SECRETARY ABRAMS/HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201370004-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2008
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: August 27, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM From the Editor's Desk STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
August 27, 1984 1:00 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Secretary Abrams/Human Rights Policy
RICHARD HEFNER: I'm Richard Hefner. Each week I chair
our editorial board. Joining me today is Alvin Schuster, Foreign
Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Also with me here at the
Editor's Desk is Daniel Henninger, Assistant Editorial Page
Editor of the Wall Street Journal. And our guest in Washington
is Elliot Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights
and Humanitarian Affairs.
Secretary Abrams has long been the Administration's most
articulate defender against the charge that Ronald Reagan's human
rights policy has been a litany of failure. Most often, Mr.
Abrams seems down to the earth, pragmatic in his opposition to
liberal attacks. Indeed, he's quoted John Kennedy as saying
"Americans' purpose is not to provide an outlook for our own
sentiments of hope or imagination, it's to shape real events in
the real world."
And this year's annual United States Survey of Human
Rights, released by Secretary Abrams, says, "Our aim is to
achieve results, not to make self-satisfying but ineffective
gestures."
So that I'd like to ask our guest if he embraces Jesse
Jackson, whose person-to-person efforts to free prisoners in the
Mideast and Cuba, and now perhaps in the Soviet Union, surely
have been effective for the human rights prisoners involved.
Mr. Secretary?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE ELLIOT ABRAMS: No, I
don't. Because if you take the case of Cuba, as an example,
there are broad human rights issues in Cuba. What Jesse Jackson
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did is something that any American of any fame could have done.
And that is, go down there and trade a little bit of legitimacy
with Castro for a certain number of prisoners.
HEFNER: Of course, no one else did.
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Well, no one else should have. And I
personally -- I think I share the prisoners' view that this is a
very troubling episode.
We could no doubt get Sakharov and Scharansky out of the
Soviet Union if we were willing to trade certain things, like
perhaps Afghanistan, in exchange. But the game may not be worth
the candle. That is, you have to ask yourself, if the ultimate
purpose is human rights, was the Jackson trip one which served
the overall goal of democracy and human rights in Cuba, or did it
not? And I think most people in the Cuban-American community
think it did not.
ALVIN SCHUSTER: In that part of the world -- that is,
in Central America and South America -- we're involved now in a
campaign to help the Contras in their effort to overthrow the
government of Nicaragua. Isn't there some hypocrisy there, in
the sense that, on the one hand, we are pushing for human rights,
quietly or otherwise, and, on the other hand, supporting those
who are determined to overthrow a government now in power?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: No. I would analogize this to the
situation in Afghanistan. I see nothing wrong, from the human
rights point of view, with supporting the opposition, the rebels,
if you will, in Afghanistan. And I would say the same thing
about Nicaragua. In both cases they're fighting pretty rotten
oppressive regimes. And if you take the case of Nicaragua now,
it's quite clear that the rebels have a much greater commitment
to democracy and that people like Cruz and Rabello and Pastora
have a much better possibility of establishing democracy there.
That's what they're fighting for.
So, from the human rights point of view, it seems to me
quite justifiable.
HEFNER: Alvin, were you going to follow up?
SCHUSTER: I was going to follow up simply to say I'm
not quite sure I follow the analysis which equates a Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan with what has happened in Nicaragua.
SECRETARY ABRAMS: The analogy is that in both cases the
people who are fighting are fighting a dictatorial and oppressive
regime in an effort to remove it and establish what will be a
less repressive regime. The guerrillas, the rebels are fighting
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to move the country in question in the direction of better
observance of human rights.
DANIEL HENNINGER: Mr. Abrams, Congress this week voted
to add to the supplemental appropriations $71 million for El
Salvador. And I believe your office has said that the human
rights situation has been improving in El Salvador.
