| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 4 of 7
In this transition from the Cold War, how has the work of human rights changed? In the earlier phase you worked in a nongovernmental organization and now you've moved into the government, trying to move the government to make this a central issue. How has your background in nongovernmental organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International informed what you're doing now, and how has being in government sensitized you to the limits of what you might have been advocating or would be advocating now if you were outside the government?
Well actually, it's interesting that President Clinton chose me for this job. Obviously I'm glad that he did, but he could easily have chosen more of a foreign policy insider. Instead the decision was made, I think, to bring someone in who had these strong NGO ties. Politically that was useful, because it made it possible for the president to say that this was something that he wanted to pursue and it wasn't just being dealt with in a bureaucratic sense. But I think there were other reasons, which have proven to be right: we in the United States are, in the broadest sense, supporting the grassroots movement for democracy and human rights all over the world. This is really our main focus in government -- how can we help these organizations that are struggling? How can we help human rights advocates who are struggling? Sometimes we can actually support them. We give funds to NGOs in Nigeria who are very much on the cutting edge of opposition to their own government, which violates human rights. Sometimes we meet with human rights advocates outside the government in a very prominent way that can upset the governments in question. This last week the president met with the Dalai Lama, and the week before he met with Martin Lee, who is the leader of the democracy movement in Hong Kong. These were the sorts of things that I don't think would have occurred if we were going to take a more bureaucratic approach toward human rights. And the fact that I come from outside means that basically I bring all the outside into the government, and the government welcomes that.
Now on the other side, it certainly has taught me how complicated the process is of advancing human rights through a government. It's not enough to be simply an advocate. You can't just mount up on your soapbox and say, OK, we've got to do this. You've got to find a way to do it. All right, there's a crisis in Rwanda, what are we doing about it? Well, actually over the last three years we've built a 200-person civilian international field operation to be in Rwanda. We've created the War Crimes Tribunal. These are the sorts of things that, working from inside, you see how hard they are, but they are really what you have to do. It's not enough to just say, "Stop the genocide in Rwanda," which is in fact a very legitimate thing to say. But that's not enough.
So, interestingly enough, what we're seeing here is that the possibilities in government have opened up as new situations have emerged. And your background in these nongovernmental organizations has attuned you to the kinds of efforts that need to be done by government. Some of these situations are new, but the government has a useful role to play which it didn't before. Before, it could stop aid to an authoritarian regime, but now you're really talking about new situations and working with different groups.
Yes. I think to support these grassroots organizations and leaders who are outside the government is something quite new for us, except when we did it in a way that, in my view, was not necessarily the best way to promote human rights -- that was to form cadres of paramilitary groups to go in and try to overthrow a government, which we did in many instances. Now what we do is to try and help people empower themselves within this setting. It isn't enough to isolate a country. There are many countries that are not amenable to that anymore. Yes, in the bad old days we could impose sanctions on an authoritarian regime; now many of the most heinous violators of human rights are governments that are themselves not responsive to anything. That doesn't mean we don't try to isolate them. We have recently done that in Burma and Nigeria. But we also need to do as much as we can to support the activists in those countries who are trying to overcome human rights abuse. And that's why we support Aung San Suu Kyi and that's why we give funds to NGOs in Nigeria.
Are you interfering in the internal affairs of other countries when you do this?
Well, I was the head of the U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. And interestingly enough, that conference developed a mandate for human rights work that I think we follow quite well. The mandate was that human rights are (I'm quoting from the document at the end of this conference), "...a legitimate concern of the international community, and sovereignty is not a basis for opposing legitimate actions by the international community in support of human rights." Now there are many governments that still resist that, including, in some cases one would say, our own. I mean, we have plenty of sovereignty specialists in the United States Congress who would rather not see us ratify international human rights treaties. But I think we're winning the battle against sovereignty, slowly but surely. And I don't think we're interfering in internal affairs when it comes to supporting basic propositions of human rights progress.
Next page: Building-Blocks of Human Rights Policy
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