[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 161 (Tuesday, November 27, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12027-S12029]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RELIGIOUS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I want to change the subject and have printed
in the Record two articles from the National Review magazine. I ask
unanimous consent they be printed at the conclusion of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See Exhibit 1.)
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, the first of these is written by Kate
O'Beirne, who always provides very well-researched and well-written
reports on a very timely topic. As she notes at the beginning of this
article:
The State Department issued the annual report required by
the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
She goes on to note:
With shocking regularity, human-rights groups report the
death of Christians at the hands of Muslim militants in
Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
She goes on to document the very troubling plethora of religiously
motivated human rights abuses throughout the world. This is an article
my colleagues would be well to review with respect to especially the
debate that is ongoing about the sources of terrorism in the world
today.
The second article is also from the National Review magazine written
by Richard Lowry, an article which also, interestingly, quotes Samuel
Huntington in his very timely and interesting book, ``The Clash of
Civilizations.'' Lowry quotes Huntington as saying the following:
The proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass
destruction is a central phenomenon of the slow but
ineluctable diffusion of power in a multicivilizational
world.
He goes on to note that one of the causes for proliferation is
Western naivete, especially in the support of arms control agreements
as the way to stop this proliferation.
He notes that arms control agreements work only so long as no one
wants to violate them, in which case they simply do not work. He goes
on to provide his prescription of what could be done instead to deal
with the issue of proliferation, which I think, again, we would all be
commended to review. Therefore, I ask my colleagues to review these two
items.
Exhibit 1
[From the National Review, Dec. 3, 2001]
Martyred
Muslim Murder and mayhem against christians
(By Kate O'Beirne)
President Bush's repeated assertions about the peaceful
nature of Islam were briefly interrupted when the State
Department issued the annual report required by the
International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. This year, as in
the past, our Muslim-world partners in the coalition against
terrorism were prominently featured among the most violent,
most intolerant regimes in the world. Religious minorities
are persecuted in over 20 states where Islam is the official
or dominant religion. The million Christians who have fled
the Muslim world in the past five years were hardly seeking
sanctuary from the peaceful face of Islam.
With shocking regularity, human-rights groups report the
death of Christians at the hands of Muslim militants in
Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. In Pakistan, Islam
has been the official religion since 1973, and over the
years, the State Department has urged our ally to repeal
section 295(c) of the penal code. This is the section that
stipulates the death penalty or life in prison for
blaspheming Mohammed, and the State Department notes that it
``contributes to inter-religious tension, intimidation, fear,
and violence.'' A Christian Pakistani, Ayub Masih, was jailed
five years ago on a blasphemy charge, and he has now filed
his final appeal against the death sentence imposed on him.
Masih is alleged to have said, ``If you want to know the
truth about Islam, read Salman Rushdie.'' An accusation by a
Muslim neighbor was enough to secure the blasphemy
conviction. Under Pakistan's ``Hudood ordinances,'' the legal
testimony of religious minorities is accorded half the weight
of Muslims'. The testimony of a non-Muslim woman is halved
again.
Most recently, gunmen from the ``Army of Omar'' opened fire
on a Protestant congregation worshipping at St. Dominic's
Catholic Church in Bahawalpur, killing at least 16. Islamic
party leaders in Pakistan immediately
[[Page S12028]]
claimed that the massacre was a conspiracy to defame Muslims.
Then, Saudi Arabia. In a bracing departure from diplospeak,
the State Department says, ``Freedom of religion does not
exist in Saudi Arabia.'' For many years, Christians have been
flogged, imprisoned, and executed by a Saudi government that
prohibits non-Muslim worship even in private homes. A Muslim
who converts to another religion is subject to the death
penalty by beheading.
Nigeria is another nightmare. The Center for Religious
Freedom, part of Freedom House, maintains a ``New Martyrs
List,'' to call attention to the most horrific cases. In one
bloody week in May 2000, over 200 people were killed in
Kaduna. Among the dead was Rev. Clement Ozi Bello, a 26-year-
old former Muslim who had recently been ordained a Catholic
priest. The young priest was attacked by a mob that dragged
him from his car, tied him up, and gouged out his eyes,
before leaving him dead on the side of the road.
