Hypocrisy on Human Rights

In the recurring ritual of debating most-favored-nation trading status for China, opponents cite human rights abuses and proponents counter that liberalized trade may lead to liberalized human rights policies. Why is there no parallel debate about the U.S. trade in the actual tools of human rights abuse?

According to the State Department, 78% of the $55.2 billion in U.S. weapons sales in the past four years were to countries identified as human rights abusers. Despite assurances that weapons are transferred only to states with legitimate defensive needs, the list of actual recipients in the past 10 years reads like a Who’s Who of misery in the developing world: Morocco, Somalia, Liberia, Zaire, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Haiti, Guatemala and Saudi Arabia, among others.

The results of these exports are clear. In Liberia, we saw U.S. weapons in the hands of teenage militias as the country descended into a hellish civil war. In Indonesia, U.S. weaponry has been used to maintain the government’s brutal control over East Timor, which it invaded in the 1970s. As the democracy movement grows in Indonesia, with elections scheduled for 1998, we are likely to see U.S. weapons in the hands of soldiers repressing democracy activists. In Guatemala, the human rights cases of Jennifer Harbury and Sister Diana Ortiz have shed light on the atrocities committed by yet another military armed with U.S. weapons.

If these cases are not bad enough, there are others that are even more troubling. The U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia who were killed by a bomb this month were deployed to help defend Iraqi Kurds by maintaining the “no fly zone” in northern Iraq. On the other side of the same mountains, however, jets provided by the U.S. are being used by Turkey to strafe Kurdish villages in a campaign designed to “pacify” Turkey’s Kurdish population.

We must also acknowledge the Saudi monarchy’s long record of human rights abuses. According to a State Department report, “Arrests without warrant, pulling out toenails, burning with cigarettes, electric shock and lack of proper medical attention resulting in the deaths of detainees,” are common there. One cannot help wonder whether the bombing would have happened if Saudi Arabia were not the single largest recipient of U.S. military support and if therefore the U.S. were not widely identified with propping up the Saudi regime.

Adding insult to injury, American taxpayers are heavily subsidizing this lethal trade. In 1995, we paid $7 billion in loan guarantees and other export agreements to help facilitate these arms deals. To put this in perspective: Taxpayers spend more to subsidize weapons sales than they pay for federal support of elementary and secondary education.

Lately, there have been signs of change in the unquestioned acceptance of the U.S. trade in the tools of human rights abuse. The Senate is about to consider for the first time a bill that would place restrictions on arms exports.

The bill, introduced by Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) and widely known as the Code of Conduct, is relatively modest in its goals. It would prohibit arms sales to countries that the State Department identifies as human rights abusers without requiring a vote of Congress.

A companion bill narrowly lost in the House. It was supported not only by California’s liberal delegation but also by such conservative Republicans as Bob Dornan and Dana Rohrabacher. In the Senate, however, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have kept their distance from the Code of Conduct, apparently fearful of offending the weapons industry.

While the annual debate about China follows a well-worn path, at least there is a debate, and we know where our legislators stand. The debate about U.S. arms exports is long overdue, and California’s two senators should be obliged to either take a leadership role in ending this disastrous trade or step up to the podium and defend it.