The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Czechoslovakian Human Rights

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. One of the things which startled a lot of people about the Carter Administration`s first week was the attention given to human rights in Eastern Europe. It`s true that Carter stressed this concern during the campaign, but he had scarcely been sworn in when the State Department opened fire with an unprecedented blast at the government of Czechoslovakia. It accused Prague of harassing Czech dissidents in violation of the Helsinki agreement. The next day, a second blast, this time warning Moscow against intimidating Dr. Andrei Sakharov the Soviet dissident and scientist. The President and Cyrus Vance who is now running the State Department said they hadn`t been consulted about these statements whose tone was quite unlike the Department`s cautious prose. Carter and Vance said they approved the content of the statements but did not want to be provocative. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, the new Administration`s human rights rhetoric second- thought hedging included, raises some very basic questions about how Carter and Vance plan to run America`s foreign policy questions mostly of the tough, practical variety like whether they are really willing or even able to put actions where their rhetoric is, and if so, how? And what the Russians and others are likely to think and do about it in response. Well, tonight we consider some of those questions ourselves. First, with Dr. William Taubman, a political scientist at Amherst College. He is an expert on Soviet affairs, served on the policy planning staff at the State Department and has been a consultant to the department since 1971.

Dr. Taubman, how did these two statements with their various clarifiers add up to you?

WILLIAM TAUBMAN: It seems to me they constitute a significant departure in American policy that has the potential to pay various important dividends. It seems to me the departure is not without risk, but that the risks are not serious provided that this develops in a proper way.

LEHRER: What is the departure as you see it? Where does this differ from where we`ve operated now?

TAUBMAN: The departure, I think, consists in a willingness to speak out directly to the governments of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union about what we believe to be violations of basic human rights in those countries.

LEHRER: But it`s a policy of speaking out. It`s not a policy of action. At least it can`t be interpreted that way at this point, right?

TAUBMAN: Well, so far it`s a policy of speaking out. It may or may not be followed by actions, but I think that even the speaking out can be very important.

LEHRER: Yes. What are the dangers of this kind of policy?

TAUBMAN: Well, the danger, one possible danger that one can imagine but I don`t think really that it`s serious, is that the Soviets can thumb their nose at us and challenge us to deliver.

One can imagine a scenario in which they would go so far as to put acamedician Sahkarov in jail. What would we do? But my feeling there is that they are very unlikely to do that. Unlikely because they know as well as we do the outcry that would follow in the United States. One can imagine in the United States the scientific exchange going down the drain immediately. One can imagine the flow of technology threatened. They can imagine that too, and they have a stake in continuing that. . . .

LEHRER: You don`t think that`s going to happen?

TAUBMAN: So, I don`t think that`s going to happen.

LEHRER: Well, what difference then do you think these statements are going to make?

TAUBMAN: Well, it seems to me that the statements could serve several constructive purposes. One is that they can protect individuals in these countries, and individuals have a way of being ignored in super-power conflict whether cold war or detente, yet there is plenty of evidence which indicates that this kind of expression of concern, what the Russians would call "shum" or noise, has the effect of deterring the Soviets or the other communist governments from putting people in jail. Another positive outcome. This is the way I think in which we can keep the faith with people behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who, surprisingly, ironically, are some of our best well-wishers in the world. Almost uncritically. And one more thing I would say. It seems to me that handled correctly this kind of demarche developed further could become a component in what President Carter has called "a policy of quiet strength."

LEHRER: So you think it`s a good thing, and there`s no problem with it?