In October, churches and Christian-owned shops were
gasoline-bombed in an area of Kaduna now adorned with
pictures of Osama bin Laden. More than 6,000 people have died
in religious conflicts in Nigeria since the end of military
rule two years ago. ``Our people are being shot, butchered,
and roasted,'' says Kaduna bishop Josiah Fearon.
The anti-Christian violence in Nigeria has been the direct
result of the adoption of Sharia law, the strict Islamic
code, by ten of the country's largely Muslim states in the
north. Under Sharia, certain crimes are punishable by
flogging, amputation, and beheading. The governor of one of
these states dismisses the national constitution that
proclaims Nigeria a secular country. ``To be good Muslims,''
Ahmed Sani says, ``we have to have Sharia to govern our
lives, because God has told us that any Muslim who does not
accept Sharia is not a good believer.'' Sani dispatched local
officials to Saudi Arabia and Sudan to learn some more about
the application of Sharia.
In Algeria, the military assumed power a decade ago, to
prevent the Islamic Salvation Front from imposing Sharia on
the country. Since then, Algeria has been engaged in bloody
civil war. In 1994, the Armed Islamic Group pledged to
eliminate Jews and Christians from Algeria. The group is
deadly serious, having massacred thousands and even hijacking
an Air France plane.
In the Philippines, an organization called Abu Sayyaf, with
ties to al-Qaeda, wants to form an independent Islamic state
in the southern islands. In May 2000, a Filipino Catholic
priest was murdered along with four others among the 27
hostages kidnapped from two Catholic schools. Before being
killed, Rev. Rhoel Gallardo was tortured for refusing to wear
Muslim clothing and say Muslim prayers. During negotiations
for the hostages' release, Abu Sayyaf demanded that all
crosses be removed from churches.
Egypt, where the influence of Sharia law is growing, is
home to the largest Christian community in the Middle East.
The Coptic Orthodox are the targets of both militant Islamic
groups and local security forces. Young Christian women are
pressured to convert to Islam, while converts from Islam to
Christianity have been tortured and imprisoned. Over the past
20 years, more than 30 massacres of Coptic Christians have
occurred. In January 2000, during several days of rioting by
Muslim mobs in Al-Kosheh, more than 100 homes and shops were
destroyed, and 21 Christians and one Muslim killed. The
Center for Religious Freedom says that the Egyptian
government covered up these crimes to avoid the ``politically
sensitive'' issue of punishing Muslims for murdering
Christians.
Eventually 96 people were tried for the massacres in Al-
Kosheh. The only four Muslims to be convicted were held
responsible for the accidental killing of the Muslim. The
longest sentence is being served by a Christian, Surial Gayed
Isshak, for allegedly ``publicly insulting Islam.'' Amnesty
International has declared Isshak a ``prisoner of
conscience'' and called for his release.
In Sudan, the Islamic government is carrying out genocide
against the Christian population in the south. Secretary of
State Powell has labeled Sudan ``the biggest single abuser of
human rights on earth.'' Two million people have died since
1983 in a civil war that ignited when the Khartoum government
tried to impose Sharia on non-Muslims. Christians are
slaughtered from the air by bombers, enslaved on the ground,
and forced to convert to Islam or starve. Writing in the
Winter 2001 issue of The Middle East Quarterly, Prof. Hilal
Khashan of the American University of Beirut explains that
Khartoum's rulers believe that non-Muslims in the south are
their ``lost brothers'' who must be redeemed by Islam.
According to Khashan, ``This attitude reflects the fact that
Muslims, devout or otherwise, tend to believe that Islam, the
ultimate divine truth, is destined to prevail at the expense
of other religions.''
From reports by government and human-rights groups, a
pattern clearly emerges: Predominantly Christian countries
generally respect religious freedom, as do buddhist countries
(absent Communist domination). The Center for Religious
Freedom concludes, ``The religious areas with the largest
current restrictions on religious freedom are countries with
an Islamic background. This parallels problems with democracy
and civil liberties in general, but the negative trend is
stronger with respect to religion.''
