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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 16KB | 306 lines

<text> <title> Overview </title> <article> <hdr> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 Helsinki Watch: Overview </hdr> <body> Human Rights Developments The optimism that attended the East European revolutions of l989 had already dimmed somewhat by the end of l990. Now, at the close of l991, we are forced to conclude that some of our worst forebodings have become reality. If there is any room left for surprise, it is mainly at the speed with which the events we feared have come to pass. The demise of communism in Europe has brought grave human rights problems in its wake. A fierce and brutal civil war is raging in Yugoslavia. The Soviet empire has come to an end with new and diverse republic governments now responsible for the protection of human rights. In Romania, vigilante miners, who last year supported the government by brutally suppressing demonstrators, this year smashed the Parliament building in violent protest against price increases and forced the government to resign. In Albania, the demise of communism has been a stormy one, resulting in considerable turmoil, an attempted mass exodus, and violence. Turkey, a strongly anti-communist member of NATO, has long used the fear of a communist takeover to justify repression against its citizens. But the end of a "communist threat" has not eased repression in Turkey, where torture in police detention centers continues unabated. Indeed, violence has escalated in the country; in the past year we have reported on a significant number of deaths in detention and the murder of a human rights activist. Communism is fast being replaced, both in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, by the ideology of nationalism. In some cases, communist leaders have merely traded in one mantle for the other. Nationalism, which often leads to ethnic conflicts, border disputes and discrimination against minorities, is potentially dangerous to the cause of human rights, as the violence in Yugoslavia and various republics of the former Soviet Union illustrates. Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, where new democracies are struggling to take hold, are also facing new problems in the process of de-communization and in addressing abuses of the past. It is ironic that in Czechoslovakia, where an enlightened president came to power in l989 declaring that all citizens should take responsibility for what happened in the past, the Parliament has recently passed a law to prevent, among others, former communist officials and all those whose names are listed as collaborators in secret police files from occupying high-level administrative positions in the public sector. The law, which assumes guilt by association and considers people guilty until proven innocent, does not provide for due process and could unleash a witch hunt of considerable proportions. Similar legislation is also being considered in Poland and Hungary. In the three Baltic states that achieved their independence in l991--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--new kinds of human rights issues have become cause for concern: the rehabilitation of former war criminals, legislation restricting the right to citizenship and property, and discrimination against minorities. The variety of problems that Helsinki Watch now faces has increased dramatically, as has the number of new independent states and regions that we now monitor. Before l989, our major focus was on a region completely under Soviet hegemony, with a monolithic structure that made it possible to understand and respond to events in the various Warsaw Pact countries almost as if they were a single entity. Now, the countries in the region have not only taken on new individuality, but many are also fracturing into their constituent parts, and some of these constituent parts, in turn, may soon splinter further. The Right to Monitor In such a time of turmoil, it has become increasingly important for Helsinki Watch to have contacts with local human rights monitors who are investigating and recording human rights abuses and issuing information that we know is reliable. But ironically, the sudden opening of many formerly closed societies has led to a diminution of indigenous human rights monitoring. In the formerly Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, where human rights monitoring (as well as the persecution of monitors) was a highly developed art, monitoring by citizens is now, at last, largely free of danger. But many of those previously active in the human rights movement are now involved in politics: they are either running their governments or active in the opposition. For the most part, new people have not emerged to take their place. At the same time, Helsinki Watch now has unprecedented opportunities to send fact-finding missions to countries that were previously closed to us and where we were unable to travel openly for human rights purposes. We have seized the opportunity to send missions to far-flung places. We have also stationed our own representatives for long periods of time in Helsinki Watch offices in Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and, most recently, in Moscow. The ability to work in these countries on an extended basis has not only improved the quality of the information we are able to gather, but it has provided us with a network of contacts in these countries and given us an organizational presence there. Part of the work of Helsinki Watch has been to discover new people interested in doing human rights work in their countries. We are now developing projects for training them, when necessary, in the skills of taking testimony and the methodology of human rights fact-finding. In Turkey, the human rights monitoring situation remains a mixed one: human rights monitors are now formally allowed to function, but monitoring is not without risks. Monitors are routinely repressed and, during l991, one human rights activist was killed. U.S. Policy The U.S. government has always walked gingerly with regard to human rights criticism of Turkey, a valued NATO ally. Although the State Department in recent years has been forced by public pressure to acknowledge the existence of torture and other human rights abuses in Turkey, its expressions of concern have been, for the most part, in the realm of quiet diplomacy. The same has traditionally been true with regard to Yugoslavia, which successive U.S. administrations considered "our" communist country as distinct from "theirs" (i.e., the Soviet Union's). With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, such old distinctions no longer pertain. However, the result has not been beneficial to the cause of human rights. It was hoped that, with the end of the Cold War, the United States would be in a position to criticize human rights abuses wherever they occur. Instead, human rights protests have largely disappeared from the agendas of U.S. governmental bodies when it comes to the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The State Department, to its credit, has been engaged in constructive human rights activities aimed at the building of democratic institutions in the former Eastern bloc, surely a worthy and necessary task. But the Department has been reluctant to criticize ongoing human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Its main concern has been to shore up the faltering central governments in these countries; in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, this policy continued long after its futility became apparent. As for Turkey, its ties to the U.S. government, if anything, are stronger than ever before, given Turkey's role in supporting U.S. positions during and after the Persian Gulf war. The United State has boosted its aid to Turkey and remains disinclined to raise delicate human rights issues, even in appropriate forums. In September l99l, for example, the Conference on Security and Cooperat