TAUBMAN: 1 think it`s a good thing. I think there are certain risks as I have said, but I think those risks are not serious provided it`s handled properly. I have my concern about whether it`s been handled properly so far, but I think it has the potential to develop into a very important policy.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: One man with personal experience of Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia is Eugene Loebl. He was imprisoned for 11 years when the Russians considered his ideas as the Deputy Foreign Minister for Trade too liberal. He was rehabilitated in 1963 and was about to become Finance Minister in the ill-fated Dubcek government, but left Czechoslovakia when the Russians suppressed Dubcek. He is now a professor at Vassar College and the author of two recent books, My Mind on Trial, and Humanomics: How We Can Make the Economy Serve Us. Dr. Loebl, the State Department`s statement, the first one, as we have heard, concerned the harassment of a group which signed the so-called Charter of `77 in Czechoslovakia. What does that group want, and what is in store for them?

LOEBL: In my interpretation they would like to make the world know that the promises, the agreement in Helsinki has not been kept, that the persecution and the humiliation of human beings, particularly of the intellectuals still exists, and they want it to be heard by the world at large and particularly in the West.

MacNEIL: What do you think of the statements supporting them, and will it do them any good?

LOEBL: I`m sure it will do them any good in the far, as it is a process of growing fight and intensity for humanization and this is the weakest point of the Soviet system.

MacNEIL: Do words alone, uttered by the West and uttered by a country as powerful as the United States, have any real power in international power terms?

LOEBL: I think it has. I think it has because it will encourage both in the East of Europe and in the Soviet Union the dissidence. Up till now there was no real response to the desperation and to the- cry and protest against dehumanization of the society, and it any tendency of humanism is being supported, you have tremendous support in the Soviet union and in the satellite countries, and the more rights these people will have, the more they will insist, not only in more freedom, but they will insist on economic changes to meet the economic needs. And this will lead to pressure to increase the production of consumer goods as opposed to the production of military equipment which amounts to 45% of the gross national product in Russia. And this is a peace movement.

MacNEIL: If statements like this encourage the dissidents, is there a danger of encouraging them too much? Might they be excited to open resistance which might be dangerous for them?

LOEBL: I think they will judge it. They will find how much they can risk. They won`t be, so to say, seduced. They know the political possibilities. They are highly intelligent and a politically minded people. We shouldn`t be afraid of that.

MacNEIL: They won`t be like the generation of the East German uprising or Hungary of Czechoslovakia in 1968, expecting because of the rhetoric of the cold war, something more than merely moral support?

LOEBL: For the time being, that is sufficient.

MacNEIL: I see. Did you feel that the President in his sort of gloss, or reaction to the statements was hedging a little bit?

LOEBL: Yes. I do.

MacNEIL: You do. And what does that make you feel? Does that leave you with any doubt about how persistent they are going to pursue this policy?

LOEBL: I`m not sure about this. I think would be very important to see long term strategy of the Soviet Union and their weak points. The long term strategy of the Soviet Union is to push out America from Europe, and the weak point is, as the Czechslovak events have shown, any attempt to humanize, any attempt to humanize is the greatest danger for them. And if you have tremendous response both in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European countries. And from this point of view it is of great importance in the SALT agreement as far as peace and a kind of stop for this armament race is concerned.

MacNEIL: Do you see that aspect of the Helsinki agreement, the so-called human rights provisions and the campaign that the Carter administration seems to be starting, as important as playing to the Soviet`s weak points as anything to do with armaments and competition?

LOEBL: Definitely. Particularly if we would act to that, that the occupation a military occupation of a country like that of Czechoslovakia is a violation both of the United Nations Charter and of the Helsinki agreement, we could create certain political pressure without going back to the cold war. Meaning that we could have a detente on the basis of Soviet conditions, and we could have a detente on basis of human rights. So let`s have a detente on human rights basis.

MacNEIL: Thank you. This June there will be a follow-up conference on the Helsinki agreements in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Jurij Gustincic is the U.S. correspondent for "Politika," the largest daily newspaper in Belgrade.

Mr. Gustincic, what do you think of the new administration`s recent statements on human rights?

JURIJ GUSTINCIC: Somehow the world always expects Democratic administrations in America to have more pronounced ideological views on such questions which may hurt Eastern Europe or the countries of the Warsaw Pact in this particular respect. So it was not totally unexpected. Perhaps the degree, the enormous strength which was put into the first two statements which were official were a surprise, but basically many have expected it.