At the same time, a group that is America's Watch, which
is frequently quoted by congressmen critical of our policy in El
Salvador, issued a report this week in which they said that
Salvadoran armed forces have killed thousands of civilians and
displaced hundreds of thousands with indiscriminate aerial
bombing, shelling, and military sweeps. And they said many of
the acts of the Salvadoran army flagrantly violate the laws of
war.
How does that square with the sorts of things your
office has been saying about human rights and the Salvadoran
military?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Well, if it were true, it would not.
I don't think it is true.
There have clearly been incidents in which the Salva-
doran armed forces have bombed, either indiscriminately, or at
least without sufficient discrimination, and have hit civilian
targets. But where is this information coming from? You know,
they. tend to quote the Tutela Legal (?), the church's own human
rights office down there in San Salvador. The Archbishop,
himself, is now being very, very careful in how he uses their
data because their data is not reliable. It's very difficult to
get reliable data.
I can't help noting that America's Watch used to talk
about why we shouldn't aid El Salvador because the death squads
were so active. Well, now the death squads aren't. They have to
admit that. So now we find another excuse for why we shouldn't
be aiding El Salvador. There's always some excuse for why we
shouldn't be aiding the government of El Salvador.
We know that there have been these incidents. In a
couple of cases, for example, they involved the Red Cross. And
we've talked to the Salvadorans about them. And I think their
record is improving on the use of airpower. But I do not believe
that we have these thousands and thousands of civilians killed.
Some of the human rights sources in El Salvador have
long been loath to distinguish between civilians killed and
guerrillas killed.
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HEFNER: Mr. Secretary, how much faith and trust can we
put in the reports that do come, basically, from the church in
Central America?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: One has to be very careful. First of
all, in the whole area of human rights we are dealing with very
soft data.
Secondly, in the Third World in general, as you know,
statistics tend not to be awfully good.
So that with that as a beginning, we know that we have
to be very careful.
There are many, many human rights groups that are, in
fact, farily well politicized. That is why Secoro Juridico (?),
which used to be the church's human rights office, was moved out
by the Archbishop, because he felt they had become politicized.
So I think we really do have to be quite careful.
HEFNER: Do you feel that way about the present informa-
tion that comes from church sources in Central America?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: I wouldn't generalize about Central
America. I think that each group is quite different. I think
that the Tutela Legal in San Salvador has come up with a great
deal of very useful and reliable information, and a fair amount
of unreliable information. I think one has to look at it piece
by piece.
SCHUSTER: In general terms, Mr. Abrams, how much impact
has the United States had? What have been one or two of our
successes in this whole field?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Well, I suppose the whole case of
Uruguay moving back towards democracy, Argentina, Honduras, and
El Salvador, if we want to just look at the Western Hemipshere
for a moment, are examples of where we hope that American
influence was useful in the direction of democracy. You never
know because you can't prove what things would have been like had
we not done what we did. And we also don't like to take credit
for a lot of things that we do. And basically, the credit
doesn't belong to us. The credit belongs to the people of those
countries.
HEFNER: Biggest disappointments?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Oh, I suppose the single greatest was
Nigeria -- it was Africa's largest country, and therefore
largest democracy -- leaving the democratic track.
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HEFNER: Mr. Secretary, tell us about the fate of
SECRETARY ABRAMS: We don't really know anything that
has not been made public -- which is to say, not too much. He
appears to be hospitalized. There are repeated rumors about drug
treatment. And no apparent willingness on the part of the
Soviets to give a single inch on that case.
HENNINGER: Mr. Abrams, I want to talk to you or ask you
a little bit about the nature of human rights abuses in Latin
America. You, for instance, are required from time to time, or
have been required, to give certifications of progress on human
rights by the government in El Salvador. And it seems to me that
most of the time these human rights abuses are thought of in
terms of governments committing them. Yet we have Marxist
guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia and Peru which, according
to news reports, are killing civilians. And yet what is it
they're guilty of? Their killing is never criticized in any sort
of institutional or public way by Congress. Can only governments
commit human rights abuses, and what the guerrillas do is, what,
just tough luck for the victims?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Well, there's an answer to that from
Amnesty Intenational. Their answer is that the crimes -- that
the human rights violations committed by guerrillas are in fact
crimes, under the law of the country in question, and should not
be viewed as human rights violations. Human rights violations
are defined as acts of governments.
