Preparing for the Helsinki Assessment

...The critical questions are when and how the Commission's findings are to be used...

...One step in this direction is being made by the Commission on Security and Cooperation, headed by Representative Dante Fascell (D.-Fla...

...William Korey is director of the B'nai B'rith International Council...

...About 1,500 of their brethren have been repeatedly refused exit visas, in many cases since 1970...

...one third were fired from their jobs...

...Moscow's sensitivity to the importance of the upcoming talks was already evidenced in the Soviet press last fall...

...Upon signing the Helsinki Final Act, President Gerald Ford declared: "History will judge this Conference not by what we say today, but by what we do tomorrow—not by the promises we make, but by the promises we keep...

...This commitment was soon demonstrated by the President's supportive letter of February 5 to Andrei Sakharov...

...Andrei Sinyav-sky tells of weeping as he read the agreement, and his response was by no means atypical among participants in the Soviet democratic movement...

...Soviet participants, the mission reports, will insist upon "the blandest possible nation-by-nation accounting" at the June meeting...

...Earlier, the American intellectuals who were supposed to be participants had been refused visas...

...and its allies "only a limited consensus on what to expect and seek" from the Belgrade sessions...

...The West, it was felt, had capitulated to Soviet demands for domination of Eastern Europe without extracting any compensatory benefits...

...The West, meanwhile, has yet to decide exactly how it will attempt to counter the Soviet maneuvers...

...The overall objective of this planning, according to a Congressional study mission sent to Europe by the Commission on Security and Cooperation, is to minimize discussion of human rights at Belgrade and limit, if not eliminate, future review sessions...

...The statement would appear to be an appropriate guideline for the American delegation to Belgrade—both as it prepares for the talks and as it sits around the conference table...

...No one doubts the Administration's interest...

...Detailed evaluations of the signatories' respective track records since Helsinki have not been prepared, and a definite approach to assuring future periodic review sessions—the lifeblood of the Helsinki agreement —has not been developed...

...it has sparked demands for both emigration and greater freedom of expression...

...But that potential can only be realized, he stresses, if the West vigorously presses Basket III items...

...The 15-member advisory body—six from the House, six from the Senate and three from the Administration—is, through open meetings and extensive research, accumulating evidence of noncompliance by the Communist countries...

...A TEST IN BELGRADE Preparing for the Helsinki Assessment by WILLIAM KOREY When the Helsinki Final Act was adopted on August 1, 1975, dissenters in the USSR and many of their friends abroad despaired...

...foreign aid to human-rights violators will be reduced...

...The Commission's most striking data has come from interviews with some 900 recent Soviet Jewish emigrants, which revealed the following: 60 per cent were subjected to harassment as a direct result of applying for exit visas...

...Answers must be found soon by the policy-makers in the State Department if Belgrade is not to be a fiasco, and if periodic review sessions for determining the effectiveness of Helsinki—no matter who might find this uncomfortable —are to be assured...

...by the State Department's denunciation of the Czech repression of "Charter 77" signers...

...Yet the Helsinki declaration, through its Basket III provisions on human rights, has actually had the effect of kindling hope in the Soviet bloc...

...Nevertheless, the Soviet Union has continued to harass and intimidate would-be emigrants...

...two thirds were maltreated by customs officials or border guards during their departure...

...And Chairman Leonid I. Brezhnev himself, at the October 25 plenum of the Communist party Central Committee, insisted: "We are consistently carrying out those provisions of the Final Act adopted in Helsinki that concern the expansion of cultural and other ties and contacts among peoples, and the expansion of information exchanges...

...Aware, however, that all their repressive and public relations efforts to head off a Basket III confrontation could prove to no avail, the Soviet leaders have simultaneously been preparing a detailed strategy for coping with the issue at Belgrade...

...Documentation of alleged U.S...

...The authorities' determination to silence the committee is also believed to have been a major factor in the subsequent expulsion from the USSR of George Krimsky, the Russian-speaking Associated Press correspondent who had particularly close ties with Orlov and his associates...

...The Congressional study mission found among the U.S...

...They are expected to urge, too, that primary attention be shifted from Belgrade to a series of pan-European conferences proposed by Brezhnev on such matters as transport, energy, environment, disarmament, and economic cooperation...

...They will spend some six weeks preparing an agenda for the substantive review conference (probably on an ambassadorial level) that is scheduled to be held in Belgrade three months later and will examine what has happened since Helsinki...

...Long before President Jimmy Carter took office, on November 15, he had said "consummation of the Helsinki agreement concerning human rights would be an ever-present consideration" in his thinking about Soviet-American relations...

...The President stated the U.S...

...Indeed, this was one of the principal items on the agenda when the Warsaw Pact powers met in Bucharest last November 25...

...Should these tactics fail, the Soviet delegation—to judge from recent articles in Pravda and Izvestia —will be prepared to take the offensive, accusing the United States and Western European countries of restrictive immigration policies...

...That the Kremlin is not prepared to meet the Helsinki test was made abundantly clear by the February 10 arrest of physicist Yuri Orlov, chairman of a small private group of Soviet citizens engaged in monitoring Soviet compliance with the agreement (see "The Road to My Arrest" by Yuri Orlov, NL, March 14...

...The Final Act calls upon the signatories to "deal in a positive and humanitarian spirit with persons who wish to be reunited with members of their family," and to handle applications for exit visas "as expeditiously as possible...

...And when Brezhnev warned last month that the American human rights thrust would undermine d6-tente, Carter rebuffed his threats...

...Soviet abridgements of Helsinki obligations pertaining to the reunion of families have been equally egregious...

...by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's February 24 testimony before a Senate committee that U.S...

...abuses in the treatment of racial minorities is also being accumulated...

...But the fact is that the USSR has hardly changed its ways in any of these areas...

...Even Sinyavsky, after reexamining the document, has come to the conclusion that it holds a great potential...

...Nonetheless, it is now essential to translate the Administration's concern into a precise plan of action for Belgrade...

...A crucial test of Western determination will come next June 15, when representatives of the 35 nations that signed the pact assemble in Belgrade...

...Because the agreement carries no enforcement machinery, focusing public attention on persistent violators at the watchdog conferences provides the sole means of implementation...

...Still, those were the lucky ones...

...would not retreat from its advocacy of freedom even as it pursued the objectives of detente—arms limitation and the renewal of salt talks...

...An outpouring of articles, mainly in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta and the daily Pravda, boasted of the USSR's adherence to Helsinki's human rights provisions and criticized the West for failing to do likewise, as well as for its unfounded attacks on alleged Soviet noncompliance...

...Within two months of the Brezhnev statement, for example, the KGB closed down an academic symposium on Jewish culture after arresting its 13 organizers and confiscating the papers to be read...