U.S. Report on Rights Blasts China

In its 22nd annual report on human rights, the State Department on Friday chronicled the curtailment of fundamental personal freedoms in China, noting, in particular, recent repression in Tibet.

“In China, the government’s human rights record deteriorated sharply at the end of 1998 with a crackdown against organized political dissent,” Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh said as he formally presented the report to Congress.

“The loosening of restrictions on political debate and activism by authorities for much of 1997 and 1998 . . . abruptly ended in the fall,” Koh said. “In Tibet and [the restive Muslim region of] Xinjiang, the government intensified controls on religious practices and fundamental freedom.”

The department’s assessment was praised by human rights advocates in the United States, who applauded the report as hard-hitting. They called on the Clinton administration to match its rhetoric with deeds, urging the president to back a resolution condemning China at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which convenes next month in Geneva.

It is a step President Clinton has shown little enthusiasm to take.

“The human rights report, by itself, would be sufficient reason for the United States to reintroduce the resolution,” said Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), who earlier this week won unanimous Senate approval of a resolution calling on the administration to act in Geneva.

John Ackerly, president of the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet, echoed Hutchinson’s call for concrete steps in the wake of the report’s release.

“There’s tough talk but little action,” he said.

The critical language marks the latest in a series of U.S. steps in recent days that is certain to cool the political temperature that awaits Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in meetings with Chinese officials in Beijing early next week.

This week, the administration scuttled a proposed $450-million satellite sale to China on national security grounds, and the Pentagon issued a report focusing on Beijing’s missile buildup in the Taiwan Strait.

The coincidental timing of the human rights report and Albright’s visit highlights both the principal strength and the main weakness of a document that is an annual ritual of U.S. foreign policy: While it has become a favored vehicle for injecting the human rights records of other nations into the American political debate, it carries no mechanism to translate its findings into policy.

“There’s a disconnect between the analysis in the report and U.S. foreign policy,” said Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia.

The 1998 report, which is more than 5,000 pages long and covers 194 countries, is the largest, most comprehensive review since Congress first asked the State Department to compile the annual report in the mid-1970s as a way to determine the worthiness of U.S. foreign aid recipients.

The initial report ran 137 pages, covering only those nations receiving U.S. assistance at the time.

Those who track human rights say that, over the years, the annual report has steadily improved in quality, gaining in respect and attention domestically and abroad. It is said to be followed especially closely by nations such as China, where the human rights issue is a central element of its relationship with the United States.

“We know that governments cited in these reports pay very close attention, both to criticism and to praise,” Jendrzejczyk said.

An important element adding credibility to the report is the fact that senior policymakers are forbidden to alter country assessments.

Although these scorecards in most cases are prepared by local embassy staffs and reviewed by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, they can, and sometimes do, go against U.S. policy.

“The message of the human rights report is often resented but always respected for its candor, its consistency for what it says about our country and our values,” Clinton said Friday during the course of a major foreign policy speech in San Francisco.

Reviewing the records of other countries besides China, the report:

* Cited Turkey for serious human rights abuses. “Extrajudicial killings, including deaths in detention from the excessive use of force, ‘mystery killings’ and disappearances, continued,” it said. “Torture remained widespread.” Human rights in Turkey, an important North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, are expected to come under far closer scrutiny with the arrest and impending trial of rebel Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.

* Accused Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, of significant human rights abuses, particularly in its separatist province of Kosovo, which has become the subject of international mediation. It said the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has used the military, police, judiciary and state-controlled media to suppress dissent by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority.

* Characterized Afghanistan as the site of “perhaps the most severe abuse of women’s human rights in the world.” It accused the country’s Islamic fundamentalist leaders of showing “devastating disregard for the physical and psychological health of women and girls.”

* Noted an improvement in Israel’s human rights problems after the withdrawal of its security forces from major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank. It criticized the government for failing to address more forcefully the issue of discrimination and violence against women.

* Effectively ended its earlier criticism of Germany for targeting members of the Church of Scientology. The report noted that a government investigation on “so-called sects and psycho-groups . . . did not pose a threat to society and state and underlined the constitutional principle of religious freedom.”

Times staff writer Jim Mann contributed to this report.

The complete text of the State Department’s global report on human rights is available online at https://www.latimes.com/humanrights