Michael Novak and the struggle for human rights
/By Juraj Kohutiar
Originally published on February 16, 2020 on Dennik Postoj
I also refer to what he thought about gender ideology.
On 17 February, we commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Michael Novak, a prominent American thinker with Slovak roots. While Michael Novak's contributions to the philosophy of democratic capitalism or the social doctrine of the Catholic Church were partly known in our intellectual and Christian circles, his work as an ambassador in the field of human rights remains largely unknown. This article is at least an attempt to fill this gap.
Dictatorships and double meters
Michael Novak owes the introduction to the world of diplomacy to President Ronald Reagan and Jean Kirkpatrick, a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute. This distingvovaná lady and a former activist of the Democratic Party (as Michael) in November 1979 published a groundbreaking article Dictatorships and double standards ( Dictatorships and Double Standards ).
The article noted that during the reign of President Jimmy Carter, there was a dramatic rise in the influence of the Soviet Union and a weakening of US positions in third world countries. In a number of states, moderate and less moderate authoritarian governments, often friendly to the United States, have been replaced by totalitarian Marxist dictatorships. This took place with the active military and other assistance of the Soviet Union, Cuba and other socialist countries, and the reluctance of the US to support authoritarian systems against armed communist rebels.
The fundamental difference between authoritarian and totalitarian states, as defined by Hannah Arendt, is not necessarily in a degree of brutality. This distinction lies in the fact that while the former regimes require political loyalty, the latter claim to the whole man and every aspect of his thinking beyond politics. According to Jean Kirkpatrick, a serious cause for concern is also that while authoritarian structures often over time democratize themselves, the return of totalitarian Marxist systems to democracy has not yet taken place.
The article was so intriguing for the then Republican candidate for US President Ronald Reagan that he had met Jean Kirkpatrick shortly after the publication of the text, and when she was elected as the first woman in history to be the US Ambassador to the UN. Kirkpatrick addressed Michael Novak the day after the President's inauguration, urging him to accept the post of Ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. The 37th session of the Commission began at half a week, 2 February 1981.
Ambassador - amateur
Michael Novak writes about his role as ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in his autobiography Writing from Left to Right in the Ambassador - Amateur chapter . It recalls the sentence spoken by President Reagan at the conclusion of a lightning-fast audience before his departure for Geneva, which became the motto of his work on the Commission: “Do not ignore any human rights violations! No! "
The new ambassador quickly realized that he could not expect much help from the State Department, where changes were taking place in those days. During his flight to Geneva, he studied materials prepared by the previous administration of President Carter. He also read articles of the American liberal press condemning Reagan's human rights policy, although none have yet been applied. On the evening of arrival, the eyes of everyone present were fixed at the reception of the Western Allies at the Norwegian ambassador to the new head of the US delegation. Apparently they were expecting something like a cowboy in high boots and with guns with pearl grips on his belt.
The new American ambassador to the assembled colleagues reassured the traditional assurance that US foreign policy is like a huge aircraft carrier that changes direction very slowly. He said, however, that even small course changes on a long ocean journey could lead the ship to different destinations. He then outlined some of the accents and methods of the new administration: disregarding human rights violations anywhere in the world, assessing human rights violations by the same standard and focusing on human rights institutions.
Not everything went smoothly. In his autobiography, Michael Novak describes an interview that he naively gave to a seemingly friendly reporter for the Zurich newspaper at the beginning of his career. He quoted her commission from President Reagan. To his great surprise, the Soviet delegation came to the next committee meeting victoriously waving a Zurich slice with the strong headline "Do not condemn any human rights violations! Ronald Reagan. ”The journalist confused the English words“ condone ”(condemn) and“ condemn ”(condemn).
Worse, Michael told the journalist to illustrate the Commission's effective work the decision to send a special rapporteur to monitor human rights violations in Poland. This was the first vote on the abuse of human rights behind the Iron Curtain in 37 years of Commission existence. The US ambassador mistakenly assumed that this fact was well known. Fortunately, the chairman of the commission accepted his explanation and apology and did not succumb to the pressure of the Soviets to punish the Americans by abolishing the whole vote.
Michael Novak adhered to the mandate of his president. On the one hand, he criticized the support of the Marxist guerrilla and terrorist groups in the Soviet bloc, while on the other hand he paid great attention to Argentina, for example, where the military hunt brutally tortured and liquidated thousands of left-wing insurgents and their supporters. The victims who disappeared were declared missing. He was proud that, thanks to the work of the Commission during his mandate, the number of disappearances was virtually zero. Not only that. The Argentine government began working with the US State Department and released a large number of political prisoners from prison.
