John Shattuck Interview (2004): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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There's a lot of frustration in the work that you were doing as the human rights point man. You raised in the book a number of times, or several times, the possibility of resigning, if not in protest, then just leaving. It probably came to your mind with regard to China. It probably came to your mind with regard to Bosnia. You decided in all those cases to stay. Now, you had mentioned earlier that this is about choices, when presidents, at the time that you're thinking about resigning, are choosing between economic interests versus human rights interests vis-?-vis China; or in the case of Bosnia, the question of whether the military go after the war criminals, or is peace more important. Talk about the way that you dealt with that. In the end you stayed.
It certainly was often a frustrating time, but it was also a very dynamic time. The simple answer to why I stayed was that everyone was learning as we went along, certainly on the issue of humanitarian intervention, on which I claimed no special expertise -- no one did; this was something that had never happened before. It was the end of the Cold War. These kinds of interventions to save lives in cases of genocide and crimes against humanity were new. I learned, myself, that it was important to try to press the bureaucracy and press the political world, indeed the Congress, to recognize the importance of these issues, and resigning didn't strike me as something that was going to advance that process. Better to use the knowledge that I had gained from inside, what I had witnessed in my own experience in Rwanda and in Bosnia and in Kosovo, use that to try to advance the process. In that respect, I felt ultimately gratified that we did come through the 1990s with a doctrine of humanitarian intervention that didn't exist before hand, and I'm glad I stayed.
The case of China was more complicated, and that was probably the closest I came to resigning. What went through my mind in the period after President Clinton made his decision not to continue to pursue the relatively aggressive human rights approach that he had chosen at the beginning of his administration, I could see that he, as president, was subject to all of these conflicting pressures. I was one of those pressures, in a sense; not that I was pressing him, but I was trying to implement his policy. I did not see that my resignation was going to improve the situation for the enforcement of human rights in China. If anything, I might well have been succeeded by someone who had less of an interest in that process. So I chose, ultimately, to stay.
I'm glad that I stayed in both instances, both for the respect of all the humanitarian intervention issues where we ultimately came out ahead, and with respect to the more difficult issues of how you deal with human rights in a big, complicated country like China.
What I feel proud of is that we moved the human rights agenda into the center of foreign policy. We lost a lot of battles along the way. But starting out in the 1980s, human rights was quite marginalized. It did not seen to be a major part of our foreign policy, and to the extent that it was, it was a part of the foreign policy that was used to advance our Cold War objectives much more than it was to be even-handed and deal with human rights crises wherever they existed.
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