The Foreign Service Journal, May 2009

tice of “segregating human rights is- sues into a dead-end ‘dialogue of the deaf’” while cooperating on other, pre- ferred matters. Amnesty International called on Clinton to “repair the dam- age” caused by her statement ( www. latimes.com/news/nationworld/ world/asia/la-fg-clinton-china 21-2009feb21,0,542695.story ). Human rights diplomacy will likely be put to the test elsewhere. The Obama administration has moved to end the four-year-old hiatus in relations with Syria. A series of congressional delegations visited the country re- cently, and Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha met with top diplomats at the State Department on Feb. 26 — a day after the department’s report con- taining “withering criticism” of Syria’s human rights record came out ( www. washingtonpost.com ) . The report received brickbats from the usual quarters. But although China’s official response to the report was “caustic,” the International Herald Tribune ’s Michael Wines observes, it was not significantly different from the reaction to last year’s report, and Xin- hua’s statement repeated, sometimes word for word, its 2008 response to the report ( www.iht.com/articles/2009/ 02/26/asia/china.php ). Sharp responses from Bolivia and Venezuela were not a surprise. The Venezuelan ForeignMinistry declared the report to be “false, interventionist and of malicious intent,” adding that it lacks legitimacy because the U.S. gov- ernment itself has a “dismal human” rights record ( www.venezuelanaly sis.com/news/4251 ) . More significant, however, as Mark Weisbrot explains in a guardian.co.uk post on March 11, the center-left gov- ernment of Chile joined the usual sus- pects this year in questioning the moral authority of the U.S. government’s judging other countries’ human rights practices ( www.guardian.co.uk/com mentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/1 1/state-department-human-rights ). On Feb. 26, Chilean government spokesman Francisco Vidal acknowl- edged deteriorating prison conditions in Chile, but added sharply: “We do not have a Guantanamo (prison camp). Democracy does not accept a Guan- tanamo” ( www.valparaisotimes.cl/ content/view/480/388 /). ■ — Susan Brady Maitra, Senior Editor M A Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 C Y B E R N O T E S 50 Years Ago... A s things now stand, the leaders of an underdeveloped country will normally deal with 16, 18 and often more than 20 different agencies coming at them purveying vari- ous kinds of assistance. … We have tended to close our eyes to the ad- ministrative burden which we place on the governments of the less developed countries by proliferating the independent agencies we create to ‘help’ them. — Harlan Cleveland, dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and co-editor of “The Art of Overseasmanship,” from testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations excerpted in the FSJ , May 1959.