A Crusade That Isn't Going to Die

Controversial campaign for human rights is gaining ground

Just before helicoptering away for his weekend trip to New England last Friday, Jimmy Carter signed in the Oval Office a two-page Presidential Directive, a set of marching orders from the Commander in Chief to his troops in the Executive Branch. Stamped CONFIDENTIAL in large red capital letters, the PD, as it is known, will be circulated this week among top officials in nine agencies of the Government.

"It shall be a major objective of U.S. foreign policy to promote human rights throughout the world," the paper began. "The policy shall be applied globally, but with due consideration to the cultural, political and historical characteristics of each nation and to other fundamental U.S. interests with respect to the nation in question."

While not the most stirring piece of prose to come out of the White House, the PD is one of the more important papers to have crossed Carter's desk in recent weeks. The reason, reports TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, is that it displays Carter's determination to continue using U.S. economic aid, military assistance and diplomatic pressure to promote human rights in foreign countries, wherever and whenever other U.S. interests permit.

Presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that the human rights initiative has put the U.S. "back on the moral offensive" round the globe. It is, in fact, a characteristically American effort to achieve something most nations would consider quixotic--combining world power with moral principle. The human rights campaign, unveiled by Carter in his Inaugural Address, has also been the object of more passionate advocacy and more scornful criticism than any other single element of his foreign policy. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev has denounced the human rights policy as interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A number of American critics, too, have decried Carter's approach as rhetorical and naive. Several Soviet dissidents, on the other hand, have credited the Carter policy with keeping their movement alive. Minnesota Congressman Donald Eraser, leader of an ad hoc human rights group on Capitol Hill, says he would "like to see the Administration do even more."

Largely because of the controversy the policy has stirred, the Administration has been carrying out a secret review of it since last summer. This PD is the result. Says Jessica Tuchman, 31, the National Security Council (NSC) staffer in charge of human rights: "The directive tries to give the bureaucracy general guidelines to shape the official consideration of human rights. It will do two things: protect the policy from those who think it should be jettisoned, and protect it, equally, from those who think human rights have to be the paramount concern all the time."

Both extremes are represented within the Government. During the first months of the Carter presidency, the policy met considerable resistance from career foreign-service officers, who felt that the new emphasis on human rights jeopardized traditional friendships and interests. Other officials have had to get used to the fact that sometimes human rights must yield precedence to other more mundane or more pressing strategic goals. Says the NSC's Tuchman, who is the daughter of Historian Barbara Tuchman: "In foreign policy, there is always bound to be a point where one has to pursue conflicting interests. When that time comes, you have to decide which interests you're going to pursue most vigorously. Otherwise you might overload the circuit." In the first three weeks of Carter's Administration, he blew several fuses in U.S.-Soviet relations by publicly protesting the harassment of Nobel Peace Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov. The Kremlin reacted by cracking down even harder on dissidents and warning Washington that the human rights campaign was "incompatible" with detente in general and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in particular. Since then, Carter, Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance have continued to remonstrate with the Russians on behalf of persecuted dissenters--but privately, through diplomatic channels, and so far with little visible effect.

The chief impact of the human rights policy has occurred not in the Communist world but in developing countries, where the U.S. dispenses largesse and therefore has leverage. The principal instruments for applying pressure are Public Law-480 food aid, grants from the Agency for International Development, military aid and bank loans--all told, nearly $10 billion annually.

Virtually every aid proposal within the State Department is routed through a newly created Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. That unit is headed by Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian, 49, a combative and articulate civil rights activist from Mississippi. Derian has traveled to 15 countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe to explain Administration policy and inspect local conditions. She and eight deputies make sure that the human rights performance of every would-be recipient of U.S. aid is taken into account before a grant, loan or sale is approved.

"Obviously," she says, "if a repressive regime wants to buy police equipment from the U.S., our recommendation is going to be no, and the sale is likely not to go through. But often it's not that simple. Human rights have an economic component too: the right to food, shelter and medical care. We understand that for a poor country, trying to feed everybody is a human rights problem as well. So if we get a proposed loan for a big water project, and it turns out that 99% of the water is going to be used for a private industry in a country with serious human rights problems, that would get a negative vote. But if the water is going to a slum area, where people now have to walk two miles to carry water by bucket, that's entirely different. We might very well favor such a loan."

