        |
|
In our view, the position shift should be viewed cautiously as perhaps the latest reflection of a long tradition in U.S. policy, which is characterized by massive contradictions of legal and moral obligations. American Indians, more than any other indigenous peoples, should understand the implications of U.S. posturing on human rights. The possibility or probability that the U.S. will support or promote the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples can and should be measured in relation to the attachment of the U.S. to other, comparable pieces of international legislation on human rights.
It should be understood that the Declaration on Indigenous Rights, even when finally concluded, will not create any immediately binding legal obligation on any state, because it is not a treaty. Subsequent to its adoption by the UN General Assembly, the Declaration may eventually be transformed into a Convention, just as the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was put into force in the form of two competing (or complementary) human-rights covenants, in 1976, but this development will take many years, if it happens at all. Present U.S. support for the Draft Declaration, therefore, can be understood to be virtually risk-free, as far as immediate legal obligations are concerned.
More importantly, the United States has consistently refused to participate in international human-rights institutions over the past fifty years. The U.S. Senate, which must ratify all treaties to which the country might become state-party, rejected all opportunities for the U.S. to accede to the 1948 Genocide Convention, until 1986. Similarly, it refused to ratify the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which codifies that set of human rights expressed in the U.S. Bill of Rights itself), until 1992. Only last year, in 1994, did the Senate ratify the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. But did ratification in these very few cases indicate that the United States would actually abide by the terms of the agreements? No, because whenever the Senate has ratified human-rights treaties, it has appended "provisions" and "reservations" that have made international laws subordinate to the laws of the United States. There is little reason to believe that the treatment of the Declaration on Indigenous Rights will be different.
The stated U.S. position should not be regarded as an insignificant policy change in an obscure area of international human-rights discourse, nor should it be viewed in isolation from the evidence of U.S. behavior when indigenous rights are obviously at stake. Rather, the policy statement should be viewed as intimately related to several other important foreign-policy areas that are implicated by past and present indigenous (or "nationality") conflicts around the globe. For example, the U.S. supported a Tibetan rebellion against Chinese occupation in the 1950s and 60s, but when President Nixon decided to play the "China card" against the USSR, in 1972, the Tibetans were abandoned to be slaughtered and exiled by the Chinese Army. Similarly, the U.S. supported Iraqi Kurds in their rebellion against Saddam Hussein, in 1973 (the prelude to the events of the Gulf War in 1991), but when U.S. interests in the region shifted, the Kurds, too, were abandoned to be slaughtered by the thousands. On the other hand, because of the strategic importance of Turkey, the U.S. virtually ignores the fate of Kurds in that country.
In another, similar policy contradiction, the U.S. supported and instigated Ukrainian secessionist rebellion against the USSR until 1991, when President Bush strangely attempted to persuade Ukraine not to seek independence, after all (of course, he was too late). Bush's address to the Ukrainians, in which he reversed forty-five years of policy to warn of the "excesses of suicidal nationalism," was labeled his "Chicken Kiev Speech" by New York Times columnist William Safire, marking the first evidence of a major dispute within the ranks of U.S. conservatives on indigenous nationality policy generally and the policy applied toward Russia, in particular.
It is difficult to underestimate the cynicism of U.S. policy on human rights. At the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, in July 1993, President Clinton and Secretary of State Christopher swore before the world that the United States was prepared to join the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. That promise could not have been less believable, considering the fact that the ESC Covenant has always been understood as the major human-rights statement of socialist regimes, led by the former USSR, and so it hardly could have been expected ever to gain approval in the Senate. Clinton and Christopher also preached human rights to the Chinese government and threatened to withhold Most-Favored Nation (MFN) trading privileges unless China reformed its behavior according to Western precepts of "democracy" -- and then reversed themselves, when China indicated that it was not about to be pressured on human-rights issues.
Meanwhile, within the U.S. itself, indigenous human-rights issues go largely unacknowledged and unaddressed by the public, because of the myth that the U.S. is the world's leader in observance of human rights. This myth probably explains why, though people in western Europe, Russia, and elsewhere are aware that President Clinton has refused to deal with the worldwide campaign to grant clemency to the American Indian political prisoner Leonard Peltier, Americans themselves hardly know his name. The illusion that the U.S. alone is the hegemonic arbiter of good and evil may account for its pursuit of the forced relocation of Diné on the Hopi Partitioned Lands, while it forbids the UNWGIP to discuss that issue, lest the U.S. scuttle that forum.
