylong conference of NGO leaders arranged by Patt and her staff.8 Any display of White House interest, however
symbolic, is of value.
When we still had some leverage with Moscow, there was a fairly steady
flow of Soviet dissident or refusenik cases of special concern to
[Page 630]
the White House for which I
would receive the visitors on behalf of the White House (sometimes with
Brement present). They were
often sponsored by the Council on Soviet Jewry, although other
organizations have asked to visit on behalf of notable Soviet
dissidents, ranging from Lev Mendlevitz, who remains in prison, along
with one Christian, for insisting on practicing their religion, after
the other “Leningrad hijackers” have been let out;9 to the daughter of Sakharov (for whom we were able to do very little). In
one case (Ida Nudel) a personal letter from Mrs. Begin to Mrs. Carter
led to my taking Mrs. Nudel’s sister to meet the First Lady.
Unfortunately, we have been able to do less and less to influence or
pressure Moscow with respect to tough cases. Nevertheless, I have been
in occasional contact with Marina Neumeyer-Wallach, who represents the
Council on Soviet Jewry, and numbers of Ukrainian, Evangelical and other
national and church groupings which take an interest in those cases.
One operational demand in which we are importantly involved concerns the
annual country human rights reports mandated of the Secretary of State
by the Congress. This last year, instead of just reporting on conditions
in countries to which the United States furnishes aid, the Congress
changed the requirement to reports on all countries—154 in all. The
deadline for submission to the Hill was January 31st, and I worked out
with Patt Derian a procedure
(which we did not formally entitle clearance) in which every report was
carried to my office as soon as it had been cleared in the Department
and before being put into final form. I reviewed many of them myself,
particularly the sensitive ones, and in every case circulated them with
a form covering note to appropriate NSC
colleagues for review and comment.10 My arrangement with Patt was that I would call her
directly if we had any real agony. There were a number of points that we
felt ought to be taken up, and I would say we batted about .500, all in
all. However, the really hot ones this year (Pakistan, Afghanistan,
China, Argentina, you can imagine the rest) I and relevant colleagues
really labored over. In the case of the Argentine report, with Tom Thornton’s help we put in a fair
amount of effort to ensure that it retained its integrity, on the ground
that 153 other reports could be undermined if one were to be too badly
fudged. I
[Page 631]
think we came out
alright, and I recommend that the same kind of “nonclearance” system be
arranged by December of 1980 for a fairly intensive exercise during the
first half of January.
The Madrid meeting of the post-Helsinki CSCE due to take place in September11 was
for a while a subject of considerable activity, in collaboration with
Marshall Brement. The chief
reason for wanting to go ahead with the meeting following the
precipitate deterioration of relations after Afghanistan12 was, in my view and that of others, the
opportunity to reaffirm our strong commitment to the human rights
elements of Basket I and Basket III of the Helsinki Final Agreement. The
chairman of the U.S. delegation will be former Attorney General
Griffin Bell, with
Washington Attorney Max Kampelman
as his deputy. State has set up its operational preparations, and you
will want to get involved in collaboration with Brement and Blackwill in helping to monitor the human rights
elements of U.S. policy as it develops over the next few months.
One issue I would simply pass along is what strikes me as an imbalance in
our tools for implementing the President’s human rights policy. The fact
is that we have, both in practice and in law, a number of sticks to
wield against countries which do not live up to the standards that are
embodied in the international declarations and covenants on human
rights, as well as our own policies. But there is a singular dearth of
carrots. In this connection, I would like to see a more active policy of
calibrated rewards to the list of countries we frequently boast of as
having moved away from despicable practices of torture, political
prisoners of conscience, an unfree press, military rule, etc. These
might have the form of a special visitation (in my opinion the visit of
Navy Secretary Hidalgo to
Argentina in early July, apart from its potential for sabotaging a
carefully crafted revised U.S. policy toward that country, was the kind
of demonstration that ought to be cranked up more often for countries
that have really gone the distance to stop leaning on their own people).
In this connection, I am concerned with the trend that I understand
Tom Ehrlich, the Director of
IDCA, is pressing for a small
number of a relatively large aid projects rather than a scatteration. I
can appreciate his logic, but this already almost forced us to deny a
tiny bit of symbolic but needful economic assistance to Equatorial
Guinea, which has gotten rid of one of the bloodiest and most repressive
dictatorships in modern history.13 I
personally think that kind of flexibility belongs in the aid
program.
[Page 632]
In summing up the NSC role in this area,
it is important to stress the difficult but necessary line that I think
has to be walked between a kind of aseptic indifference to the way the
human rights policy falls so long as the paper work is in order, as
against an all out advocacy of the human rights criterion in all complex
policy decisions, which I think would be unbalanced and unseemly in the
role a Presidential policy coordinating staff should play. The NSC role is essentially a monitoring one.
However, I have often been asked by HA
to intervene where the system seems disposed to downgrade human rights
concerns; in consultation with my colleagues, I have done so where the
arguments were legitimate. Reciprocally, I have sometimes flagged human
rights aspects of issues we are dealing with at the White House
level—even in the State Department—where it is not apparent that HA and its legal and policy mandates are
being given sufficient attention. Frankly, it would be disingenuous not
to notice that there are forces in the United States government which
would be glad for an excuse to dump the whole human rights policy and
get back to what they conceive to be a “realistic, national interest
based” approach. I guess I would have to say that their approach seems
to me, both in prospect and in retrospect, to deprive us of one of the
central distinctions between the democratic system and the totalitarian
system which is the foundation on which those critics think they argue.
Conversely, I feel that the NGO
community worries excessively that we really don’t give a damn and our
policy is thus a sham. They confuse the limits of policy based on the
possible with bad faith regarding the desirable. I feel the greatest
service one can do at this level is to keep in a balanced overall focus
the positive commitment to the advancement of human rights and political
democracy to which President Carter is committed, and from which the United States
has already considerably benefited in Africa and in some other formerly
hostile regions.