I think that's really dumb. An act of murder or
torture, or something like that, is going to feel the same
whether it's a soldier doing it or a guerrilla. And it has the
same -- it really has the same effect on a society and on the
individuals who bear the brunt of it. So we disagree with that
Amnesty definition.
We have tried, in our own country reports, to take up
the question of what non-governmental groups are doing. When we
go over an asylum case, we always take into account what will
happen to the individual, not who will be doing it. It doesn't
really matter whether there's a guerrilla group or a government
that may be persecuting you. You still get asylum. And I wish
that human rights groups took the same view.
HENNINGER: Given the way you, the Administration, or
any Administration, and their critics in Congress fight over
these human rights figures, why shouldn't we regard this human
rights issue now as having become mainly just a political
football?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: Well, it has become very much a
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political football, a lot more than I wish had happened. I think
it makes it very difficult to talk about human rights when we
know that so many of the people involved on all sides of the
issue have political goals.
I have, myself, faulted many of the groups working on
Central America because I think that they have a policy dif-
ference with the Administration and they dress it up as a human
rights problem and attack our human rights policy, when really
it's the overall Central American policy that bothers them. I
think that that's very bad for human rights policy because it's
an area where we should be able to achieve a very great deal of
consensus.
HEFNER: Part of the reason for that, I would think, Mr.
Abrams, is that there does tend to be some inconsistencies in
what we criticize, as a country, and what we do not criticize, as
a country. You often hear, for example, that we criticize South
Africa -- I have no particular brief for South Africa -- and
leave Saudi Arabia alone.
This is a problem, is it not, in terms of American
policy on this issue?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: I don't really think it's as large a
problem as people generally make out. We issue a country report
every year on each country, in which we try to tell the truth.
And most human rights groups and Congress have acknowledged that
we do it pretty well.
Beyond that country report, the question is, how do you
try to achieve a better human rights performance in a given
country? It's a tactical question. The goals are the same.
And we do treat different countries differntly. Some
places we have nothing to use bu denunciations, like Vietnam or
North Korea. In other places, we have an awful lot of diplomatic
and political clout.
The problem is that when I say we are using our politi-
cal clout, we are using diplomacy in a friendly country, whether
it be Chile or Uruguay or Paraguay, or whatever, I'm accused of
being a liar. People say that quiet diplomacy, so-called, is
really silence, and you're not doing anything. And that's the
real problem. The problem is not that people don't like the
tactic; it is that they accuse their government of lying to them.
If we could get past the point where everybody thought
they were being lied to all the time, then I think we'd have a
better consensus on human rights policy.
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HEFNER: Mr. Secretary, I wonder. Comparing yourselves,
comparing the Reagan Administration, let's say with the Carter
Administration, to what extent do you think you are more or less
concerned with making matters of human rights impact upon actual
foreign policy?
SECRETARY ABRAMS: I think we're more concerned. I'll
give you one rough and odd measure: cable traffic. Every cable
on human rights has a tag, human rights. There are many thou-
sands more cables going in and out of the State Department and
U.S. embassies today than there were in the Carter Administra-
tion.
Around the world today at U.S. embassies, I think we've
managed to persuade people in the Foreign Service, who were very
dubious, that human rights and U.S. national interests always go
together. I think in the Carter Administration, the way in which
the policy was conducted led lots of ambassadors, Foreign Service
officers to conclude they were frequently incompatible, and that
human rights policy had to be held at arm's-length. I don't
think that's so widely believed anymore in the U.S. Government.
(End of interview)
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