Human Rights in Foreign Policy: A Soviet Success

...But Frankel and the Russian dissidents are definitely swimming against the current...

...People mired in poverty need food, clothing, shelter--not the right to vote, due process, habeas corpus, freedom of the press...

...Repressive governments, especially those of the Marxist-Leninist variety, continually argue that they are taking care of "the people' '--that they are meeting or striving to meet what Vance calls "such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education...

...Albert Camus, "Bread and Liberty" During the last week in September, the Dirksen Senate Office Building was the scene of a unique American event: the third meeting of the International Sakharov Hearings to examine the status of human rights in the Soviet Union...

...The dissidents, on their part, must be puzzled and somewhat contemptuous of Americans, who show so little interest in understanding a question that affects America's standing in the world...

...My father was a very astute man...

...He is not asked to give up his civil rights...

...But in the Soviet Union everyone has a " r i g h t " to a job, which means that if a citizen does not have a job it is his own fault and he will be prosecuted fo'r parasitism, a designation that several dissidents at the hearings, including Andrei Amalrik, spoke about from firsthand knowledge...

...If there were an easy solution that could be adopted, even with some small degree of dishonor or some further minimum loss of life, Britain would have adopted it years ago...

...The first two hearings were held in Copenhagen fn 1975 and in Rome in 1977...

...During the transition from capitalism to Communism, Lenin said, the vanguard of the proletariat has the right to restrict the liberty of those it regards as "the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists...

...Moreover, although there is no necessary connection between a respect for civil rights and advances in the economic and social wellbeing of a country's citizens, we do know that in the twentieth century those regimes that say they provide, as the Soviet Constitution of 1977 says, "genuine rights"-that is, economic and social rights--for their people by and large have wreaked untold economic and social misery upon them...

...Every man, Madison said, had a "right to his property" and a "property in his rights...

...Many Westerners have been taken in by the Soviet Union's claims that there is a trade-off between economic and social ~rights and civil rights, for many Westerners believe that though life is bad in the Soviet Union for dissenting intellectuals, it is certainly much better for the average worker...

...The answer, in part, is guilt...

...And if the Soviet worker protests...

...Therefore they must be sorely disappointed that the hearings attracted so little attention in the United States...

...I,:i THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980...

...At the least, they must have thought, the hearings would make the current administration aware of the dangers of trying to accommodate itself to so-called progressive regimes, a policy that can only undermine civil rights in the world and thus ultimately hurt the world's poor...

...has it had on you and your family ) What kand of life is being led by the children who have been brought up without ever knowing peace ? JS: The revolution is a call that you cannot run away from I cannot really point to the exact day I decided to join, but I was fortunate that my father worked on the Benguela Railroad...

...He must work long hours in generally poor working conditions for low wages...

...Moreover, the Soviet authorities have made it clear that they will not tolerate any attempts to monitor the Helsinki accords...

...The main thing I have heard from those who have been imprisoned," Chalidze said in To Defend T/~ese Rig/vts, "is complaints about hunger...

...In their defense of property and civil rights, the Founding Fathers were descendants of Locke...

...And what he can finally buy with his wages is by Western standards miserable: a very limited range of foods and poor-quality clothes, household items, furniture, etc...

...As Vladimir Bukovsky put it in his autobiography: "The pampered Western democracies have forgotten their past and their essence, namely that democracy is not a comfortable house, a handsome car, or an unemployment benefit, but above all the ability and the desire to stand up for one's rights," by which he means civil rights...

...If, as Valery Chalidze (a prominent dissident who played a major role in the hearings) has said, "the most important contribution that can be made to the defense of human rights in any country is publicity," then the hearings did little to advance the cause of human rights throughout the world To some degree it is understandable that the American press did not think the hearings worth much attention...

...Moreover, the covenants constitute a defeat for the liberal democracies of the West, for they enable repressive regimes to argue that the liberal democracies are doing nothing to achieve one batch of rights (economic, social, and cultural) whereas 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1980 they themselves are only temporarily suspending one batch of rights (civil and political) in order to achieve a society where both kinds of rights will flourish...

...If someone takes away your bread, he suppresses your freedom at the same time...

...the cause of liberty better, and it would probably do more to promote economic and social progress in the world at large...

...JS: Do not forget us...

...standards of life and welfare in the province, costs amounting to about $1.8 billion a year...

...The Communist Party, of course...

...The citizen thus protects himself from the state not only by owning property, but also by being himself a kind of property--something that the state cannot trespass against...

...But they are under no illusions about their ability to change the nature of the Soviet regime...

...According to Chalidze, the Soviet Union has "used the full might of its propaganda apparatus to convince people that they need not those rights which a person endowed with common sense wants but some other sort of rights discovered by Communists" The Soviet Union maintains, Chalidze said, that "economic and social rights take precedence over civil rights...