MacNEIL: Some Soviet commentators said afterwards that this was a gross interference in their internal affairs. Would the Yugoslavs-look at it that way?

GUSTINCIC: Well, we would like, particularly the hosts to the next round of talks on European security and cooperation, to see the question of human rights to be dealt with in its complexity. The human rights are not a privilege of one side or another. We could find violations of human rights in many parts of the world, in the West as well as other parts of the world. Take for instance, just to mention one example, the position of migrant foreign workers in Western Europe. One of our leading writers who is not a member of the Party and whose books have been translated in many different languages, Mr. Bolotovitch, has just published a novel under the title, People With Four Fingers. In his opinion the migrant worker is a modern slave. Now should we discuss that old saw under the general description of human rights or not? What I want to say is it is a question of many ramifications in which the questions which are being mentioned now with regards to Eastern Europe are only part of it.

MacNEIL: Yes, I understand, but on the other hand the Soviet press, for instance, and Soviet government has never hesitated to lecture us when they see what they would consider violations of human rights here, like the treatment of the poor or the blacks in this country, have they?

GUSTINCIC: No, I think we should discuss everything, but if, as you say, one side would lecture the other side, and then the other side would come up and start lecturing this side, stating for instance as has been stated in the Soviet press that there are millions of people dying of hunger in Western Europe and so on, what is the net result? We have only a new form of cold war in Europe, and we shall not constructively really discuss human rights which include, apart from freedom of press and individual rights, freedom of travel and so on, also minority rights, rights against racial and other persecution and so on.

MacNEIL: Let me be clear. What harm do you think could flow from statements like these from the State Department if they continue?

GUSTINCIC: I do not see any particular harm so far, but Mr. Vance has told us at his first press conference that the United States will use human rights selectively. Now, selectively might well mean it will be just a political weapon to fight between East and West. If that happens I think it would be really a tragedy because everything has to be discussed, and it has to be discussed in such a way that it is not a shouting match, that it does not become just a new propaganda battle as we have seen in the 50`s.

MacNEIL: Uh-hum. Do you think -- I know it`s hard to generalize about them, let`s take the Soviet Union. Yugoslavs have a particularly intimate view of them if you like. Do you think the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki agreement as it concerned human rights purely cynically?

GUSTINCIC: I cannot answer this question for the Soviet Union. My opinion is that nobody signed anything in the Helsinki agreement purely cynically. Everybody, of course, has his own interpretation, and we have to compare this interpretations. We have to see whether certain, common aims can be achieved. This will be very hard, and I don`t want to defend anything in the Soviet union or in Czechoslovakia as I would not defend everything in Western Germany. It is a question of approach. And then we have also to think about the rest of the world. How does the human rights issue look in terms of Asia, Africa, Latin America? We cannot isolate Europe from the proceedings in the world.

MacNEIL: All right. Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Yes, Robin. While the State Department wasn`t too interested in putting teeth into the human rights portion of the Helsinki Accords, a small group from Congress were, and Millicent Fenwick, Republican of New Jersey, was the prime mover and was responsible later for pushing through a piece of legislation creating the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki Commission as it`s called. This group`s mission is to check whether nations are complying with the rights standards they promised to observe at Helsinki.

Congresswoman, do you think there is a danger that a new cold war could develop over human rights as a result of this first round of statements from the United States?