Hilal Khashan points out that religion has been a decisive
factor in most civil wars in Arabic-speaking countries, and
there have been at least a million deaths (compared with
150,000 Arab deaths in combined Arab-Israeli wars since
1948). The murderous intentions of the extremist Muslims have
clearly overwhelmed the influence of the pacific
practitioners continually cited by President Bush. Journalist
Amir Taheri noted in the Wall Street Journal recently that 28
of the 30 active conflicts in the world involve Muslim
governments or communities.
In his oft-cited book The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington writes,
``Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims
have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. . . .
Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but
in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup
violence than the people of any other civilization.''
Huntington further argues that Islamic militancy is not a
heretical strain of Islam. ``The underlying problem for the
West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different
civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of
their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their
power.''
While scholars of the Koran debate whether or not its
teachings justify violent jihads against non-believers,
Christians in dozens of Muslim countries live with the
fearful reality that they risk martyrdom at the hands of
Islam--as they long have. Again, Huntington (writing in
1996): ``Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton,
have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam
but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred
years of history demonstrate otherwise.''
____
[From the National Review, Dec. 3, 2001]
Delay or Die?
The imperative of counter-proliferation
(By Richard Lowry)
In 1946, U.S. delegate to the U.N. Bernard Baruch had an
idea. All nations would be prohibited not just from seeking
to develop nuclear weapons, but from building nuclear power
plants that might create fissionable material appropriate for
a bomb. Instead, an international authority would maintain a
monopoly over nuclear activity, and the U.S. would eventually
relinquish its weapons. U.N. Security Council permanent
members would lose their veto over any action to enforce
these restrictions, because, when it comes to nukes, ``to
delay may be to die.''
Today, with worries about Osama bin Laden or other
terrorists gaining access to the tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons and the thousands of tons of fissionable material
rattling around the world, Baruch's urgency may again seem
appropriate. But his prescriptions don't, even as the spirit
of them lives on in U.S. policy. The Baruch plan went nowhere
in the U.N., but it still can be seen as a sort of high-water
mark for post-war arms control. Then, the fantasy of non-
proliferation at least still seemed shiny and new. It has
been steadily discredited ever since.
The Baruch plan was the first shot in what would become an
ever more tolerant and open-minded attitude to non-
proliferation, pioneered by the Eisenhower administration,
enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and
finally brought to its appalling nadir by the Clinton
administration. In the Age of Osama, it is time to
acknowledge that non-proliferation is mostly a failure. It
has restrained some nations--Japan, Ukraine, etc.--from
acquiring nuclear weapons, but the overriding lesson of the
last half-century is that weapons technology will always get
through: through to the state that is willing to lie, cheat,
and pay enough to get it.
The U.S. should now adopt a tougher, more clear-eyed
approach to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and missile technology. It should concentrate less on the
universalist goal of bringing all states under sweeping arms-
control plans on an equal basis, and focus instead on a
frankly discriminatory objective: denying weapons to the
states--most of them Islamic--that are hostile to the West.
This would be more practical than the grander efforts of the
past, but it too would be doomed, eventually, to failure
(although mere delay has its value). When rogue governments
succeed in acquiring these weapons, the U.S. will have to
punish or topple them, on the theory that the act of
proliferation can't be eliminated but occasionally noxious
governments can.
There should be no illusion about what is at stake in the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. should
oppose it not because these weapons are inherently evil or
because we seriously seek a nuclear-free world, but rather
because their spread represents a diminution of Western
power. As Samuel Huntington puts it in The Clash of
Civilizations, ``The proliferation of nuclear and other
weapons of mass destruction is a central phenomenon of the
slow but ineluctable diffusion of power in a
multicivilizational world.''
