A New Chapter for Helsinki

...The compromised text was withdrawn...

...After complaints were registered by the Western countries, particularly the United Kingdom, Havel was released in midMay, just a few months before Prague was engulfed in massive anti-Communist demonstrations that put him in the President's seat...

...At its core is the protection of newly-won human rights—the mechanism "man needs most, " the Czech President further observed in his message, "to sing at the top of his voice in the bathroom without fearing that there may be a bug in his shower...

...The hope now is that the Copenhagen proposals will be incorporated into Helsinki 2 when the 35 heads of CSCE states meet in Paris...

...They should be called upon to enact laws that make incitement to violence against minorities a crime...

...None of these vital elements of democracy were alluded to in the Helsinki Final Act...

...Basket 3, as a balance to security concerns, spelled out the obligations of the signatories to facilitate travel, the "reunion of families," an unimpeded flow of information, and respect for religious and ethnic-cultural rights...

...Rather, today it is on the lips of virtually every statesman and foreign affairs pundit as they ponder "the new architecture" of postCold War Europe...

...The resolution's two specific and sharply critical references to anti-Semitism were unprecedented...

...In addition, the linkage was extended to approval of a Soviet request that a fall 1991 Human Dimension conference be held in Moscow...

...The Sofia authorities, unaccustomed to unauthorized public assemblages, brutally dispersed the demonstrators...

...As with practically every Helsinkisponsored conference, nongovernmental organizations used the occasion to press their aims...

...By December Ceausescu was gone...

...The CSCE has to address itself to the serious challenge that bigotry and hate pose to stability and democracy in Europe...

...Among the forms of racism discussed by the conferees were recent anti-Hungarian practices in Romania, anti-Turk policies in Bulgaria and anti-gypsy acts throughout Europe...

...Now there was a beacon of hope giving strength to activists striving for accountability and rationality from repressive and capricious regimes...

...The trouble is that incendiary bigotry could be a powerful destabilizing force in the predominantly democratic new epoch...

...Once the dissenters' plight was brought up and subsequently broadcast, it was harder for their oppressors to continue singling them out...

...To its eventual dismay, however, the provisions covering the "free movement of peoples and ideas" would in fact undermine the entire foundation upon which the USSR had erected its structures to preserve the status quo...

...the emigration of Jews, Germans, Armenians, and Pentecostals escalated...

...Taking advantage of the newly specified right to leave their country, East Germans seeking to emigrate to West Germany began to use Hungary (and Czechoslovakia) as a halfway home...

...Soon a half-dozen other monitoring groups sprang up in various major Soviet cities...

...nor the USSR fully comprehended the implications of the Helsinki Final Act, groups of democratic activists in Eastern Europe certainly recognized its promise...

...In other words, 15years after the Helsinki Final Art we may very well see the erection of the scaffolding for a new Pan-European edifice...

...But I think it is essential that a balance be maintained between security and human rights concerns, between Basket 1 and Basket 3. True, the "free movement of peoples and ideas,"the dream of the early Western CSCE signatories, has largely been realized...

...Brutal suppression of the monitoring groups ineluctably followed, but they could not be totally silenced...

...Nicolae Ceausescu's government declared that it would not be bound by the Vienna decisions...

...and religious and cultural rights were expanded...

...In short, a whole process had been set in motion that made human rights a formal matter of public concern—and the subject of broadcasts to Eastern Europe reporting the stormy review sessions that often spanned several years before a "concluding document" acceptable to everyone could be put together...

...Next, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and the Communist regime came tumbling after...

...The West reluctantly went along as part of a complicated series of tradeoffs...

...What Havel grasped from the day of Helsinki's creation escaped most masters of realpolitik as well as hard-ball anti-Communists...

...Then the pattern spread to other Communist countries...

...In Katowice, Poland's coal mining center, activists openly challenged the government's authority by distributing copies of the Final Act...

...Comprising the 35 countries of Europe (except Albania) and North America, the body derives its historic importance from having produced the Helsinki Final Act, signed by each head of state at an impressive ceremony held in Finland's capital on August 1, 1975...

...One of the more active of these organizations in Bulgaria, an environmental group called Eco-Glasnost, choseto stageademonstration...

...Governments should be charged with the responsibility for setting the tone and providing the moral standard here by speaking out loudly, clearly and to the broadest possible audience...

