[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 54 (Thursday, March 23, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E667]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


            ``WOMEN'S RIGHTS'' CONFERENCE IN BEIJING, CHINA?

                                 ______


                        HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, March 22, 1995
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I commend this article by Dr. Nicholas 
Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and Harvard University 
to you concerning the irony of the U.S. decision to hold a conference 
on women in Beijing.
               [From the Washington Times, Mar. 13, 1995]

                          U.N. Summit Follies

                        (By Nicholas Eberstadt)

       Somewhere within the United Nation's vast New York 
     headquarters, there must be an official charged with finding 
     the most inappropriate spot on earth for each new U.N. 
     summit.
       How else to explain the upcoming U.N. World Conference on 
     Women in Beijing--a capital that has championed coercive 
     abortions, and revived female infanticide? Or the choice of 
     Copenhagen--exemplar of the discredited and hypertrophied 
     ``social welfare state--as the venue for this week's U.N. 
     World Summit for Social Development?
       Though ostensibly organized to push for the eradication of 
     global poverty, the proceedings of the Copenhagen Summit 
     often sounded like the work of a cruel satirist intent upon 
     discrediting this same cause:
       First Lady Hillary Clinton, whose disastrous ``health care 
     reform'' initiative had just helped her husband's party lose 
     control of both houses of Congress, arrived to instruct the 
     summit's 13,000 delegates on the development strategies they 
     should undertake in their own lands.
       The non-aligned ``Group of 77,'' apparently unaware that 
     the Cold War was over, proposed a program of ``new and 
     additional'' aid for Third World governments, arguing that 
     such subventions would be in the national interest of donor 
     countries.
       Meanwhile, off-stage, diplomats were concentrating upon a 
     substantive question: Who would fill the top United Nation's 
     Children's Fund (UNICEF) slot just opened by the sudden death 
     of the American James P. Grant? The United States, it was 
     widely agreed, no longer could lay exclusive claim to this 
     plum job. According to rumors the British candidate, Richard 
     Jolly, looked strong--except that U.N. Secretary General 
     Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted a woman . . .
       Thus the Copenhagen Summit closes like so many U.N. 
     conferences before it: forgettable, superficial, at moments 
     plainly silly. And in the final analysis, this gathering has 
     done another disservice to its nominal beneficiaries, the 
     world's poor.
       In the comfortable surroundings of the Copenhagen Summit, 
     very few delegates were prepared to deal with some of the 
     uncomfortable truths about global poverty: that national 
     wealth must be created, rather than wished into existence, or 
     extorted from countries that have accumulated it; that free 
     international trade, and free blows of private investment, 
     help create national wealth; that governments throughout the 
     Third World routinely exacerbate poverty through unwise or 
     even destructive policies and practices; or that the economic 
     success of such countries as Taiwan and South Korea was 
     sparked by the termination of their ``development 
     assistance'' programs.
       Unending state-to-state transfers of concessional aid will 
     not solve the problems of the world's poor. To the contrary, 
     as we are learning with sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, 
     unconditional funding for irresponsible regimes can lead to 
     economic ruin and national impoverishment. Such blunt themes, 
     unfortunately, seem too serious for the light comedies we 
     have come to expect from major U.N. productions.
     

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