The Nation: Human Rights: Other Violators

When Jimmy Carter began speaking out against Soviet violations of human rights, Moscow gruffly reminded him that many U.S. allies were hardly guiltless. At his press conference last week, Carter acknowledged that the Soviets had a point. “Obviously,” he said, “there are deprivations of human rights even more brutal than the ones on which we’ve commented up to now.” He singled out, in varying degrees of guilt, Uganda, South Korea, Cuba—and the U.S. Scores of other nations as well, many of them staunch U.S. allies, have systematically violated human rights while Washington looked the other way. The U.S., said a recent congressional study, has too often been guilty of “embracing governments which practice torture and unabashedly violate almost every human rights guarantee pronounced by the world community.”

Says Richard N. Gardner, Ambassador-designate to Italy and a close Carter adviser: “We’ve been in bed with some of the worst regimes in the world.” Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and Greece under the junta are infamous examples. Others:

> South Korea. Repressive presidential decrees prescribe prison terms for dissent. Eighteen well-known political, intellectual and church leaders, including former Presidential Contender Kim Dae Jung, have been jailed for dissent. “We say we’re there to protect democracy,” scoffs a U.S. official. “Is there any left?”

> The Philippines. President Ferdinand Marcos rules by decree, and has been accused by both Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department of torturing political prisoners.

> Chile. Church sources say that more than 1,000 political prisoners have been killed by the harsh rightist regime of General Augusto Pinochet since the 1973 overthrow of Marxist President Salvador Allende. Thousands more are still in jail. A strict curfew is in effect, critical foreign journalists are regularly barred from the country, and its own press is tightly muzzled.

> Iran. According to the International Commission of Jurists, human rights violations have taken place on “an unprecedented scale.” Estimates of the number of political prisoners range well into the tens of thousands; the Shah himself admitted to TIME last August that the number stood at more than 3,000.

> Uruguay. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 citizens have been jailed or interrogated in the past five years.

The U.S. has also stumbled. The Soviets have always hastened to lambaste the U.S. for discriminating against blacks. As Carter acknowledged last week, the U.S. has denied visas to admitted Communists—a violation of the Helsinki agreement. At White House direction, the State Department is already studying possible revisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Nor has Western Europe been blameless. Restrictions on political activity still prevail in Spain. Britain has admitted extensive violations of human rights in jailing dissidents in Northern Ireland.

In many non-Communist lands, a Sakharov would not be allowed to speak out at all, or an Amalrik to leave the country. Still, the policies of most of these countries, however reprehensible, often pale in comparison with Soviet practices. Few nations, in fact, can match the institutional framework of repression embodied in the prisons and insane asylums of the Soviet Union’s Gulag archipelago.