[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 170 (Tuesday, November 17, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2779-E2780]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        LISTEN TO THE DISSIDENTS

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                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 17, 2009

  Mr. WOLF. Madam Speaker, I would like to share with our colleagues an 
editorial from the November 8 Washington Post by columnist Jim 
Hoagland. Hoagland's piece is aptly titled ``Listen to the 
Dissidents.'' Hoagland points out the limits of ``engagement'' as 
pursued by the Obama administration--particularly engagement that 
relegates human rights issues to the back-burner.
  It is tragic that, as Hoagland points out, ``the dissident--a hero 
and catalyst for enormous change in the Soviet empire, China, the 
Philippines and elsewhere only two decades ago--has become a largely 
neglected and absent figure in this administration's diplomacy.''
  I join the growing chorus of voices in urging the President to listen 
to the dissidents.

               [From the Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2009.]

                        Listen to the Dissidents

                           (By Jim Hoagland)

       Barack Obama's extended hand was whacked across the 
     knuckles by the leaders of Iran, Syria and assorted other 
     thuggeries last week. But the Obama administration did manage 
     a good demonstration in Burma of how its brand of engagement 
     can and should work.
       Kurt Campbell, the State Department's top Asia official, 
     traveled to the isolated military dictatorship to talk with 
     its corrupt junta. But Campbell also insisted on having a 
     highly visible meeting with the leader of the country's 
     democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, and then publicly 
     called on her persecutors to grant her party more freedoms.
       This is the balance that has been missing in Obama's 
     outreach to other authoritarian states. Demonstrators on the 
     streets of Tehran underlined the president's missing link 
     Wednesday by chanting: ``Obama, Obama--either you're with 
     them or you're with us,'' as Iranian police beat them, 
     according to news accounts. Obama and his advisers need to 
     take the dissidents' message to heart.
       The dissident--a hero and catalyst for enormous change in 
     the Soviet empire, China, the Philippines and elsewhere only 
     two decades ago--has become a largely neglected and absent 
     figure in this administration's diplomacy. Media coverage of 
     political protest globally also seems to have waned since the 
     end of the Cold War.
       True, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have 
     made symbolic gestures toward the politically oppressed on 
     their

[[Page E2780]]

     travels and in pro forma statements. But, as the president's 
     coming visit to China will again show, dissident political 
     movements have not been incorporated into his strategy for 
     changing the world. The president believes so strongly in his 
     powers of persuasion that the transformative work once done 
     by Lech Walesa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Corazon Aquino, Wei 
     Jingsheng and others now falls largely on his shoulders. 
     Campbell's meeting with Suu Kyi provided a useful corrective, 
     for one country at least, to this tendency.
       George W. Bush proved that it is possible to overdo support 
     for dissident movements and the vilification of their 
     tormentors, just as his father demonstrated that it can be 
     underdone (see Bush 41's effort to keep the Soviet Union and 
     Yugoslavia from disintegrating). The Bush 43 administration, 
     in fact, bears some of the responsibility for the eclipse of 
     the dissident in the public mind. The focus of many 
     journalists' and political activists has recently been on 
     U.S. human rights abuses rather than those of much more 
     brutal foreign regimes.
       So Obama's decision to reach out and encourage hostile 
     regimes to relax their grip internally made initial tactical 
     sense, especially in Iran. The administration deserves some 
     credit for the current political fluidity there. Removing the 
     United States as a heavy-handed, threatening enemy helped 
     expose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's manifest failures of 
     governance and helped meaningful dissent to surface and 
     spread.
       But the extended-hand tactic may have run its course there. 
     Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's highest authority, used 
     inflammatory language to denounce Obama and the U.S.-
     originated proposal on uranium reprocessing given to Iran on 
     Oct. 1 in Geneva. Even though U.S. officials claimed at the 
     time that Iran had ``accepted'' the proposal--which 
     effectively drops the long-standing U.S. demand for Iran to 
     suspend its enrichment of uranium as a condition for 
     negotiations--Khamenei said that its terms were unacceptable.
       Meanwhile, protesters were voicing concern that Obama's 
     single-minded pursuit of a nuclear deal is conveying 
     legitimacy to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad--at the dissidents' 
     expense. They did not seem to have been impressed by the 
     general words of support contained in a message issued by 
     Obama to mark not this political uprising but the 30th 
     anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, an 
     event celebrated in Iran but not here.
       Syria also served notice that its priorities have not been 
     influenced by Team Obama's repeated blandishments for better 
     relations. Israel intercepted a major clandestine Iranian 
     arms shipment destined for Syria and the Hezbollah guerrillas 
     it supports in Lebanon. And As-Safir, a Syrian-controlled 
     newspaper in Beirut, launched a vitriolic, sexist attack on 
     Michele Sison, the able U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, that 
     concluded by calling on its readers to ``silence this 
     chatterbox''--an ominous statement in a country where U.S. 
     and European diplomats have been murdered.
       Friendly, principled engagement is a useful tool--up to a 
     point. It is probably worth exploring in Burma with new 
     steps. But there also has to be a workable Plan B--something 
     Obama will now have to demonstrate that he has developed for 
     Iran and Syria.

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