INTERVIEW: The Helsinki Commission on its 20th anniversary (06/30/96)

INTERVIEW: The Helsinki Commission on its 20th anniversary

Orest Deychakiwsky is a staff adviser with the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe whose areas of responsibility include Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and Hungary. On the Helsinki Commission staff for nearly 15 years, he has served on U.S. delegations to over a dozen CSCE/OSCE meetings; part of his responsibilities at these meetings included liaison with non-governmental organizations. Mr. Deychakiwsky has been an international observer of elections in Ukraine, Russia and Bulgaria, and he also coordinates the intern program at the commission.

In the early 1980s he was a member of the editorial board of the Smoloskyp quarterly magazine, which focused on human rights in Ukraine. Before joining the commission, Mr. Deychakiwsky was project manager at the Republican National Committee. While on a leave of absence from the commission, he served a four-month stint with the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation in early 1992-1993.

Hailing from the Cleveland area, Mr. Deychakiwsky was involved with various Ukrainian American organizations as a youth. In his role as a Helsinki Commission staffer, he is a well-known to scores of Ukrainian community leaders, especially those active in the human and national rights arena during the 1980s.

He holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. from Georgetown, both in the field of government and international relations. He is a founding member of The Washington Group and currently serves as secretary of that organization of Ukrainian American professionals, and is a member of the TWG Fellowship Committee. He is married with three children and has lived in the Washington area since August 1979.

The two-part interview below was conducted with Roma Hadzewycz.

PART I

Q: What exactly is the Helsinki Com-mission, or more properly the Com-mission on Security and Cooperation in Europe? Many people think it is a congressional committee. What is its role?

A: Most people do, indeed, associate the commission with Congress, as 18 of 21 of the Helsinki commissioners are members of Congress, including the chairman and co-chairman, currently Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) and Al D'Amato (R-N.Y.), and for good reason. We do many of the things that congressional committees do: hold hearings and briefings, issue reports, and do casework, though the commission per se does not have legislative responsibility. Also, many commission actions are initiated by our congressional members (e.g. resolutions, letters, meetings with foreign officials, etc.)

Actually, though, the Helsinki Commission - formally known as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe - is an independent agency of the U.S. government. It is a unique institution in that it is composed of nine members from the Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, as well as one member each from the departments of State, Defense and Commerce. That is, it encompasses members from both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government.

Another source of confusion is that people often think the commission is a branch office of the 55-state Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which until last year, was known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). We are independent and call our own shots with respect to our mandate, which is to monitor and encourage compliance of the participating states with the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. We do, however, participate in the work of OSCE institutions and various OSCE meetings as members of U.S. delegations.

Q: This month marks the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Helsinki Commission. How, and more importantly, why was it formed?

A: To answer this, we need to back up a bit. In 1975, 35 countries signed the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. That document is a politically binding agreement consisting of three main sections, known as "baskets," which contain a broad range of measures designed to enhance security and cooperation in Europe. The baskets deal with security issues, economic, scientific and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian issues.

Many people, including many East European ethnic groups at the time saw Helsinki as a sell out, in which the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, that is, the post-World War II status-quo, was essentially accepted by the West. The West, of course, rejected this interpretation.

Following the signing of the Final Act, a congressional delegation visited the Soviet Union. New Jersey Republican Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick, troubled by what she saw there and heard in meetings with dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, decided that the human-rights language of the Helsinki Accords could prove useful in assisting the dissenters. In September 1995, she introduced a bill calling for the establishment of a Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor implementation, by East European governments, of Helsinki's human-rights provisions. This truly marvelous woman saw that it was important to keep the spotlight on those repressed for their convictions and determination to see their governments live up to their Helsinki commitments.

The Ford administration, with Henry Kissinger at the helm as secretary of state was, to put it mildly, not warm to the idea and saw the proposed commission as interfering with the prerogatives of the executive branch. Despite this opposition, and with the support of various Jewish and East European ethnic groups (including, for instance, Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine), Millicent Fenwick and her colleagues in the House and Senate were able to prevail.

On June 3, 1976, a bill creating the commission was signed into law and Rep. Dante Fascell became its first chairman. A few weeks earlier a group in Moscow calling itself the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group was formed to monitor Soviet government compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. Later that year, in November, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was formed, and others in various then-Soviet republics as well.

As you know, the individuals who formed these groups, especially the Ukrainian group, suffered tremendously as a result of their courage and commitment, and some, such as Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy, Yuriy Lytvyn and Valeriy Marchenko, sacrificed their very lives.

The members of these groups laid the groundwork for the events that were to follow culminating in the fall of the Soviet empire. Frankly, I sometimes think that many in the Ukrainian American community, especially those who have become involved with Ukraine since independence, fail to appreciate the debt owed the dissidents of the 1980s. Perhaps the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (in November) will provide an opportunity to recall their sacrifices and appropriately honor their courage.

Q: Given the State Department's opposition to the creation of the commission, what were relations like in the early days?

A: This was before my time, but from what I understand, relations were not smooth. To cite but two examples - it took a lot of prodding, for instance, to get the State Department to allow commission staffers access to classified documents and cable traffic, which were important in enabling the commission to carry out its mandate. Also, the administration tried to block the commission from traveling to Eastern Europe to fulfill its mandate by having direct contacts with those states. Thankfully, commissioners were able to force the State Department's hand in these and other areas.

Also, and this is something I experienced somewhat afterwards, at various CSCE meetings, the commission, encouraged by human-rights and ethnic non-governmental organizations, including Ukrainian groups, often pushed for a harder line on human-rights issues when dealing with Communist governments, including the raising of specific cases, while often the State Department was more cautious. Eventually, they came around.