One of the most significant achievements of the 37th session of the UN Commission, Michael Novak, in a hearing before the congressional subcommittee, called for the adoption of a Declaration Against Religion Discrimination. It took 20 years to approve, given all kinds of obstruction of the Soviet bloc countries. Michael Novak as well as Pope John Paul II. He considered religious freedom to be the most basic and inalienable human right, because religion is related to the most intimate movements of the human soul and is the root of human identity and dignity. For the same reason, in the Commission, the word "belief" was added to the word "religion" so that the declaration should also include the rights and dignity of atheists or agnostics.
The new US representation was surprised by the different understanding of human rights in the Soviet bloc. For the numerous interventions of delegations to defend Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, the Soviets just shook their heads. They did not understand why they should be devoted to the individual. According to them, human rights were a matter for the state. Third world countries, in turn, understood human rights in the categories of balancing economic differences between the North and the South.
Match (not only) for the Polish precedent
Michael Novak and his deputy, Richard Schifter, after the first year of working in the commission, stated as one of the biggest problems that the Western delegation had so far had the agenda of the meetings taken by the more proactive Soviets. The commission's typical work program in previous years consisted of a weekly debate on Israel, a week of discussions on South Africa, a few days on Chile, and so on. Michael recalls, for example, that every time someone raised the case of Cambodia, the entire Soviet and Cuban delegation rose immediately and left the room. If the US delegation wanted to include other more human rights violating states in the negotiations, better preparation and coordination were needed.
The US delegation prepared more thoroughly for the 38th Commission meeting. It paid off. In the Commission, several serious issues were well overlooked, apparently because the Soviet bloc concentrated its attention on the protection of Poland, where General Jaruzelski had meanwhile declared a state of emergency. In a hearing before the congressional subcommittee, Michael Novak subsequently described the meeting as one of the most productive in history. The scope of this article does not allow the individual inputs of Michael Novak (and Richard Schifter) to be addressed in more detail, hence just a brief calculation of some topics.
A resolution on aid to victims of torture was adopted. There has been great progress in working on the Convention on Torture or the Resolution on the Right to Development, which the US delegation based on the rights of individuals and their associations. The United States has made a significant contribution, albeit for obvious reasons, in a hidden way, to publicizing the persecution of the Baha'i community in Iran. In addition to other issues, the Missing Commission has also opened the case of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat and rescuer of thousands of Jews who disappeared in the Soviet Union after the war. Progress has been made in a resolution against the abuse of psychiatric clinics to eliminate political and religious dissidents in the USSR. The US delegation spoke with new force against the Soviet chemical weapons development program or the financing of terrorist subversive groups in other countries. And so on.
While sending the official rapporteur to Poland at the previous 37th Commission meeting was associated with the aforementioned embarrassment for Michael, he recalls humor in voting on the resolution based on the rapporteur's report. The report criticized the human rights violations in Jaruzelsko Poland and threatened to vote on it for the first condemnation of the Soviet bloc in its 38-year history.
The tactic of the Soviet delegation was to postpone the vote so that the midnight session on Friday 12 February 1982 would not be completed until the end of the meeting. The Bulgarian chairman of the commission abruptly suspended the negotiations on the last day at 18.00 and invited everyone to a farewell reception to his embassy. This could not be refused.
The US delegation, which had learned to count votes before the votes, had divided oversight of potentially unreliable delegates of neutral countries before the reception. They tried to drink coffee and keep away from the vodka that flowed at the reception stream. Bulgarian hosts also offered a lot of vodka to Michael, who with delegates strang "to the Slavic brotherhood", but the contents of the glasses secretly poured into a pot.
After returning to the meeting room, the delegates agreed to rewind hours before midnight. The subsequent vote on the resolution condemned widespread human rights violations and the unlawful imprisonment of thousands of members of Solidarity in Poland (by 19 for, 13 against and 10 abstentions). Michael recalls that he congratulated the head of the Soviet delegation after the vote for a fierce struggle to the very end. But he was pleased to note that he would write a message to Washington that night with more enjoyment than his counterpart to Moscow.
Michael Novak, with regret, resigned from his post for family reasons after this commission meeting. He gave the place with confidence to his closest colleague Richard Schifter, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, an excellent lawyer who, besides other titles and attributes, was a defender of American Indians' rights.
Monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Agreements
The Helsinki Final Act (1975), in addition to the principles of security and economic cooperation, also contained clauses on respect for human and civil rights. It also set up the Helsinki process in the form of subsequent conferences to check compliance. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan again asked Michael Novak to be his representative, this time at the Bern meeting. The topic was to monitor respect for the rights of free contact between people, which included family reunification, permission to emigrate, return home, cultural, religious and professional contacts and the like.
Michael again took up his responsibilities. With the blessing of the State Department, he visited several European capitals for prior consultation before the negotiations. He also visited Moscow, where Mikhail Gorbachev recently joined. However, as it turned out, Soviet aparatčici remained immune to the spirit of the new perestroika and glasnost policies for a long time. Novak has tried to scare him several times by warning that they have collected a huge collection of documents on human rights abuses in the US. They repeatedly warned him against presenting specific cases of violations of individual rights.
Nevertheless, Michael warned them that he was going to talk about specific names and cases. He explained that statistically one in ten Americans has roots in one of the countries of Central Eastern Europe. He and his grandparents from Slovakia also fell into this category. He said it means that for approximately twenty million Americans, the question of human rights and contacts is not a foreign issue, but a family issue. He also said that Americans are a people with a strong biblical culture. The Bible depicts a man who has a mission, freedom of choice and responsibility for his actions before God.
The Bern meeting began on 2 April and lasted until the end of May. It is apparent from the transcripts of the speeches that the issue of freedom of movement has taken up a large margin in the spectrum of mutual allegations of non-compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. This was most limited in places where the Iron Curtain was running, namely from the western to the communist countries and from the communist countries out. Michael Novak has proven by Soviet statistics on the emigration of Germans, Armenians and Jews that their order was reduced at the turn of the decade.
The Soviet side argued that their laws allow emigration, but citizens have no reason to do so because the USSR guarantees them employment, medical care and social security. Americans, on the other hand, pointed to estimates by the Red Cross and experts that another 150,000 ethnic Germans, 200,000 Armenians, and 370,000 Jews had already taken the invitation as the first step to obtain permission to travel.
Ambassador Novak also spoke in defense of Andrei Sakharov during the Bern meeting. He performed on the day that he lived to his 65th birthday. He lived in internal exile in Gorky, just like five years before Michael had stood up in Geneva. The Soviets restricted his contacts with the outside world, but also with his own family. Mikhail Gorbachev finally allowed him to return to Moscow half a year after this intervention.
One of the Soviet accusations was that there were categories of people in the US who were not allowed to travel. They are marked with orange cards in the filing cabinets. Michael Novak refused that the US government would prevent other citizens than those serving a prison sentence released on bail or escape from prison. They had limited travel in all CSCE countries and were color-coded in the US registers.
In the sphere of non-observance of religious freedom, the US delegation pointed out a ban on the import of the Bible into the USSR. The Soviets defended the ban with little convincing argument that overseas Bibles may contain a bad translation that could lead to erroneous beliefs. They were even harder to argue against the fact that the Soviet border authorities took away even Hebrew-Russian dictionaries issued in the Soviet Union and the published works of Jewish authors in Yiddish.
Some Soviet appearances gave the impression of trying to delay time and employ the other side. One of the most bizarre allegations was that the film Rocky IV presents the Soviet Union through an image of a boxer acting like an idiot. Michael's response reflects a different perspective of both social systems.
Michael Soviets pointed out that the film was made by a private company, to which it is entitled in the free world. The film does not reflect the views of the US government. He also said that those members of the US delegation who saw the film stated that the intelligence of both boxers was presented at about the same level. And last but not least, US producers make a number of films annually that are extremely critical of various aspects of American life.
Fight for the final document
According to Michael Novak, the Soviet Union and its allies began to show a more apparent interest in adopting the final document after the explosion in Chernobyl. This occurred in about half of the negotiations. However, his work was difficult and progress was slow, often none.
According to Michael, the Soviets were extremely allergic to words such as the will of the individual, religion or NGOs. On the contrary, they tried to insert a reference at each point to respect for the country's legislation or something that implied the decision-making of the state. Michael Novak acknowledged that there may be exceptions to the rules. However, excessive proliferation of such clauses was dangerous, as the Soviet bloc had abused these in the past to deny the essence of the Helsinki process.