In fact, much of it has occurred with anti-Westernism as
its implicit rationale, as China in particular seeks to
undercut American dominance. ``Weapons proliferation is where
the Confucian-Islamic connection has been most extensive and
most concrete, with China playing the central role in the
transfer of both conventional and nonconventional weapons to
many Muslim states,'' Huntington writes. China and Russia
have been
[[Page S12029]]
the suppliers, with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--
all terrorist states to one degree or another--the primary
recipients. The Pakistani nuclear program, for instance, is
almost entirely a Chinese production. And the Russians have
been playing the same role in Iran.
History of a fantasy
Western naivete has, over the years, helped push
proliferation along, as Henry Sokolski argues in his book
Best of Intentions. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program
spread nuclear reactors around the globe ``to serve the
peaceful pursuits of mankind,'' with little thought to the
possibility that they might serve the war-making pursuits as
well. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which
sought to maintain the exclusivity of the nuclear club, is
similarly starry-eyed. It talks of ``the inalienable right''
of signatories to develop nuclear technology, and urges ``the
fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials, and
technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear
energy.'' Cheating? Don't be silly. Sokolski quotes a Dutch
NPT negotiator explaining that for parties to the treaty
there should be ``a clear presumption'' that nuclear material
and know-how won't be diverted to weapons programs.
This remarkable faith in the trustworthiness of every NPT
nation is why signing the treaty was Iraq's first step toward
acquiring a bomb. According to Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi
scientist who defected, Iraq used the presumption of
innocence to acquire the hardware and knowledge for its
massive nuclear program, which the International Atomic
Energy Agency lending a hand. Hamza writes: ``Few of Iraq's
suppliers--or the IAEA itself--ever bothered to ask a simple
question: Why would Iraq, with the second-largest oil
reserves in the world, want to generate electricity by
burning uranium?''
IAEA inspectors were easily deceived and manipulated,
partly because any particularly aggressive inspector would
simply not be invited back. Not just the NPT, but most arms-
control agreements--the chemical and biological weapons
conventions, for example--rely on inspecting the
uninspectable. As Kathleen C. Bailey writes in a paper on
bioterrorism for the National Institute for Public Policy,
``Biological weapons facilities can be small, temporary, and
without distinguishing features; there is no current means to
detect a clandestine biological weapons production
capability, absent serendipitous discovery.'' This is the
problem with inspections generally: They can be guaranteed
success only in the case of a nation not bent of frustrating
them.
This circularity applies to arms-control agreements more
broadly: They work so long as no one wants to violate them,
in which case they simply don't work. The danger is
forgetting this, and mistaking the sentiments and assurances
that come with signing an agreement--which are so comforting
and high-minded--with reality. This was a mistake that the
Clinton administration inflated almost to a strategic
doctrine: Don't verify, if you can trust instead.
Non-proliferation agreements are most effective when they
are composed of like-minded nations determined to deny
technology to a specific enemy, e.g., the Coordinating
Committee (CoCom) of Western nations that sought to keep
advanced military technology from the Warsaw Pact. The
Clinton administration instead wanted to transform such
organizations from, as Sokolski puts it, ``like-minded
discriminatory organizations to norm-based efforts that
increased members' access to technology''--in other words, it
sought to include the proliferators in the agreements in the
hopes that it would somehow reform them.
So, instead of cracking down on Moscow's missile
proliferation, for instance, the administration made Russia
part of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), even as
the Russians were flouting its terms. The EU wanted the
Russians in so that they could be a permitted market for
European aerospace sales, while the administration argued
that their membership would modify their behavior. When
Moscow's behavior was resolutely unmodified--it continued to
proliferate to Iran and Iraq--the administration rewarded the
Russians with various contracts and subsidies anyway.
Meanwhile, at the administration's urging, China bulked up
on treaties and agreements. It signed the NPT, the Chemical
Weapons Convention, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
and it (sort of) joined the MTCR. All these Good Housekeeping
seals made it easier for China to acquire Western weapons
technology, harder to punish it for any transgressions. And
did nothing to stop its proliferating. As an important 1998
Senate report, ``The Proliferation Primer,'' put it, Beijing
still managed to be ``the principal supplier of weapons of
mass destruction and missile technology to the world.''
