Stonewalling Human Rights

The Madrid conference is soured by Soviet intransigence

The U.S.S.R. is not prepared to be a bull in the corrida of Madrid," declared Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. That pronouncement served as a dour keynote for the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe that convened in the Spanish capital last week. The object of the long-scheduled conference was to review the members' compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords on military security, economic cooperation and human rights. But throughout, it was clear that the Soviets had every intention of blocking any proceedings devoted to their own human rights record or their Afghanistan invasion.

In nine weeks of preliminary talks, the participants had not even been able to agree on an agenda. At issue was the West's insistence on ample time not only for examining Soviet repression and Afghanistan but also other East European limitations on strong Helsinki principles like the "freer movement of peoples." The U.S. proposed the airing of such topics for some six weeks. After that, the conference would take up new proposals on the Soviets' pet topic of disarmament. The Soviets' timetable would have limited discussion of human rights and issues like Afghanistan to a week or two.

Finally the conference had to begin without an agenda. The exasperated delegates filed wearily into the huge, steel-and-glass Palace of Congresses. A perfunctory five-minute session before midnight just barely met the Nov. 11 deadline for opening the meeting. Next day, Spanish Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez made a dispirited opening address. Said Suarez: "Sometimes it seems we are engaged in a dialogue of the deaf."

The work of the conference began with a series of Western speeches that confounded Soviet hopes of stemming a tide of condemnation. Delegate after delegate castigated Moscow for its repressive policy on human rights and for the occupation of Afghanistan. The U.S. spokesman, former Attorney General Griffin Bell, was tough. Of Afghanistan he said: "The Soviet invasion cast a dark shadow over East-West relations which no meeting, no pronouncement--nothing, in fact, but the total withdrawal of Soviet troops--can dispel." Bell went on to denounce "brutal repression" against such Soviet dissidents as Yuri Orlov, the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Committee, Jewish Activist Anatoli Shcharansky and Dissident Leader Andrei Sakharov.

Adding to Moscow's discomfiture was a surge of human rights activism directly inspired by the Madrid conference. Some 8,000 scientists from 44 non-Communist countries broke relations with Soviet scientific organizations to protest the persecution of Soviet colleagues. In seven Soviet cities, 139 Jewish dissidents began a three-day hunger strike, while 100 others crowded into Moscow's Supreme Soviet building demanding to emigrate to Israel. Exiles from the U.S.S.R. converged upon Madrid to hold press conferences detailing repression at home. Outside the Palace of Congresses, Maris Kirsons, a 39-year-old Latvian-born Lutheran minister from Philadelphia, punctured a vein in his arm and dripped blood on a Soviet flag in a protest against Moscow's dominance of the Baltic states.

After three days of contentious opening speeches, agreement finally was reached on a compromise agenda put forward by Sweden, Austria, Cyprus and Yugoslavia. The agenda will allow four weeks of debate about human rights and related issues; then, after a Christmas recess, such topics will be strictly taboo, and the conference will concentrate on military security issues. The prevailing atmosphere of acrimony is bound to endure, but at least there is now some assurance that the Helsinki process may survive yet an other round. If the conference were to break down altogether, the commendable, hard-won Helsinki accords would be relegated to history, and a severe blow would have been dealt to East-West relations and human rights around the world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.