As a measure of the current U.S. foreign policy on rights of indigenous/nationality peoples, Chechnya is an illustrative case, since Russia remains the "centerpiece" of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. U.S. reaction to Russia's most recent invasion of Chechnya (there have been several over the past 300 years) has been typically full of contradictions. Although members of the Clinton Administration have condemned Russia's brutal military tactics against the Chechens, there has been virtually no challenge to the legitimacy of the basic Russian claim over Chechen territory. President Clinton is clearly supporting Yeltsin's regime, in its attempt to fend off opponents, including the fascistic Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has no sympathy for Chechens and wants to re-establish a Russian empire. The Clinton Administration believes that Yeltsin represents the best present hope that Russia will become a pro-Western capitalist enterprise. That hope is contingent on territorial integrity, however, and Chechen secession would probably seal Russia's doom, by tapping the wellspring of endemic separatism in the complex Russian Federation. Such separatism could bring on a period of chaos and, given the genuine possibility of a military coup, precipitate another Cold War.
The absence of official criticism and opposition from the U.S. Government has been matched in the U.S. mainstream media. The New York Times, for instance, has repeatedly supported Russia's suppression of Chechen self-determination and encouraged Washington to "quietly counsel [Yeltsin] to apply force carefully," because the Chechen claims "cannot be allowed to stand" (NYT, 14 December 1994). This, despite the Times' own acknowledgment that the Russians have, in the past, occupied Chechnya but never subdued it because the Chechens have resisted and rebelled continually against Russian domination, twice earlier in this century.
The U.S. State Department (the agency that is constructing the policy on indigenous peoples' rights) agreed with the Times, giving Russian territorial claims and military actions higher legitimacy than those of the Chechens. State Department official Mike McCurry succinctly stated the U.S. position on 14 December 1994 (also later affirmed by President Clinton and Secretary of State Christopher) that "Chechnya is an integral part of Russia, and events in Chechnya, because of that, are largely an internal affair." Vice President Al Gore underlined the Administration's stance by saying that the US is "not going to challenge Russian territorial integrity [on the Chechen question]" (Associated Press, 9 January 1995).
As the Times concluded, the U.S. statements gave "Mr. Yeltsin a green light for military intervention" (NYT, 28 December 1994). Apparently, neither the U.S. nor the Times will object to the general principle of an established state invading a stateless people's territory. The feeble concern that they do raise is rather that the invasion was bungled it was not done quickly or quietly or effectively enough, and it was not executed cleanly out of television camera range.
Ironically, Zbigniew Brezinski (Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser), recently joined a few Republican members of Congress and a smattering of conservative newpaper editors in condemning U.S. policy for complicity in the denial of Chechen self-determination, in a column in the Washington Post (8 January 1995). Brezinski claims that Chechnya "could become the graveyard of America's moral reputation," because the U.S. refuses to come to the assistance of a "freedom-seeking" people that "dared to reach out for independence." His defense of the "helpless Chechens... who are not Russian and do not wish to be Russian," while laudable under normal circumstances, rings hollow when one recalls his lack of defense of the freedom-seeking Tibetans against China, or of the freedom-seeking East Timorese against Indonesia, and the pounding of the freedom-seeking Kurds by Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, during his watch at the White House. His commentary represents the depth of contradictory sentiments within both conservative ranks and the policy community at large.
In a most telling distortion in his column, Brezinski claims that the U.S. vilification of an indigenous or nationality struggle (of the Chechens), and justification of oppression (by the Russians) "has never happened before." In addition to the cases mentioned above, Brezinski seems to have forgotten the decades of U.S. opposition to the African National Congress, the IRA, the Eritreans, the PLO, the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara, and the Naga Nation struggling for its independence from India. The list of freedom-seeking peoples engaged in nationality and indigenous struggles that have been opposed by the United States could fill pages. It is precisely the United States' own history of opposition to self-determination struggles that should give pause to those who are watching the new U.S. agenda unfold on the indigenous-rights stage.