MILLICENT FENWICK: I do not. In fact, quite the contrary. I happen to believe in detente. I don`t think there is any alternative to an atmosphere in which things can be discussed. Maybe I`m the last one who does, but I do. And I don`t think you can have detente on any false basis. I think just as in any relationship between human beings the only solid, sure thing is to have the situation made clear, and I think it has got to be made clear that we do care and always cared and probably, I hope, always will care about human rights in this country. And that is just something that people dealing with us, I think, have to accept. Because you know, Herbert Hoover went to Russia with a lot of food when the communists were in the government, and this is not something new. There are, of course, many human rights, but we`re talking now about a collection of rights that were signed in the final act at Helsinki. And they are quite clear what they are, and we cannot assure human rights everywhere, but neither can we go around the world in the 20th century signing great, big pacts with the heads of every nation and not mean what we say. At some point we`ve got to start meaning what we say. Now we weren`t able to get more in the way of human rights into that declaration although they do refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which includes religion and conscience and so on, and that is accepted. But what were we talking about there? A rather limited number: information, the right of reunification of family, the right to information which means that you can get newspapers and things from other countries, the right of journalists to travel more freely, also not to jam other nations broadcasts. Rather simple, very limited, rather sadly limited. The right to travel for personal and professional reasons. And those we signed, and those we must stick to, and those we must uphold. And for me what the State Department did was glorious. I was so proud and pleased because it is better to have relationships on a sound and truthful basis.

LEHRER: Uh-hm. You sat down in fact, and wrote a letter to the Secretary of State, did you not, after the statements were made?

FENWICK : I did indeed.

LEHRER: Saying, "Right on," or words to that effect?

FENWICK: Right on! But I didn`t think that my little signature would make much difference, but 45 others now, and we`re sending it still. People are sending it still. Co-sponsors of the letter so to speak.

LEHRER: Your commission has, as I said in the introduction, as its mission to check whether or not the Helsinki Accords are being adhered to. Are they?

FENWICK: Well, you know, you can`t take all of them in one lump. Every single country is absolutely different, and that is one of the most fascinating regulations. one country is very fond of Russia because Russia freed them from the Turks 200 years ago, and they have never forgotten it. And the people of that country really like the Russians. Now there are other countries where the people are suspicious of the Russians. There are other countries another country, in fact two, where they don`t like them at all because there are Russian tanks and troops right there. And they do not like that. I mean every country there is different. In some places, you`ll find the churches open and being repaired by the government. In other places, the Soviet Union, they are turned into a movie theater.

LEHRER: What`s the next step in this enforcement of the Helsinki Accords, or of human rights generally, to pick up on Jurij`s point a moment ago that it can`t just be Europe, it must be the entire world. I mean, how do you enforce something like this? Do you tie human rights to trade policy, or what? How do you put teeth in it?

FENWICK: As far as the Helsinki Accords go, we know exactly where we stand and what rights we have, and what countries have signed these obligations. The problem is in many countries in the world, in fact by far the overwhelming majority, there are no such obligations, there are no such promises. There are 29 out of 145 nations in the United Nations that really you can protect their citizens with guaranteed rights. So, we have a very difficult problem. I think what we have to make clear is that the United States is in a position to do certain things and join in certain monetary, agricultural, and other technical, commercial exchanges. And it does make a difference particularly . . .

LEHRER: In other words, human rights should influence everything that we do.

FENWICK: Everything we do. I think, you see, Congress has a role here because many of these things come back to us in one way or another, and I think it would be wise if the countries understood what Congress feels like.

LEHRER: And let me ask you, Dr. Taubman, what do you think?

Do you think that`s a logical next step to the rhetoric of last week? To enforce this in some way?

TAUBMAN: One thing that troubled me about the way the policy was begun was that there was no sense -- I got no sense that they had planned next steps. Obviously it was done on a somewhat ad hoc basis. So I think we`ve got to talk about next steps. But before we do that, I wanted to say that I think that apart from next steps, apart from actions, what we say can be very important. And I would like to come back to the notion of a quiet strength. You know, in recent years the United States has, it seems to me too often felt compelled to demonstrate a kind of unquiet strength when it was ignoring other possibilities. One thinks of Mayagues which was a kind of signal to, the Russians among other people. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn wasn`t welcomed at the White House. Now what I have in mind is the fact that human rights aren`t the only blemishes on the Soviet and East European record. There are some truly astonishing and, in fact, down right embarrassing weaknesses that these countries suffer from: the inability of the Soviets to feed their own people, the necessity to import technology for the wave of the future from the capitalist adversary.

