Communism’s Fall Lifted Human Rights, State Dept. Reports

The collapse of totalitarian Communist regimes contributed to a general improvement in human rights conditions worldwide last year, the State Department reported Friday.

“In many countries there is now less fear of the knock on the door at midnight than there was as recently as five years ago,” Richard Schifter, assistant secretary for human rights, said in releasing the agency’s annual report on the state of human rights worldwide.

The State Department also cited vast human rights improvements on the African continent, especially in Zambia where voters, in the first multi-party election since independence, resoundingly defeated the authoritarian rule of longtime President Kenneth Kaunda.

Yet the agency found that troubling conditions persist in many countries that remain under Communist rule and nations under strong religious or ideological dictatorships.

The worse human rights violations, Schifter told reporters, are occurring in North Korea under the rule of Kim Il Sung. “Russians who have been there confirm that it’s really a horrible place,” Schifter said.

A major portion of the report dealt with the former Soviet Union, where the former central state used tough police and a military apparatus to assert control until the August coup attempt. By the end of the year, however, the infamous KGB had been dissolved, and military units had been ordered to stay out of political disputes.

But the collapse of the Soviet empire also led to human rights abuses, the report said. The most extensive occurred in the republic of Georgia, where President Zviad Gamsakhurdia “abused his mandate by trying to impose direct rule on local governments seeking autonomy and by cutting off dialogue and compromise with the political opposition.”

Other significant human rights abuses in the former Soviet Union included the killings in January of unarmed civilians by Soviet Interior Ministry troops in Latvia and Lithuania, and the deportation of Armenian villagers by Soviet and Azerbaijani forces.