...He whose life is exposed to sheer misery," Brandt has recently said, "can take only a minor interest in...civil rights...

...Perhaps guilt, then, has led the current administration, as Jeane Kirkpatrick recently said, to exhibit " a posture of continuous selfabasement and apology vis-~t-vis the Third World," trying to ingratiate itself with all manner of regimes that say they are for "the people...

...The idea for such tribunals was first suggested by a group of prominent Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov, in an open appeal on February 14, 1974, the day Alexander Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union...

...Secretary of State Vance and President Carter have also put economic and social rights on a par with civil rights...

...My mother, who is still alive, told my sister and myself that he never complained Before he died, he told my mother that he always agreed with what I was doing and that I should never give up...

...The testimony at the hearings made it abundantly clear that the life of a Soviet worker is nasty, brutish, and relatively short...

...And in a speech in 1978, President Carter said that "hunger, disease, and poverty are enemies of human potential as relentless as any repressive government...

...And they give us faith that the country we want to build will be shaped, if not by us, then by our children...

...As a parasite, he will probably be sent to a forced labor camp, where it is official state policy to give prisoners a diet that does not meet their average daily requirements...

...But I can tell you that we are winning, and the Angolan people know it...

...At present, Britain has approximately 13,000 troops stationed in Northern Ireland, a large proportion of her shrunken forces...

...We who were born and have grown up in an atmosphere of terror," Bukovsky said, "know of only one remedy--the position of a citizen...

...This illusion is perhaps excusable...

...By its accounts, only Chile, South Africa, and Israel have consistently violated human rights...

...As a result, Britain's NATO forces on the Rhine are perilously overstretched and the troops themselves suffer something like battle fatigue after the third or fourth tour of duty in Northern Ireland...

...Which is why I begin with the statistics, to b convey some idea of the cost in blood and treasure to the entire British Isles...

...They believe the dissidents are entitled to compassion and even admiration, but they also believe that the dissidents are men whose suffering has made them unreasonable and therefore not worthy of being taken seriously...

...The theme of the hearings was appropriate, since many Western leaders and intellectuals have gone halfway toward meeting the Soviet Union's understanding of human rights...

...The regime will not allow Soviet citizens to question its own understanding of human rights...

...And the dismaying fact is that "this thesis has been adopted by thv" governments of many developing countric,~ and has even begun to influence interTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 11 national law...

...My family has suffered a great deal...

...For a hard-pressed economy like Britain's, suffering from congenital overspending by government, this is a considerable burden...

...The war, my father's imprisonment and death--these things were very hard on my family, but these hardships drew us together and even today we are united I think this story, which has been repeated a thousand times in a thousand other families, says something about the strength of the Angolan spirit It is a source of great confidence and great pride for me...

...Two years ago the New York Times ran a story about an ~migr6 worker who pointed exultantly to a tin of cookies, a bowl of apples, a large candy bar, and a bowl of grapefruit and oranges that were on his coffee table...

...The interpretation of human rights offered by the Russian dissidents is one that some Westerners would support...

...From the Soviet Union we have come to expect one story and one story only, the story of human suffering, and there may be a limit to the number of harsh tales we can bear to hear...

...Lacking civil rights, the citizens of such regimes cannot say, "You are not really giving us what you promised...

...Yuri Orlov, the Soviet physicist who was chairman of the Helsinki monitoring group in Moscow, was recently sentenced to seven years in a strict-regimen labor camp and five years of internal exile...

...Or, to put it another way, the dissidents know that despotism often presents itself as the fulfiller of economic and social rights...

...The dissidents ask us to cast a cold eye on all those regimes that proclaim their devotion to economic and social rights...

...It would not be surprising if there did linger some irrational domineering streak in British attitudes, other things being equal...

...According to one report, the participants "were livid with the Washington newspapers and national media for all but ignoring them...

...Stephen Miller HUMAN RIGHTS IN FOREIGN POLICY: A SOVIET SUCCESS As the West comes to accept the Soviet Union's definition of "human rights," the world grows less free and more impoverished...

...Furthermore, such a balance sheet, with economic, social, and cultural rights on one side and civil and political rights on the other, enables the leaders of MarxistLeninist-regimes to say that the people in the liberal democracies of the West only have more civil rights because they have fewer economic and social rights...

...By "the position of a citizen" the dissidents mean something close to Locke's notion of citizenship...

...It was appropriate, Chalidze said, to focus on the Soviet Union because of that country's "role in formulating and propagating the ideological justification for human rights violations...

...But the covenants themselves--not simply the monitoring of them--may be said to have undermined human rights, for they come close to endorsing a notion of human rights adumbrated by Marx and spelled out by Lenin...