...Even Romania could not fully protect itself against the democratic virus...

...If accepted there, much will depend on the effective implementation of the new agreement...

...The Hungarian Foreign Ministry rejected the request on the grounds that the treaty had been superseded by international agreements...

...Still, a total quarantine could not be effected...

...The present heightened interest in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe is almost exclusively attributable to its potential as a vehicle for shaping and controlling the post-Cold War power balance...

...For the first time, too, the concluding document fully recognized the right of an individual to leave any country—a development with enormous ramifications—and it set up a yearround complaint procedure...

...THE CSCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS A New Chapter for Helsinki BY WILLIAM KOREY "The sexiest new set of initials in international diplomacy" is the way one Washington insider recently characterized CSCE—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe...

...Orlov's toast reflected their extraordinary courage, and their doubt that they could withstand the repressive apparatus of totalitarianism: "To the success of our hopeless cause...

...In retrospect, it is apparent that the Vienna concluding document acted as a powerful spur to the remarkable series of transformations that occurred in the fall of 1989...

...Now there was a standard accepted by both East and West for measuring the rights performance of governments...

...Until now, no international agreement has contained a reference to anti-Semitism...

...For one thing, there were the Western broadcasts carrying news about their activities...

...Yet that has led to other significant problems...

...But the 15th anniversary of that event is not what has suddenly attracted attention to the CSCE...

...Their focus is largely security concerns—borders, conventional arms reductions, how to fold a united Germany into a nonconfrontational East-West relationship—not human rights...

...In the vacuum, vicious anti-Semitic organizations have surfaced to intimidate Jews—notably in the USSR, but to some extent everywhere...

...Basket 1 established "human rights and fundamental freedoms" asoneof 10 equal Principles that should govern interstate relations...

...Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with his indifference to, if not contempt for, human rights as a factor in international affairs, and his partiality for direct bilateral superpower relations, thought the Helsinki accord inconsequential...

...The sparks produced by Vienna also ignited fires throughout Eastern Europe...

...The lengthy resolution adopted by all 35 members at the end included elaborate instructions for holding free elections, ensuring political pluralism, and instituting the rule of law...

...In the light of the revolutionary transformation of Eastern Europe, it is reasonable to wonder what role, if any, is left for the Helsinki process...

...As a result, most political prisoners were released...

...For another, there were the review conferences at Belgrade (October '77-March '78) and Madrid (November '80-September '83...

...Former Undersecretary of State George W. Ball summed up the conventional wisdom when he pronounced Helsinki "a defeat for the West...

...Indeed, the one head of state to send a message to the second Helsinki-sponsored Conference on the Human Dimension, held in Copenhagen this past June 5-29, was Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel...

...In January '89 he had received his latest sentence—eight months for participating in anti-State demonstrations...

...played merely an incidental role in the negotiations begun in 1972 that led to the 1975 signing...

...The Kremlin especially could not afford to ignore Western pressure at the Vienna review conference (November '86-January '89...

...When human rights complaints were nevertheless lodged by the U.S., the UK and the European Community, Bucharest rebuffed the accusations...

...William Korey, director of International Policy Research for B'nai ?'rith, is currently preparing a study on "U.S...

...Once completed, the Final Act, consisting of three Baskets (dealing respectively with security, trade and human rights), was perceived by hardliners from Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington to Governor Ronald Reagan of California as a "betrayal" of the peoples of Eastern Europe...

...But no one should suppose the millennium has arrived...

...This time, Moscow joined in a Canadian initiative that placed anti-Semitism beyond the pale of civilized society...

...Helsinki delegates from the Western and neutral/nonaligned countries were shocked by the crackdown and threatened a walkout...

...Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 group, whose foundingmembers included Havel and his current Foreign Minister, Jiri Dienstbier, demanded adherence to the Helsinki accord...

...The "secret" only became fairly common knowledge during the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe in late 1989...

...Now, too, there was a forum—the periodic review conferences stipulated in the accord—where abuses could be detailed, to the international embarrassment of the abusers...

...Moscow probably did welcome the agreement as guaranteeing existing borders and therefore the status quo...

...A United States effort bring that about at the United Nations in the mid-'60s was deleteriously compromised bytheUSSR, which proposed an amendment bracketing "Zionism" with anti-Semitism...