For example, on the right of free travel, the Soviet delegation advocated the addition "where personal and professional circumstances allow". The US side registered and manifested cases of unjustified Soviet impediment to traveling under this pretext. The Soviet delegation sought to limit religious travel to official church officials.
At one point during the night session at the very end of the meeting when discussing exit visas, the Soviet delegation began to enforce the formulation of this right with a restrictive addition "from one participating state [CSCE] to another". After a while, a member of the Soviet delegation of Shikal said: “We all know who we are talking about… Israel. We will never include Israel in any of the documents. ”Michael Novak responded that once it was known, which is the reprehensible purpose of the amendment, it could not be accepted in any way.
The Soviet delegation sought to limit the freedom to receive and transmit religious literature and religious objects by means of "for their own use" reasoning. Such a narrow understanding of religious freedoms was a step back from Helsinki and Madrid. It was too far from the standard for Western delegations, which, according to them, should include, for example, the right to pilgrimage, study and missionary work abroad.
Problems also arose on the part of NATO countries, when individual countries began to formulate "new and more precise rules" in order to solve the problems of their compatriots. The Germans, for example, had a keen interest in allowing the return of their ethnic tribesmen. The Turks wanted a more human treatment of the Gastarbeiter in Western Europe. The articulation of such specific requirements in a given situation weakened the rights and rules to be respected universally.
The last scheduled date of the meeting, Friday, 23 May, came very quickly. The consensus was out of sight. The delegates worked day and night, agreeing to extend the last day, which lasted until Monday. No agreement was reached. The final version of the document submitted on Monday morning as the last attempt by a group of neutral and non-participating countries was weak. Attempts were made to compromise between the difficult positions of the two blocks outlined above in this article.
From the western countries, no one was satisfied with the text, with the exception of Germany, which found it right to return the prisoners of war who were still in the USSR. Unlike the UN, documents in the Helsinki process are approved by consensus. Rejection of only one country means vetoing the final document. The Western states did not want to spoil the consensus and were willing to agree. The only delegation out of thirty-five who refused to agree was the one led by Michael Novak.
Michael did so in consultation with his State Department, and in particular with Richard Schifter, who was already Deputy Minister of Human Rights at that time. The US side did not change its decision even after the intervention of German Foreign Minister HD Genscher with his US counterpart G. Shultz. It did not change the decision even after the announcement by the Soviet Union that it issued outgoing visas to 36 families. It was positive, but it was too little and too late.
In conclusion
Before leaving for Bern, Michael Novak pointed out that the main problem was not the lack of good texts but the fulfillment of existing ones. Nevertheless, he wrote in his autobiography that the day when he had to refuse a final document for several treacherous formulations against all of them, which on the other hand might help many (especially German prisoners of war in the USSR), was the worst day of his life.
He was all the more surprised when he read the title of the Breakthrough in Berne on the front page of the Wall Street Journal after his arrival home . The article glorified his brave attitudes against the increasing pressures. The refusal to sign a document that the Soviets would again break was presented as the best decision in favor of the people for whom the meeting was convened. According to an article, Americans have sent a signal that they take words seriously and reject controversial wordings.
In the days, months and years that followed, Michael's attitude was confirmed. US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, in charge of conducting the forthcoming CSCE meeting in Vienna, thanked him by telephone for making his job extremely easy by acting in Berne. In the Soviet gulags, the news of the meeting in Berne was reportedly celebrated by banging on metal pipes. Dismissed Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzberg personally thanked Michael for not saving the Helsinki process by not signing the document.
Let us add that the third basket of Helsinki did not survive the communist regimes and this, along with other factors, contributed to the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. For this, we also thank Michael Novak, who, with great eloquence and intelligence, braved our freedom in Geneva and Bern. Some have said that the greatest wars of history are wars of thought. Michael Novak spent much of his life fighting the ideas of communism, whether in the field of philosophy or human rights.
GK Chesterton wrote that "Communism is originally Christian thoughts that have gone mad". The concept of human rights also originated in Christianity as a gradual development of the legacy of the Book of Genesis on the creation of man in the image of God. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that man was of greater value than the state and Jacques Maritain inspired by him was one of the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both, and others, were a great inspiration for Michael Novak, who wrote about freedom in the categories of service to the common good, reasonable choice and responsibility.
Some postmodern human rights concepts based on populism and hedonism have obviously gone mad. The author of this article asked Michael Novak about a year before his death what his message is for students who are curious about his opinion on the gender policy of then President Barak Obama. Michael's answer was, "Tell them I'm terrified."