...Ttlis view presupposes that Britain retains one last inflection of imperialism and that there lies hidden within the British soul some ineradicable desire to rule over the Irish until the end of time...

...For four days both prominent dissidents and numerous 6migr6s from all walks of Russian life gave testimony to a distinguished panel that included Lane Kirkland, Arthur Schlesinger, J r . , Robert Conquest, Tom Stoppard, and Simon Wiesenthal...

...Property and personhood are conceptually yoked together, and government is a trust whose duty it is to regulate and protect the enjoyment of these rights...

...Insofar as the notion of the failure of American nerve means anything, it means that many intellectuals, journalists, and policy-makers feel that the United States in the past did too little to advance the cause of economic and social rights in the world...

...He said that if I did not fit in with the people in the bush, I was nothing at all, because I would never be a Portuguese...

...To this must be added the other costs to the British taxpayer of repairing damage to people and property in Belfast and of maintaining Ferdinand Mount is a columnist for the London Spectator...

...But if someone seizes your freedom, rest assured, your bread is threatened, because it no longer depends on you and on your struggle, but on the pleasure of a master...

...What many Westerners refuse to grasp is that the Soviet Union's interpretation of human fights has grievously affected the economic and social condition not only of dissenting intellectuals, but also of the ordinary Soviet worker...

...For 800 years, until 1921, the English ruled the Irish, usually incompetently, sometimes cruelly, and almost always negligently...

...Q: I f you had to ask one thing from the American public, what would it be...

...Article 50 of the Soviet Constitution says that citizens "shall be guaranteed freedom of speech, press, assembly, meetings, street processions, and demonstrations" only "in conformity with the interests of the working people and for the purpose of strengthening the socialist system...

...According to the dissidents, then, the people of the Soviet Union are exploited precisely because they lack civil rights...

...Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, has argued that the West should not apply its standards in countries where satisfying "social human rights" takes precedence over respect for individual rights...

...The Irish Republican Army contends that Northern Ireland is just such another colony and that British obstinacy will eventually be overcome there as it was elsewhere...

...Most dissidents would probably say that 25 years was incorrect...

...But the organizers of the hearings did not want to belabor the obvious Rather, they wanted to persuade Americans in particular and the West in general of a point they find compelling: Human rights means civil rights, not economic and social rights...

...The troubles have been going on for ten years now and the rate of killing has diminished only slightly in the last 18 months...

...My father died in jail after five years of iraprisonment...

...Yet for many of the Stephen Miller has written for many jour nals, including Encounter, Commentary, and the American Scholar...

...Even those figures may not sound extraordinary in a century hardened to huge statistics of violent death...

...For starving people, it would seem, civil rights are a hopeless luxury...

...IVhen will you win--if you win ? JS: There is no timetable in a guerrilla war like ours...

...And, as if to affirm its expanded idea of human rights, the United Nations in 1966 drew up two separate covenants on human rights: one on "economic, social and cultural rights," the other on "civil and political rights...

...Builders of Communism are not allowed to protest...

...The Soviet leaders have access to special stores where they can indulge their taste for Western goods, but they do not believe in giving t h e average Soviet citizen a chance to develop a taste for "consumerism," to use a term popular with Western intellectuals of a socialist bent...

...The hearings were a media failure, I suspect, because many Americans find the message of the dissidents embarrassing and discomforting...

...But for a small place like Northern Ireland, with a total population of one and a half million, it is the equivalent of four times the number of American deaths in Vietnam...

...The UN's recognition of both "economic, social and cultural rights" and "civil and political rights" constitutes a triumph for-the Soviet Union, for its constitution stresses that civil rights are guaranteed only insofar as they do not obstruct the building of Communism...

...Ferdinand Mount THE IRA AND THE BARROOMS OF AMERICA Many Irish-Americans think the IRA represents an acceptable political solution to the troubles in Northern Ireland...

...The hearings in Washington were rich in human drama...

...It is hard for a British writer to write dispassionately about Northern Ireland, and almost as hard for an American audience, let alone an Irish-American audience, to accept that he is trying to write dispassionately--or perhaps "in good faith" would be a better phrase...

...Why have we gathered here," Valery Chalidze asked on the opening day of the hearings, "to discuss human rights in the Soviet Union...

...He told me of the suffering he had seen and through his eyes I saw it too...

...Since slow starvation has been an instrument of Soviet internal policy, it is not surprising that the Soviet Union has recently refused to use its influence on its satellite Vietnam, which controls Cambodia, to allow shipments of food to reach the starving Cambodians...

...The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a five-page document that _9 Edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, New American Library, $6.95...

...According to Kenneth Minogue, whose essay "The History of the Idea of Human Rights" appears in The Human Rights Reader, Locke implies that "everyone has a property in his own person...

