[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.''

                          ____________________