The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

the authority to impose sanctions against religiously intolerant coun- tries; any such action against the king- dom is considered unlikely. For much of 2004, Powell has made the situation in Sudan a high priority. He has worked hard to assist more than one million people in the Darfur region who have been uproot- ed in an ethnic cleansing campaign he has classified as genocide. With the possible exception of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, no one is more identified with efforts to ease the suf- fering in that area than Powell. A Mixed Record During his three years at State, Craner attached importance both to democratic reforms and efforts to secure the release of individual pris- oners of conscience. He said China pleased and surprised the administra- tion in 2002 by freeing 10 political prisoners, an unusually large number. But, he acknowledged, at that rate it would take six centuries for China to release all prisoners of conscience — assuming there were no arrests in the interim. So he spent considerable time during his years as rights chief trying to chip away at Chinese author- itarianism, using the country’s experi- ment in village elections as a starting point. This fall, human rights groups voiced strong objections to initial administration support for an intelli- gence reform bill that would have allowed the deportation of foreigners to countries with a well-documented history of torture. Advocates of the measure see it as an important anti-ter- rorism tool, while opponents note the potential for abuse. In 2002, the Justice Department deported a Syrian- born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, a country with a long record of human rights abuses. Arar alleges that he was tortured during his 375-day prison stay. To many, it was a clear case of American complicity in torture. Ultimately, that provision was stripped from the latest version of the bill, but in its stead, the director of homeland security would have authority to detain such individuals indefinitely. However, as of mid- November, it was unclear that the bill would pass in any form. Among the harsher critics of cur- rent U.S. human rights policies is William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA. He used the occasion of the February release of the State Department’s annual human rights report to say: “The con- tent of this report has little correspon- dence with the administration’s for- eign policy; indeed, the U.S. is increasingly guilty of a ‘sincerity gap,’ overlooking abuses by allies and justi- fying action against foes by post-facto references to human rights. In re- sponse, many foreign governments will choose to blunt criticism of their abuses by increasing cooperation with the U.S. war on terror rather than by improving human rights.” Schulz also said Amnesty Inter- national’s research confirms that public beheadings continue in Saudi Arabia; mass public executions are ordered in China; and people are “disappeared” in Chechnya and Colombia. “As with Iraq before the war, where such violations were over- looked for decades by the U.S., these countries will feel little pressure to end such abuses. After today’s release of this report, U.S. military aid and training, political and economic sup- port, high-level visits and diplomatic sweet-talking will reassure abusive nations that few penalties accompany the criticism.” A Consensus Forms Human rights have been a key ele- ment of American foreign policy since the early days of the Carter adminis- tration, when — at the president’s urging — Congress created the human rights bureau at the State Department. (Originally a stand- alone office, it is now part of the Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Bureau.) To say the least, President Carter’s policies were highly contentious. Human rights abuses by military dic- tatorships in Argentina and Chile were a particular concern in the late 1970s, and Carter loosened U.S. ties with those countries and the many others in the region run by generals. But he was more tolerant of the abus- es of strategically important countries, including South Korea, the Philip- pines and Saudi Arabia. This left Carter open to the criticism that he was directing sanctions solely at strategically unimportant countries. It is the kind of criticism that all sub- sequent administration’s have faced. Among Carter’s stronger critics was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would be- come President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. She argued that it was unwise to treat communist and anti-communist authoritarians alike. Her basic premise was that the former don’t evolve: the latter do. After the defeat of its first nominee to head the human rights bureau, the Reagan administration seriously con- sidered calling for its abolition; Secretary of State Alexander Haig said the existence of that office implied that other bureaus in the department were working against human rights. But Reagan eventually nominated Elliott Abrams, then the head of the State Department’s D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 The U.S. human rights umbrella has been expanding lately.