...The hearings, then, constituted a plea to the West not to lose faith in the overriding importance of civil rights by falling prey to the insidious notion that in "developing" nations civil rights can be dispensed with in order to ensure that socalled economic and social rights are quickly met...

...American leaders and intellectuals may feel guilty, but Russian dissidents argue that they have nothing to feel guilty about...

...His fate is similar to that of many other people in the Soviet Union who formed monitoring groups...

...A similar notion appears in one covenant: "the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights, as well as his civil and political rights...

...The documents collected in a very useful new anthology, The Human Rights Reader," show that in the last 30 years the notion of economic and social rights has come to be accepted by the international community, becoming gospel, in fact, in the halls of the United Nations...

...his civil rights are taken from him by governments that proclaim they are building a society in which economic and social rights will be ensured...

...It is strange and sad to realize that Russian dissidents have become the most eloquent defenders of the values of liberal democracy...

...The cost of this military commitment is about $170 million a year...

...According to the dissidents, those who regard economic and social rights as equal in importance to civil rights not only undermine freedom throughout the world, they also make it more difficult for the masses of the world to avoid poverty, starvation, disease, and neglect...

...Who determines the interests of the working people...

...Unlike many Americans, the dissidents know, as Tocqueville said, that "despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the supporter of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order...

...Why, the dissidents probably wondered, has not the current administration proudly defended its own heritage, acknowledging the preeminent importance of civil rights...

...After Lenin's vituperations, this passage sounds bland, but the language enables a state to argue that in order to "create the conditions" for the fulfillment of economic, social, and cultural rights, it must temporarily--states rarely say permanently-suspend civil and political rights...

...mentions the word "rights" 52 times, categorizes an extraordinary variety of things as rights, including the following: "Parents shall have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children...

...But the necessitous man never faces such a stark choice...

...The dissidents, however, have not given up hope, for they do think that publicity undermines the Soviet Union's pretensions to being a regime that is intent on improving the economic and social condition of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 13 the worker...

...But the IRA today is essentially red, not green...

...Workers who complain about their economic and social conditions are considered "anti-social," and are usually fired from their jobs...

...Q: How long can you keep this up...

...Only they seem to be certain that without civil rights people have only the slightest chance of bettering themselves...

...If the British government, Labour or Tory, thought it could withdraw the troops or begin to withdraw the troops or announce a date for withdrawing the troops, it would have done so, just as it has withdrawn troops from, and resigned authority over, British colonies and dominions...

...The dissidents want every Soviet citizen to have, as it were, a "property in his rights...

...In a speech on human rights and foreign policy in 1977, Vance defined human rights by saying that "First, there is the right to be free from governmental violation of the integrity of the person . . . . Second, there is the right to the fulfillment of such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education . . . . [And] third, there is the right to enjoy civil and political liberties...

...And when we defeated the Portuguese in 1974, I went to my father's grave and stood over it and told my father that we had won, and that the suffering, the pain, and the struggle had not been useless...

...In Russia," he said, "there are people who go twenty-five years without seeing this...

...The arguments of Brandt, Vance, and Carter are persuasive to many well-meaning people...

...We have learned," Chalidze said, "that fundamental freedoms are as necessary for workers as for intellectuals...

...The dissidents know that the future of human rights in the Soviet Union is grim...

...Why not, he asked, discuss the status of human rights in other countries, where people are shot without trials or are dying of starvation...

...participants the hearings were a failure, because they received scant attention from the American press...

...Whenever possible, he sent me back home to the bush to see my grandfather...

...So far, up to the day I write, 1,969 men, women, and children have been killed in the troubles in Northern Ireland...

...he should have said a lifetime, for the Soviet government believes in devoting most of its money and energies to defense, not consumer goods...

...The dissidents, of course, do not think that poverty is nonexistent in the Western democracies, but they know--and argue-that in such countries journalists are free to point out such conditions, and freely elected legislators are able to deliberate about the best way of addressing them...

...All those Soviet citizens who formed groups to monitor the treaty, which encourages "individuals [not governments] to know and act upon their rights," have been crushed...

...In an article entitled "Are Economic Rights 'Human Rights?' " the late Charles Frankel argued that "a more restricted use of the phrase 'human rights'...would serve...

...Only a fool would argue that if a starving man were given the choice between a steady supply of food and civil rights he would choose the latter...

...The UN's monitoring of these covenants has been grotesquely selective...

...And we will never give up...

...After work, he must Spend a good deal of his time waiting in line for essential items...

...As for the children who were born after the start of the revolution, they are really our greatest hope, because they understand themselves in a way that no generation before them ever has...

...But these very same regimes make sure that no one can question their claims...