In December, Derian's bureau recommended that the U.S. vote against three Inter-American Development Bank loans for Argentina and one for Chile as "signals" of U.S. disapproval of human rights violations there. None of those loans contained what Derian calls "the needy-people provision," which would justify aid to a repressive regime. In all these cases, Derian's recommendations were accepted by a permanent interagency committee, chaired by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, 52, which coordinates human rights policy throughout the Government.

Sometimes Derian is overruled. She recently lost a battle with the State Department's East Asia bureau over military aid to the Philippines. Derian and others in the Government argued that President Ferdinand Marcos' authoritarian rule necessitated substantial cuts in U.S. arms aid. The East Asia bureau countered that current negotiations with Marcos over the status of U.S. military bases in the Philippines made this the wrong year to try to force him to mend his ways. Christopher and Vance agreed.

"If we decide to go ahead with military assistance even though there are human rights abuses," explains Christopher, "we should make it clear to the country involved that we are concerned about the abuses but we're going ahead for other compelling reasons." That is the message U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines David Newsom has been reiterating to Marcos in a series of private meetings in Manila. Says Congressman Fraser, chairman of a House subcommittee that is reviewing human rights among U.S. aid recipients: "I think the Administration should be doing more about human rights in the Philippines. We shouldn't let ourselves be held hostage on the bases there." Indeed, Congress is, if anything, more militant than the Executive Branch in favoring use of U.S. influence to promote human rights.

TIME correspondents in three areas of the undeveloped world have conducted their own surveys of how the Carter human rights policy has influenced conditions in their regions:

Asia: U.S. pressure played a part in Indonesian President Suharto's recent decision to release 10,000 political prisoners. During Derian's visit to Jakarta in January, Suharto argued that security and stability still come first, but he agreed "possibly to accelerate" the release of the approximately 20,000 leftists still in custody. In South Korea, U.S. intervention,"mostly in the form of quiet diplomacy, led to the release on New Year's Eve of five prominent religious and political dissidents.

Latin America: Argentina and Chile continue to resist U.S. pressures, but there has been some change in Central America. When U.S. Ambassador Mauricio Solaun presented his credentials in Nicaragua five months ago, he coolly informed Strongman Anastasio Somoza that Washington wanted to see martial law lifted and official terror decreased. Somoza, whose family has ruled Nicaragua with U.S. backing for more than 40 years, yielded. Last month opposition elements mounted a two-week nationwide general strike to protest the assassination of an anti-Somoza newspaper editor. Ambassador Solaun cautioned Somoza that Washington would not support him unless he responded to the strike with reform rather than repression. "If it were not for Carter's concern for human rights," an opposition leader told TIME, "this general strike would not have been possible."

Africa: Human rights abuses remain widespread, but some progress can be cited. In December, Guinea's President Sekou Toure freed 300 former ambassadors, army officers, magistrates, government officials and others whom he had accused of trying to overthrow him. Western diplomats credit that to U.S. efforts. The military government of Nigeria, meanwhile, shows every indication of keeping its promise to return the country to democratic rule by October; and as far as is known, all political prisoners have been released.

The Carter Administration hopes that criticism of its human rights policy will diminish as the policy itself becomes, in the jargon of the foreign policymakers, "multilateralized." Translation: they are hoping other countries will adopt a version of the policy themselves and join forces with the U.S. in international bodies. There are already some signs that this is happening. A joint State Department-Treasury Department team toured Western Europe earlier this month drumming up transatlantic cooperation on human rights. The European Economic Community is considering writing human rights provisions into the Lome Convention, which provides trade preferences for 52 former European colonies in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean.

In a speech before the American Bar Association in New Orleans last week, Christopher proposed the creation of an "International Clearinghouse for Human Rights Information," an idea partly inspired by the London-based group Amnesty International. The White House is also considering a proposal for a "Human Rights Foundation," a quasigovernmental body that would provide support to private human rights groups.

But the most important and immediate challenge to international cooperation on human rights is the European Security Conference, now in its last weeks in Belgrade. The U.S. is determined that the final document of the conference should reiterate human rights guarantees adopted at Helsinki four years ago but honored largely in the breach since then. The Soviet delegation at Belgrade is trying to avoid so much as a mention of human rights in the final document. So far the U.S. and Western Europe have maintained a solid front against Soviet recalcitrance. "We're not alone," says Christopher. "And there's a great deal of strength in numbers."

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