...Although Todor Zhivkov's Communist government would come to regret its plea, it desperately wanted to host an environmental conference decided upon during the Vienna review...

...This will be at the heart of the East-West summit tentatively scheduled to begin in Paris next November, known as Helsinki 2. The negotiations are expected to produce a reinforced CSCE with more frequent meetings, particularly at the ministerial level, a permanent, albeit limited, secretariat and a more direct involvement in security matters...

...The repression quickly ceased, but the courage of Eco-Glasnost set off a chain of events that brought down the Zhivkov regime...

...The letter was distributed widely in samizdat fashion and received extensive coverage on Radio Free Europe broadcasts...

...Within a day or two of its adoption, top-level Moscow officials were brought together to plan the implementation of steps that would achieve the Final Act's call for the "free movement of peoples and ideas...

...In essence, it is that people can and will shape their own destiny when circumstances permit...

...Thus, in the middle of October the signatories assembled in Sofia...

...For the U.S...

...This in itself was quite an admission...

...Policy and the Helsinki Process" under a Ford Foundation grant...

...Clearly, the Vienna document had legitimized absolute emigration rights...

...For as President Ford cautioned while signing the Helsinki Final Act, what is important is not the "promises we make" but rather the "promises we keep...

...linked the holding of talks on conventional arms reduction in Central Europe—a major Soviet objective—to Moscow's positive performance in the areas of releasing political prisoners, emigration and radio jamming, as well as to its accepting a concluding document that decreed much higher human rights standards than any previous Helsinki pronouncements...

...The power of the Helsinki idea was initially seized by a hardy band of Soviet dissenters meeting in a small Moscow apartment in May 197 6. Under the leadership of Yuri Orlov, aprominent physicist, they formed the first Helsinki Watch (or Monitoring) Committee...

...or, where such laws already exist, to enforce them with vigor...

...Among the effects of the new procedure was Havel's early release from prison...

...In March '89, a half-dozen very prominent former Romanian officials circulated a letter demanding a cessation of human rights abuses and strict adherence to the Helsinki accord...

...If neither the U.S...

...A top State Department official, Lawrence Eagleburger, noted in 1982 that Helsinki is "terribly valuable" because "it gives us a forum that the Soviets simply cannot ignore...

...Poland's underground Committee of Workers' Security (Kor), the intellectual arm of Solidarity, similarly based its claims to social justiceontheaccord...

...He saw the meeting as "the opening of a truly new chapter in the whole humanitarian area of the Helsinki process...

...It is as if the freedom to hate is integral to freedom itself...

...A telling and decisive historic moment came when the German Democratic Republic's Communist Party chief, Erich Honecker, demanded that Hungary adhere to a treaty requiring it to turn back all East Germans without visas to Bonn...

...The Helsinki accord, in a short 15year interval, has had totally unexpected and remarkable results in shaping the character of a more democratic, more unified, less fear-riddenEurope...

...Helsinki probably had its most direct impact on the Bulgarian uprising late last October...

...The twin evils of racism and bigotry, for example, have been released from the Pandora's box unintentionally opened by glasnost and the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and are now major human rights issues that need to be confronted...

...Under his stewardship theU.S...

...The Copenhagen deliberations pointed in the right direction...

...The trauma of the Holocaust appears to have been plunged down history's "memory hole...

...Obviously dangerous is the revival of what one authority has termed "the specter of the past," the anti-Semitism that marked the era of Nazism...

...To succeed in fashioning a still more humane and peaceful Pan-European order, the CSCE must continue to play the Pied Piper of freedom...

...jamming of foreign broadcasts ended...

...Everyone at Copenhagen recognized, especially after the revolutions of 1989, that peace and security, not to mention justice, depend upon "tolerance...

...Hostile, occasionally violent attitudes toward ethnic or racial minorities have become an ugly "dividend" of the successful struggle to end totalitarian rule...

...Equally striking was the emphasis in Copenhagen on the protection of minorities and the importance of combating racism and anti-Semitism...

...Leading newspapers also editorialized against the accord, and mail to the White House ran 10-1 against President Gerald R. Ford signing it...

...So did the U.S.' top negotiator at Copenhagen, Ambassador Max M. Kampelman, who played a key role in winning approval of a resolution urging specific steps designed to advance free elections, political pluralism and the rule of law...