LEHRER: Well, how does that tie in with human rights?

TAUBMAN: It ties in this way. It seems to me we have a chance to exert a little psychological pressure which it seems to me is less costly and more humane than military pressure. This is one way I think that we can deter the Soviets from taking actions hostile to our ideals and interests, and the way is simply to make very clear that we are aware of their weaknesses, we are aware of our own strengths, and let them worry about exactly how we`ll take advantage of our strengths to play upon their weaknesses.

LEHRER: Mr. Gustincic, what do you think of that idea?

GUSTINCIC: `I was very pleasantly impressed by the statement of Mrs. Fenwick that each country has to be judged on its own merits, and the questions of human rights, freedom and so on look very differently in different countries. I only think that we should start with quiet strength but without polemics. The role of polemics in post war politics has been frequently shown as insufficient and usually leading to a beleaguered state of affairs when each side then blames the other side and we are just standing put.

LEHRER: And you consider these-two statements of last week to be polemics, right?

GUSTINCIC: I think that there is a danger that they develop into a polemic because I foresee all the answers which will follow from the other side. This is not a condemnation of those statements. It is, if you wish, a kind of warning. I hope it will not develop this way.

LEHRER: Okay. Robin?

MacNEIL: You don`t agree with that, Dr. Loebl, do you?

LOEBL: I do accept that the polemics may have an element of danger, but the greatest danger is to be neutral, face to face to unjustice and dehumanization. After all, there is one question absolutely clear. Czechoslovakia was an independent country, a member of the United Nations. The communist party emphasized the necessity of dehumanizing, the absolute occupation of Czechoslovakia by 500 thousand Soviet soldiers; they imprisoned the Prime Minister, the heads of Parliament, the Secretary General, Mr. Dubcek, and it`s still occupied despite the fact that in the Helsinki Act it expressed that none of these states signing the agreement will occupy or interfere in other countries. So this is such a flagrant violation of Helsinki and of the United Nations Charter that if we are neutral, very neutral in this respect, that this is the greatest danger of the whole Western civilization.

MacNEIL: What do you think, Dr. Loebl, to come back from what the Congresswoman and Dr. Taubman were saying, what do you think the next step should be by the Carter administration?

LOEBL: I think just to speak out for human rights and the United Nations organization, at Belgrade, this has a tremendous force. People who believe in human values realize that this is the strongest force that can exist, and if you take into consideration either the act of Mr. Sakharov or of my Czechoslovak friends who signed the Charter, they are taking tremendous risks and due risk to have polemics, although they are outnumbered, although they have no power, is a strength of ideas. And if you do not adhere to these ideas out of which our civilization developed, that`s then end of our civilization. There is no other way out.

TAUBMAN: I agree.

MacNEIL: Congresswoman Fenwick?

FENWICK: Oh, I do agree. I think the time has come when we cannot let things go on in the world and just watch. We`ve become, we are accomplices. Tie are guilty of sharing in the injustices. I think that obviously there is a danger . . . .

MacNEIL: Can I just interrupt here? Do you see it as a danger of polemics as our Yugoslav friend does, Mr. Gustincic?

FENWICK: No, I do not. I think that you should state firmly and openly, not only because it gives comfort and some recognition to the courage of people who are desperately trying to maintain some kind of standard. in Poland now there are groups too, and in Ukraine and in Moscow, and now in Czechoslovakia. We must tell them that we know that they exist, and that we care, and that they are right. And I think it is wise also that the government should know that this is the expression of the American people.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there, Congresswoman, I`m afraid.

FENWICK: Oh, no.

MacNEIL: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Jim. Good night. Thank you gentlemen here. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow evening. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.