World Tibet Network News Wednesday, March 04, 1998

Editorials & Opinion

Washington Post, Tuesday, March 3, 1998; Page A16

THE CLINTON administration long ago abandoned human rights as a primary consideration in dealing with China, but it claimed an intention at least to continue speaking out on the issue. The substance of U.S.-China relations -- in other words, trade, military contacts, high-level summits -- would go forward no matter what abuses China's leaders committed against their own people, but the United States would, in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's famous phrase, "tell it like it is" nonetheless. Now, however, it seems the administration may sacrifice even truth-telling so as not to offend China's Communist regime.

The immediate issue is whether to sponsor a resolution at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights when it convenes in Geneva next month. You wouldn't think this would be a tough call. Such a resolution would moderately criticize China's record and call for improvements; it would impose no penalty beyond well-deserved embarrassment. Democracy advocate Wei Jingsheng nevertheless calls the resolution "a matter of life and death" for reform in China. President Clinton explicitly promised, back when he de-linked trade and human rights in 1994, that the administration "would step up its efforts" to get such a resolution approved. China's regime remains as oppressive today as it was then.

That much is clear, in fact, from the State Department's own human rights report, which -- despite a touch of whitewash this year - does mostly tell it like it is, painting a dismal picture of China's "widespread and well-documented human rights abuses." These include torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced abortion and sterilization, crackdowns on independent Catholic and Protestant bishops and believers, brutal oppression of ethnic minorities and religions in Tibet and Xinjiang and, of course, absolute intolerance of free political speech or free press. Just this month, the FBI arrested two Chinese citizens for allegedly marketing human organs harvested from some of the 6,000 prisoners China executes each year. If prisoners are being killed in order to provide organs, it "would be among the grossest violations of human rights imaginable," Stanley O. Roth, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, said last summer.

Yet from Mr. Clinton, still no word on plans for Geneva. Last year the administration similarly dithered and delayed, eventually hiding behind tiny Denmark, which sponsored a resolution. China responded, with grace matching America's courage, by warning that the human rights resolution would "become a rock that smashes on the Danish government's head." This year, while the administration again has been unable to make up its mind, the entire European Union opted out, cravenly vowing not to co-sponsor any resolution. The EU then cited a series of inadequate "benchmarks" to measure future Chinese progress

in the human rights field, such as that the visit of the U.N. human rights commissioner to China "should be taken seriously by the Chinese leadership."

It may be too late now for the United States to rally a coalition of countries that would guarantee a fair hearing for a resolution on China, but it is not too late for Mr. Clinton to support such a measure nonetheless. He can still send a message that America supports, or at least sympathizes with, the fighters for freedom inside China; alternatively, he can send a message that his friendship

with their oppressors is too important to put at risk with any impolite words. For someone who hopes to become this year the first president to visit China since the massacre at Tiananmen Square, this should be an easy choice.