The justification applied by the U.S. to the Chechen case, that the survival of a state (Russia) and its territorial claims are more important than the survival of an indigenous people, can easily be observed in other serious cases at this very moment. The government of Myanmar (Burma) is waging a relentless and brutal military attack against the Karen Nation, killing hundreds and forcing tens of thousands of refugees to flee their homeland into Thailand. Not surprisingly, neither the United States, nor any other major power, has submitted any meaningful challenge to Myanmar's attacks. In November, just three months ago, the State Department claimed that it was taking a "conciliatory approach" toward the Burmese military regime, as far as human rights in general were concerned (especially the imprisonment of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi), but made no attempt to address the question of indigenous rights in particular. The U.S. maintains extensive trade relations with the Ne Win regime; the petroleum, natural gas, timber, weapons, and narcotics industries are all doing big business in Burma. Meanwhile, the U.S. supports, either actively or tacitly, the open relations between the Ne Win regime and China, Thailand, and Japan.
Rather than support the application of the principle of self-determination to the Chechens or the Karenlest it set a precedent for other freedom-seeking peoplesthe United States and other states of the world would prefer to protect the "sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the chauvinistic and human-rights-abusing governments of Russia and Myanmar out of political or economic expedience. Rather than examine the claims of the Karen or the Chechens, that they have never given their consent to be integrated into the Burmese or the Russian states, and that they have long-standing political and territorial claims of their own, the governments of the world side with the oppressor's invasion in the name of regional stability and order. Similar examples of expedience over principle can be cited from Chiapas to the Western Sahara, from Indonesia to Eritrea.
The self-determination of the peoples of Eritrea was ignored, even actively opposed, for over three decades by the major powers of the world, led alternately by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in the interests of protecting Ethiopia's sovereignty. At the same time the U.S. was assuaging Israel's fear that the Red Sea might be completely bordered by states hostile to its existence. The Eritrean spirit of freedom prevailed despite prohibitive odds, surviving drought and over thirty years of military oppression from the Ethiopian government that was alternately supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Eritrea's seat in the United Nations, which can be celebrated as an enormous monument to the perseverance of the Eritrean people, should also serve as a constant source of shame to the world community that consistently rejected a legitimate claim of self-determination in favor of the territorial integrity claims of a corrupt Ethiopian government. Eritrea would still not be seated at the UN if it had to rely solely on the international community's embrace of high-sounding principles respecting the self-determination of peoples. Eritrea's seat would not exist had the Eritreans not mobilized the military might necessary to liberate their homeland and to defend and protect their claim to self-determination.
The lessons of the Chechens, the Karen, and the Eritreans should serve as important lessons to other indigenous peoples and nationalities. If the international community has a choice between the legitimacy of indigenous peoples' claims for territory, treaty rights, economic sustainability, or self-determination, versus the claims of a state, any state, for continued survival, indigenous peoples can be virtually certain that the statist claim will be supported consistently. For the United States, consolidating global hegemony is the preeminent national interest at this time. U.S. hegemony can be managed successfully only with a limited number of sovereign states in the system. The U.S., therefore, judges it imperative to forestall any possibility, real or imagined, of a wave of secessionism.
The United States clearly does not take international human-rights obligations seriously, despite its charade of being the world's bastion of respect for rights. Neither is it ever likely to accept the Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples as a constraint on its own policy towards the indigenous peoples enclosed by its borders. At this point in history, there is no reason to believe that increased U.S. interest in indigenous peoples' rights is anything more than self-serving political posturing. The U.S. has made it clear that it opposes any meaningful recognition of the right to self-determination for indigenous peoples; it opposes any serious assertion of territorial or natural-resource control by indigenous peoples; it opposes recognition of the international standing of treaties between indigenous peoples and states; and its recommendation for the protection of indigenous rights rests solely within the domestic jurisdiction of the very states that have historically attacked, dismembered and sought to destroy indigenous peoples. Does this record bespeak an indigenous-rights policy that should be applauded?
Fourth World Bulletin • Fall 1994/Winter 1995
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
Created by Aigis Communications, Ltd