1986: A LOOK BACK: The Helsinki process (12/28/86)

1986: A LOOK BACK

The Helsinki process

The Helsinki Accords review process, or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, continued in 1986 with two major events: the six-week Experts Meeting on Human Contacts, which took place in April and May in Bern, Switzerland, and the more significant full-scale Helsinki review conference, which was officially opened in early November in Vienna.

The six-week Bern meeting on human contacts ended on May 27 without agreement on a final document as the United States, whose delegation was headed by Ambassador Michael Novak, stood alone in its opposition to the "consensus statement."

The U.S. refused to approve the document, saying it would weaken rather than strengthen the pledges made at Helsinki in 1975 by 35 states from the East and West.

The Bern meeting was the last in a series of experts meetings mandated by the most recent Helsinki Accords review conference held in Madrid in 1980-1983.

In Bern, representatives of 35 states covered such topics as family reunification, exchange of information, travel for personal or professional reasons, and postal and telephone communications.

During the Bern conference, the United States raised many specific cases of family reunification and emigration. Among the cases of persons wishing to emigrate were those of two Ukrainians: Yuriy Shukhevych, a human-rights activist and Helsinki monitor who has been imprisoned for over 33 years and who has relatives in Australia; and Aleksander Maksymov, who renounced his Soviet citizenship and subsequently served two terms of imprisonment for his emigration efforts.

During a May 13 discussion on mail and postal interference, the U.S. delegation brought up the issue of contacts in the aftermath of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident in Ukraine.

The Vienna follow-up conference convened officially on November 4 in the Hofburg. The U.S. delegation is headed by Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, and includes two Ukrainians as members: Helsinki Commission staffer Orest Deychakiwsky and Julian Kulas, a public member.

The U.S. continued to underscore the plight of Ukrainian political prisoners in its statements concerning human-rights provisions during plenary sessions. Ambassador Zimmermann mentioned the deaths of four Ukrainian dissidents in camps in 1985, including three Helsinki monitors: Oleksiy Tykhy, Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn and Valeriy Marchenko, in his November 14 statement on national minorities in the USSR. He added that three other Ukrainian dissidents, Mykola Horbal, Ivan Kandyba and Mykhailo Horyn, were very ill and were serving lengthy sentences for their political activity. He also stated that he knew of some 400 religious activists who were imprisoned in the Soviet Union, including Ukrainian Uniates.

Ukrainian organizations from Europe, Canada and the United States sent representatives to Vienna to lobby for human and national rights and participate in both the official part of the conference as well as the parallel and simultaneous "Helsinki Mirror," series of unofficial seminars and press conferences sponsored by Resistance International.

The Ukrainians in Vienna included representatives of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group's External Representation, grass-roots human-rights groups, youth organizations, news services, political groups and national representative bodies, all under the leadership and guidance of the Human Rights Commission of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.

Before the conference had even begun, three of the UHG's external representatives, Gen. Petro Grigorenko, Leonid Plyushch and Nadia Svitlychna, issued an appeal to the CSCE delegates calling for a thorough review of Soviet human-rights abuses and demanding that Ukraine be included as a full and equal participant in the Helsinki process. They also demanded that Ukraine be represented as an independent party in all international bodies concerned with disarmament and nuclear energy, and that embassies and consulates of the Helsinki Accords' signatories be opened in Ukraine and foreign journalists be accredited to Ukraine.

It was these very demands that the Ukrainian representatives in Vienna sought to publicize through a series of news conferences, meetings with delegates, demonstrations and other activities during the first two weeks of the CSCE. The Ukrainian delegation held a news conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Helsinki Groups on November 10 in the Vienna Marriott Hotel, which served as the group's headquarters. The press conference, which was held together with the Lithuanian World Community and the Lithuanian Information Center, was described as "a historic reunion of founders and exiled members of the Helsinki monitoring groups." It was presided over by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), co-chairman of the Congressional delegation to the CSCE and included speeches by Ginte Damusis, director of the Lithuanian Information Center, who spoke of the fate of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, Yuri Orlov, Ms. Svitlychna, Mr. Plyushch, and Tomas Venclova, one of the founders of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. Ambassador Sam Wise, deputy head of the U.S. delegation, also spoke on the plight of all the Helsinki monitors in the Soviet Union. Ambassador Wise stated during the press conference that Ambassador Zimmermann, head of the U.S. delegation, had mentioned the 10th anniversary of the UHG in his remarks during the opening plenary session earlier that day, and had called it the most severely persecuted of all the Helsinki Groups in the USSR. Also present were Sens. Claiborne Pell, Dennis Deconcini and Paul Sarbanes.

Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the conference so far has been the Soviet delegation's proposal to hold a conference on human rights in Moscow. U.S. Ambassador Zimmermann told members of the Ukrainian delegation in Vienna that the U.S. was interested in such a conference under certain conditions, including the right for non-governmental organizations and Western press organizations to participate without restrictions.

As it stands, the delegates in Vienna were in the midst of the first review phase, that is the review of implementation, when they broke up for the holidays on December 19. What will come of this review conference for Ukrainians remains to be seen.

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