[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 16 (Tuesday, February 10, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E153-E154]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                TRIBUTE TO AMBASSADOR WARREN ZIMMERMANN

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. STENY H. HOYER

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 10, 2004

  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, last week a prominent thinker and actor in 
American foreign policy passed away. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann died 
on Tuesday, February 3, from pancreatic cancer. He was a career foreign 
service officer, who later taught at both Johns Hopkins and Columbia 
universities.
  I had the honor and privilege of working with Ambassador Zimmermann 
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Our collaboration began when he was 
chosen to represent the United States at the Vienna Follow-Up Meeting 
of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. At the time, I 
was Chairman of the Helsinki Commission. Under his leadership, State 
Department officers and Commission staff together formed the basis of 
the U.S. delegation. Ambassador Zimmermann recognized the talent, 
expertise and political support offered by the Commission and ensured 
that bureaucratic hurdles would not jeopardize its integration and 
effectiveness.

[[Page E154]]

  Warren Zimmermann also agreed essentially with Commission views about 
being bold on human rights, on naming the names of political prisoners 
and divided families as well as the names of the countries whose 
governments were denying them and many others their basic human rights. 
Ambassador Zimmermann challenged the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact 
allies to uphold their Helsinki Final Act commitments. This happened 
during the critical first years that Gorbachev was in power in Moscow, 
and the Vienna meeting helped to give real meaning to words like 
glasnost and perestroika by insisting, before it would conclude, on 
actual implementation of existing commitments along with more specific 
and forward-looking new human rights commitments.
  To his credit, and with potential implications for his, career, 
Ambassador Zimmermann was prepared to remain in Vienna until the 
Soviets resolved long-standing human rights cases. During the course of 
the meeting, over 600 of the 750 Soviet political prisoners listed as 
such by the United States were freed, including all Helsinki monitors. 
The number of bilateral family reunification cases was reduced from 150 
to about 10, and foreign radio broadcast jamming ended. While other, 
larger factors were, of course, at play, Warren Zimmermann, the U.S. 
Delegation and the friends and allies of the United States meeting in 
Vienna from 1986 to 1989 helped in no small way to bring an end to the 
Cold War and the decades-long, artificial division of Europe.
  Warren Zimmermann not only engaged his fellow diplomats. He also 
developed close contacts with Soviet human rights activists during his 
postings at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow which he maintained through the 
Vienna meeting. For his efforts on behalf of refuseniks, he was awarded 
the Anatoly Sharansky Freedom Award by the Union of Councils for Soviet 
Jews.
  After the Vienna meeting ended in 1989, he went on to serve as the 
United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia. In that capacity, he would 
again work with the Commission at a decisive time, namely the beginning 
of the violent disintegration of the Yugoslav federation. The Helsinki 
principles, which we had just defended in Vienna, were about to witness 
their most severe violations primarily at the direction of Slobodan 
Milosevic. Ambassador Zimmermann knew well the complexities of the 
Balkans, but, like the Commission, he also knew that human rights 
violations--in this case taking the form of ethnic cleansing--could not 
be explained and accepted as the historical inevitability that the 
region's nationalist propagandists would want us to believe.
  Warren Zimmermann's approach to U.S. foreign policy embraced the 
broader, comprehensive view of security that was relevant to the Cold 
War, to the Balkan conflicts and to our world today. In 1986, he noted 
the vital connection between a state's approach to human rights 
domestically and its conduct internationally. ``If a state is 
pathologically distrustful of its own citizens,'' he asked, ``is it not 
prone to a certain paranoia in its foreign policy? If a state does not 
earn the trust of its own citizens, should it have the confidence of 
other states? If a state is a threat to its own people, can it fail to 
present a potential threat to peoples beyond its borders?''

  Mr. Speaker, Warren Zimmermann was an American patriot who served 
this Nation with honor and distinction for decades. His professional 
legacy is marked by a continual striving for freedom, democracy and 
human rights, and today there are innumerable people in Europe and 
elsewhere who live freer, happier lives because of his life's work.
  I want to extend my sincerest condolences to Ambassador Zimmermann's 
wife, Teeny, his entire family, many friends and admiring colleagues.

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