by John McCain
Last December, the administration sanctioned five more Russians under the Magnitsky Act, and the President signed an executive order citing “serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world” that imposed on thirteen named individuals sanctions authorized by the provisions of the Global Magnitsky Act, which Ben Cardin and I also authored. The list of targeted people could have been longer, and some deserving individuals were spared. But the executive order actually expanded the reach of our bill and represents real progress toward the norm of American diplomacy, and I heartily welcome it.
The administration’s recently released National Security Strategy document simultaneously offered hope and disappointment to human rights advocates. In one passage it avers, “We are not going to impose our values on others.” In another, it promises, “We will continue to champion American values and offer encouragement to those struggling for human dignity in their societies.”
As we write this, Iranians have taken to the streets again, and not just in Tehran, where the affluent and well-educated want to live in a more modern society. The protests began outside the capital and have spread to many cities, including the religious city of Qom. In 2009, the protests were focused on disputed election results. These protests are broader and, from the point of view of the regime, more subversive. Their criticism includes Iran’s military adventurism in the region and the power of the mullahs. Some protesters are reported to have shouted “Death to Hezbollah,” Iran’s proxy in the Arab world. Others have demanded that Iran no longer continue as an “Islamic Republic.” Another crackdown is sure to follow. As in 2009, the worst of it won’t be public, but away from the cameras. To his credit, President Trump quickly identified with the protesters, and warned the regime that the world is watching. He has followed up with other statements. Will he persist? I don’t know. He has been more outspoken thus far than our European allies, and that’s something administration diplomacy should address. We’re the leader of the free world, and we should work to rally our allies to the side of justice in Iran. Acting in unison with other nations will refute the regime’s criticism that the Great Satan is behind the protests. The administration should negotiate an agreement on multilateral economic and diplomatic sanctions against the regime if the protests are violently suppressed and protesters killed or imprisoned. They should put on notice foreign companies that do business in Iran and the U.S. that they will be targeted if they are in any way, even indirectly, supplying materials or services to the security apparatus of the regime.
I also don’t know if the President’s engagement, much earlier and outspoken than his predecessor’s, is mostly due to the fact that Iran is an adversary. I hope it’s because he sees the connection there between America’s interests and values, and that by promoting the latter he defends the former. Encouragingly, he unexpectedly criticized Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen around the same time, taking issue with an ally he was not previously willing to rebuke. I hope both actions indicate an evolution in his administration’s view toward the understanding that our values are more than talking points with which to shame our enemies.
It is hard to know what to expect from President Trump, what’s a pose, what’s genuine. As in other areas, the character of the President will likely be reflected in the content and conduct of foreign policy. But the extent to which that is the case will depend on the restraining effect of his more experienced advisors’ counsel, and, I genuinely hope, his growing recognition that “leader of the free world” is more than an honorific. It is a moral obligation more important than the person who possesses it.
There have been times in the past and there will be times in the future when America’s conduct at home and in the world will fall short of our own high standards. That doesn’t mean that our values are imperfect, only that we are. In those instances, our true friends will encourage us to change course. But we should never believe that our fallibility disqualifies us from supporting the rights of others. That isn’t humility. It’s an abdication of moral responsibility. What matters most is that we remain confident in our principles, mindful that they are not ours alone, and that we recognize that to be on the right side of history is to support people denied their basic rights.
Of course, we should recognize that some nations are more skeptical of American influence. And when dissidents there ask for our silence, we should respect their wishes. But when courageous people call on us by name, when they plea for our solidarity in peaceful demonstrations against their government, when they write their protest banners in English, that is a good indication that we can and should do more to support their cause.
When people peacefully appeal for their rights, we should encourage them. When they are thrown in prison, we should work for their release. When they face intimidation and violence, we should condemn it. This applies not only to our enemies, but to our friends whether they are long-standing partners like Saudi Arabia and Egypt or emerging partners like Vietnam. They won’t enjoy these conversations. But if we really value these relationships, we will make the case to them that the only guarantee of their nations’ long-term stability is the inclusion of all its peoples in the rights and protections their leaders possess and in the promise of a better future.
We will only get so far by urging abusive regimes, whether in private or public, to treat their people better. We also need to support those people directly wherever and however we can, to help them promote their aspirations and prepare for the day that they will govern themselves. What this help entails varies from country to country, but its aim is to strengthen civil society to balance the power of the state. It often includes providing access to factual information by broadcasting it ourselves or helping closed societies get it on their own. It can include support for political parties, the middle class, labor unions, student organizations, religious groups, and other associations. It can be strengthening the institutions of a free society—an independent media, legislatures, courts of justice, uncorrupt bureaucracies, election commissions and monitors. What form these institutions take is not up to us. America’s institutions of governance are the result of 230 years of experimentation, trial and error, and our own unique experience. Other societies will develop in their own ways, consistent with their own cultures and traditions.