As with Russia, the Clinton administration not only failed
to punish the Chinese for their violations, it often rewarded
them. After Beijing sold anti-ship missiles to Iran, Sokolski
writes, the White House approved ``hundreds of millions worth
of sensitive U.S. missile-related exports to the very Chinese
firms known to be proliferating missiles.'' Such was the
pattern.
Russia and China--even if the Clinton administration
mishandled them--are at least major states susceptible to
U.S. influence. Now, thanks partly to their handiwork,
proliferation is so far advanced that an isolated basket case
like North Korea has graduated from weapons consumer to
weapons supplier. The North Korean No Dong missile has
become, as a result of Pyongyang's salesmanship, the missile
of choice in the third World. The Pakistani Ghauri and the
Iranian Shahab-3 are both really No Dongs. Iran, in turn, has
been able to market missile technology acquired from North
Korea to Syria, as the daisy chain moves from rogue to rogue.
What can be done
Despite this dismaying picture, the U.S. must still do all
it can at least to slow proliferation. Instead of ambitious
global agreements and conventions, the U.S. should seek to
create a CoCom-style regime focused on stopping proliferation
to the block of nations that are most likely to use or
threaten to use a weapon against the West or leak one to a
terrorist: Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, North Korea, and even
our rent-an-ally Pakistan. One reason the success of the
CoCom wasn't duplicated after the Cold War was that there was
no agreement on who the enemy was; now there should be.
The effort should spread in concentric rings, beginning
with tough export controls here in the U.S. No one--not
businessmen, not politicians, not our allies--likes export
controls, since they necessarily mean forgoing cash: but some
things are just more important. The argument against controls
is often that the technology in question is available
elsewhere, so why not have American-supplied Libyan poison-
gas plants rather than German? But we should lead by showing
our own willingness to spurn certain profits. Meanwhile,
European allies like Germany and France need to be convinced
that joining the war on terrorism means recognizing that some
export markets simply aren't worth having. Finally, we should
urge nations that are loitering on the outskirts of the
civilized world to choose up sides. Russia may choose the
right way, China probably won't.
But there are limits to what can be done to stop the spread
of weapons technology. Non-proliferators are in the position
of anti-drug warriors, constantly involved in a futile effort
to keep supply from meeting demand. It inevitably will. Then
what? When supply-side non-proliferation fails, demand-side
counter-proliferation should fill the breach. The best way to
end demand for weapons of mass destruction is to seek the
end--through diplomatic, economic, and military means--of the
governments that want them. Iraq should be the easiest case.
After years of flouting U.N. resolutions and international
inspections, after stockpiling tons of chemical and
biological agents and seeking a nuclear bomb, Saddam's regime
should be made into a demonstration of the consequences of
seeking weapons of mass destruction: It should be destroyed.
This would have an important educational effect. The reason
governments seek weapons of mass destruction is that they
know these weapons will increase their power. If they are
shown that the pursuit of these weapons could also end their
power, they might alter their calculations. In this light,
aiding the Iranian opposition is a more important act of non-
proliferation than getting President Khatami's signature on
some agreement. In a similar way, missile defense can change
the cost-benefit equation of acquiring missile technology by
undermining the utility of ballistic missiles. So, this
supposedly dangerously ``unilateral'' initiative--American
missile defense--buttresses the cause of non-proliferation.
Other unilateral actions, such as preemptive strikes on the
model of Israel's take-out of an Iraqi reactor in 1981, or
covert operations to sabotage technology shipments, can also
repress proliferation in a way that gaudy treaties cannot.
None of this will be easy. It will require Western self-
confidence, moral clarity, and, above all, military
superiority. The cause of keeping our enemies from attaining
weapons is achievable only with lots of weapons of our own:
an enormous conventional military superiority, a credible
nuclear deterrent, and--as a fail-safe--missile defense. But
adopting this more muscular, realistic approach to non-
proliferation is as urgent as the other kind seemed in 1946.
In the words of Bernard Baruch, ``to delay may be to die.''
____________________