I would note that now, relations between the commission and the State Department, including at the working level, are very good, despite diverging views on certain specific policies, most notably Chechnya and Bosnia.

Q: How does the Helsinki Commission implement its mandate? The changes that have taken place with the fall of the Soviet empire must have had an impact on the commission. How have these change affected its work?

A: Indeed, the work we do now at the commission is markedly different from in the 80s, yet there are still many common elements. Before 1990, there was more of a focus on human-rights casework - trying to help release individual political prisoners, or Jewish refuseniks, or helping Romanian families reunite - now there tends to be more emphasis on broader issues of democratization, rule of law, and market reforms. These are issues that not so many years ago would have been impossible to pursue. For instance, in the last six years we have monitored and written reports on more than 50 elections that have taken place in the OSCE region and been observed by commission staff. Obviously, this would have been impossible to do before 1990.

Lately, also, we have especially focused on areas with conflicts, as these are where the greatest number of human-rights violations - and the most egregious ones - occur. Thus, we have had numerous public hearings and briefings on Bosnia and Chechnya, and have advocated a stronger U.S. stance with respect to those conflicts. On Bosnia, commissioners, for instance, introduced legislation last year on lifting the arms embargo that was so hurting the Bosnians who have been the principal victims of the brutal Serb aggression and genocide.

Also, even though to a lesser degree than before, we still do human-rights casework. Just in the last few weeks, for example, commissioners sent letters to Belarusian authorities on behalf of two leading Belarusian democratic opposition leaders arrested in connection with the recent demonstrations there criticizing the Belarusian government's pro-Moscow policies, and one signed by commissioners urging the unconditional release of a Catholic priest in Bosnia being held by Bosnian Serb forces.

I should point out that the commission publishes numerous reports on various OSCE issues - reports on human rights in a given country, or election reports, or reports on OSCE institutions - as well as a monthly newsletter on OSCE-related developments, which goes out to about 6,000 addressees - other government agencies, ethnic or human rights oriented non-governmental organizations, OSCE country embassies, university libraries, etc. In fact, there are several hundred Ukrainian American institutions and individuals who receive our publications. Also, we now have a home page on the Internet which gives even greater access to commission materials.

Q: Ukrainian Americans are most familiar with the work of the commission because throughout its history the commission has been an active supporter of Ukrainian aspirations, especially human rights. What are some of the activities the Helsinki commission has engaged in with respect to Ukraine?

A: Well, there have been many over the years, and I have to tell you that I am very proud, as a Ukrainian American staff member of the commission, of the commission's consistent work with respect to Ukraine, especially before Ukraine was on the foreign policy establishment's radar screen as it is today. The commission was focused on and supportive of Ukraine long before independence. To cite just one example, then-commission Chairman Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) and then-commission member Rep. Don Ritter (R-Pa.) introduced congressional resolutions in fall 1991 - prior to the historic December 1 referendum on Ukrainian independence - calling on the administration to recognize Ukraine.

The resolution, with strong support from the Ukrainian American community - and opposition, I might add, from the State Department - passed the Senate in late November. A few months before that, Sen. DeConcini was the first to publicly criticize President George Bush for his infamous August 1, l991, "Chicken Kiev" speech.

Among the other activities of the commission with respect to Ukraine: the commission was instrumental in ensuring that numerous cases of individual Ukrainian political prisoners, as well as general issues, such as the plight of the Ukrainian Churches, were raised publicly and privately at various CSCE conferences and in direct contacts with Soviet officials throughout the 1980s. We also published documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, held hearings on the situation in Ukraine where Ukrainians have testified, especially former Ukrainian dissidents now living in the United States. The commission in the last 20 years wrote many letters to Soviet officials, and even to our own officials, and individual commissioners have introduced or co-sponsored legislation concerning Ukraine, for example, the Millennium resolution which called for legalizing the Ukrainian Churches.

One of my highlights at the commission was our commission visit, with nearly a dozen senators and congressmen, to Moscow in 1988, where we invited dissidents from all over the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, to meet with us and hosted them at a U.S. Embassy reception and set up meetings and roundtables between them and Soviet officials with us as - well, for lack of a better word, "facilitators."

This was somewhat unprecedented at the time, as some of these people had even recently been released from the gulag, and it was a thrill for me - actually, almost a surreal experience - to meet with people whose cases we, and the Ukrainian American community, had been vocally defending for years - people like Vyacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn, Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Oles Shevchenko, and others.

Don't forget, during most of the 80s, the human rights situation was so bad in the Soviet Union that often we - by we I mean the commission, Ukrainian Americans, the human rights community - felt we were engaging in an exercise in futility by raising these issues because the Soviets were so intransigent. In retrospect, it was clear we were not and, indeed, it is clear that these efforts, too, contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire and creation of an independent Ukraine.

Q: And more recently?

A: More recently, we have held hearings and briefings, and issued reports on Ukraine. My colleagues and I have covered virtually every election in Ukraine since March 1990 and issued reports on the elections - comprehensive reports - discussing, of course, the political context of elections and not just limiting ourselves to what we observed during poll-watching.

In fact, when I look back at some of those earlier elections such as in March 1990 and March 1991, there were very few international observers, and I think that our earlier reports were especially valuable because Ukraine was still a "terra incognita." Starting with the December 1991 referendum, election observation (and political and democracy development, for that matter) has become somewhat of a growth industry, even as groups who wouldn't touch Ukraine with a 10-foot pole before independence now get into the act. I guess it's better late than never, and many of them are doing good work there.

We also often meet with visiting Ukrainian officials, including parliamentarians, to discuss various policy issues and have visited Ukraine, meeting with the highest officials there. Whenever we do travel there, we issue and disseminate reports, thereby adding to the growing pool of information about Ukraine and demonstrating Congressional interest.

CONCLUSION

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