Critics, whether they call themselves realists or noninterventionists or just indifferent, maintain that active support for the political development of closed societies constitutes more than a strategy for changing the behavior of abusive regimes. It’s a ploy to change the regimes themselves. Correct. And why shouldn’t it be? I’m not suggesting armed revolution, but regime change achieved by giving people the tools and skills they need to work peacefully for it and build a better society. Why wouldn’t we want autocracies replaced by democracies everywhere in the world? Our goal isn’t to coexist eternally with regimes that are hostile to our most basic principles of justice. We deal with states like that because we have to, not because we wish them well. And while we deal with them, we shouldn’t forget that our ultimate goal is to see the victims of oppression supplant their oppressors.
It is one thing to recognize obstacles to change, and to understand the world as it is with all its corruption and cruelty. But it is a moral failure to believe tyranny and injustice are the inevitable tragedies of man’s fallen nature, that there are some places in the world that will not change or aren’t worth the effort to make better. They can be changed. They have been. And not only by force of arms as with Germany or Japan, but peacefully with international pressure and support. Every independent democratic country in the world once had a government less just and accountable, whether it was monarchical, dictatorial, or imperial. Progress toward a freer, more just world is the history of the world. Change doesn’t always proceed as quickly as we want it to, but it comes. We were once the world’s only democratic republic and now we’re one of more than a hundred. The ranks of free nations have swelled thanks in large part to the example, leadership,
and support of the United States. And thanks to all those people and organizations in every corner of the world, the philosophers, the politicians, the activists, and the ordinary decent men and women who throughout history have not let injustice stand without trying to right it. Thanks to idealistic realists in the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights First, Freedom House, the International Rescue Committee, the McCain Institute, and countless other advocates. I have disagreed with their positions from time to time, but I’m proud to have worked with them for causes that are just and achievable. And thank you to those in the latest generation and in future generations who will be “involved in mankind,” and make another, better world.
I’m grateful to have played a part in that progress. The gratification I’ve gotten from defending the rights of subjugated peoples has outlasted the satisfaction gained from personal successes and it has outlasted the sting of life’s disappointments. The image I have of the Maidan in Kiev, of the massive crowd giving me their attention as I struggled to say a few words of encouragement, far surpasses in effect all the recognition given me because I managed to stay in the public spotlight as long as I have. I am grateful to the freedom fighters, the justice seekers, the change agents, and civil society builders the world over for the example they set for me, for their reminder that we are not inevitably the victims of our fallen nature. We are all sinners, far from perfection. But we can compensate a little for our flaws and the injuries we’ve caused when we fight for the dignity of our fellow man. We know our lives were not entirely squandered on ourselves. When you reach my age and condition that knowledge is a great relief, a little hope for God’s mercy.
Even the smallest gestures in support of the hardest causes, the ones that seem futile, mean something to those struggling in them, and they are the ones that end up meaning the most to you. They’re so appreciative of your support no matter how modest it is. But it’s not their gratitude that moves you the most. It’s their faith. They refuse to accept defeat, to face facts. They refuse to lose hope, no matter how long they’re jailed, no matter how many of their friends are killed. They don’t despair, they persist. It’s an honor to stand with them, although most of the time all I can offer is my voice raised on their behalf or an open door to my office, an appeal to the administration, an introduction to other members of Congress.
I have done what little I can to stand in solidarity with forces of change in countries aligned with us and opposed to us, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Georgia and Moldova, in China, in Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, in Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, in Cuba, Nicaragua, in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and wherever else people fighting for their human rights wanted our help. I’ve protested killings, torture, and imprisonments. I worked to sanction oppressive regimes. I’ve encouraged international pressure on the worst offenders. I’ve helped secure support for people building the framework of an open society. I’ve monitored elections, consoled the families of political prisoners, worried about the risk-takers and mourned their deaths. I’ve gotten more from them than they’ve gotten from me. I’ve gotten their hope, their faith, and their friendship.
For the last twenty years, I’ve tried to help the opposition in Belarus overcome the ruthless regime of Alexander Lukashenko that has misruled that country since 1994. I’ve met with Belarusians from all backgrounds who are fighting to change their country, students, professors, lawyers, former government officials, retired military, businesspeople, technocrats, and actors. Joe Lieberman and I applied for visas to go to Belarus in 2004. The government refused to grant them, and we have been unwelcome there since. Opposition representatives have had to leave the country to meet with members of Congress enlisted in their cause. We have met in Vilnius, Lithuania, and in Riga, Latvia. We’ve met in Brussels and Washington. In solidarity with them, I denounced Lukashenko’s fraudulent election in 2001 only to watch him steal another one in 2005, and another in 2010, and another in 2015. I called for the release from prison of Lukashenko’s opponent in the 2001 election, Mikhail Marynich, only to see him remain behind bars for another five years after suffering a stroke. I’ve called for the release of other political prisoners with no greater success. I’ve watched Lukashenko work as closely with Putin’s Russia as if Belarus were still a vassal state, then try to lead Belarus toward greater independence, and then always fall back into subservience to the Kremlin.
