The most generous way to describe the Clinton administration's approach to human rights is to call it ambivalent.
John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, has said all the right things and produced candid reports on human rights around the world. But President Clinton ignored Beijing's abuses for the sake of trade, subordinated human rights to strategic concerns when Boris Yeltsin assaulted Chechnya and made the fatal mistake of refusing to classify the mass murders in Rwanda as genocide when to do so might have enabled UN forces to stop the slaughter.
Recently there has been an unusually overt demonstration of the administration's ambivalence on human rights. Speaking in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Owens, said the Pentagon wanted to resume a US program for the military and educational training of the Indonesian army, a program that Congress suspended in 1992 because of Indonesia's flagrant abuse of human rights on the conquered territory of East Timor.
The same day, Shattuck was telling Congress that the human rights situation on East Timor, ''which began worsening in late 1994, worsened further in January this year.'' Shattuck's testimony replicated a report by the organization Human Rights Watch/Asia on ''Deteriorating Human Rights in East Timor.'' The report describes ''extrajudicial executions, torture, disappearances, unlawful arrests and detentions and denials of freedom of association, assembly and expression.''
As Clinton and the new Congress consider the Pentagon's request for $600,000 to spend on the training of Indonesian officers, they ought to heed the counsel of the US Catholic Conference. ''As difficult as the situation in East Timor has been over the years,'' the bishops' office noted, ''congressional protests and representations by various US administrations have helped limit the severity of human rights abuses, keeping a bad situation from becoming much worse.''
This is no time to encourage Indonesian persecution of the East Timorese.
Last changed: 25-JUN-1997 18:19:54
David Barts | davidb@scn.org | http://www.scn.org/~davidb/