I’ve made countless statements, attended numerous conferences, helped pass legislation imposing sanctions on the regime, called on other nations to impose sanctions, and when they did, called for more. I made all manner of pleas and threats and promises, all focused on supporting the rights of the Belarus people to govern themselves. And to what effect? It doesn’t appear to have had any. Lukashenko is still there. He’s still jailing his opponents and worse. He’s still obedient to Putin. In February and March 2017, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Minsk and a dozen other cities. The regime responded with mass arrests. International calls for the release of protesters were ignored. In 2015, the Guardian published an analysis of the prospects for change in Belarus in the wake of the successful Maidan protests in Ukraine. It found Lukashenko’s power secure and the opposition to be powerless, and declared “a revolution is impossible in Belarus.” But, as Winston Churchill observed, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Every time I meet with members of the Belarus opposition, they’re as determined and sure of themselves, and as grateful for international support, as were the first dissidents I met all those years ago. Often, they are the same people I met with years ago. They believe, they fight, and they persist. They are a rebuke to the cynics, a tonic for the weary fatalism that can overcome even the happiest warrior.
Like them, I believe with all my heart that one day they or their children will prevail. And it won’t be because they reached the end of history in Belarus, and it bent inevitably toward justice. It will happen as it’s happened elsewhere, because brave men and women inside the country and loyal friends outside made painstaking and enduring efforts to make it happen. “In history,” Nobel Laureate and freedom fighter Liu Xiaobo said, “nothing is fated.”
• • •
Liu Xiaobo died in the summer of 2017 from multiple organ failure caused by liver cancer while under armed guard in a provincial capital in northeast China. His pleas and the appeals of his wife and his many supporters that he be allowed to receive treatment in the West were ignored, as were all previous appeals for his release from prison. He was a scholar and poet and one of the world’s most eloquent proponents of Gandhian nonviolence in resistance to tyranny. He had been teaching at Columbia University when the student protests in Tiananmen Square began in 1989. He rushed home and joined them. He began a hunger strike on June 2. When the army moved in on the night of June 3 to massacre protesters and take the square, Liu urged the students to remain nonviolent, even wresting a rifle from the hands of one activist, and negotiated with the army to allow several thousand to leave the square peacefully. He was arrested two days later, fired from his university position, and his books banned. He was incarcerated for most of the next two years, and released after his conviction for counterrevolutionary incitement. Forbidden to write, he published his next book in Taiwan. He traveled back to the U.S. in 1993, and rejected advice from friends that he seek asylum here. He was arrested in 1995 and held under house arrest for nine months for starting a petition calling for political reforms. He was arrested again in October 1996 for calling for Taiwan’s peaceful reunification with China, and sentenced to three years in a reeducation camp. For the next nine years, he was constantly surveilled by the police and harassed. His phone and Internet connection were cut after he wrote an essay in 2004 criticizing the regime.
Charter 08, which Liu helped write, was released on December 10,
2008. A political manifesto modeled on Charter 77 written by Václav Havel and other Czech dissidents, Charter 08 demanded democratic elections, an end to one-party rule, and the privatization of state-controlled industries. Liu was arrested two days before the Charter’s release. The three hundred original signers of the document were interrogated to gather evidence against him. He was held in solitary confinement and denied access to a lawyer until he was formally charged with “inciting subversion” in June 2009. He was tried and convicted the following December and sentenced to eleven years in prison. His wife wasn’t allowed to attend his trial. American embassy officials and officials from other Western embassies in Beijing requested permission to observe his trial and were denied. They stood outside the courthouse in solidarity. The court denied Liu’s request to read testimony he had prepared for his trial, another appeal on behalf of human dignity that began “I have no enemies.” The United States and the governments of many other nations condemned his conviction and petitioned Beijing for his release.
The next year, the Nobel Committee awarded Liu the 2010 Peace Prize. When he learned of the honor, he dedicated it to the “Tiananmen martyrs.” He was, of course, forbidden to receive it in person. His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest and not allowed to travel to Oslo, either. An empty chair represented him at the ceremony, where the statement he had written for his trial was read.
He was among the most prominent political prisoners in the world. Hundreds of influential and powerful people spoke up for him and appealed for his release, presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, statesmen, celebrated writers and artists, representatives from the legislatures of many countries, including me. When I learned he had died, I said he would want it remembered that his imprisonment and lonely death were “only the latest example of China’s assaults on human rights, democracy and freedom.” He had been “relentless,” I remembered, “in pursuit of a democratic China.”