In the early 1980s, the Strasbourg-based European Parliament held
a conference on the “Right to Development,” and I was the Reagan
Administration’s representative. Peter Berger, our regular
delegate to these meetings, couldn’t attend because, if memory
serves, he was attending a torture conference. I suppose the
reason I was chosen to replace him was because, as Assistant
Secretary of State Elliott Abrams’ speechwriter in the State
Department’s Human Rights Bureau, I helped prepare some of the
material critical of the Right to Development. (Another reason
for my selection may have been the fact that this was not a very
high-profile conference, so even if I made a fool of myself, not
many would notice.)
The Right to Development was an attempt by such knavish Third
World dictatorships as Cuba, Algeria and Libya to create a new,
internationally recognized human right — the right of all
nations to full economic development — equal in status to such
well-established civil and political rights as freedom of speech,
freedom of association, and freedom of religion. The basic idea
was that even if a regime systematically violated these rights,
it still enjoyed an inalienable Right to Development.
Before going to Strasbourg, I promised myself that I wouldn’t be
an “Ugly American” throwing my weight around and dominating the
proceedings, but would sit back and let the Europeans hash out
their differences by themselves. This, I assumed, was what the
Europeans themselves wanted — but I was dead-wrong. After the
French expert delivered an impassioned opening statement in
support of the Right to Development, the Conference’s Chairman —
a distinguished-looking Luxembourger —declared that it was now
time to hear the American viewpoint, and looked expectantly at
me.
When I am nervous, I tend to speak quickly, and I must have been
very nervous that morning in Strasbourg, because the Chairman
actually interrupted me at one point and asked me to slow down —
the translators were having trouble keeping up with my verbal
torrent. In any event, the argument I made (more or less well)
was that recognizing a human right also meant recognizing a
corresponding obligation to enforce that right. For example, if I
have a right to worship freely, and someone interferes with that
right, then the government is obliged to step in and help me
exercise my right. Similarly, if Cuba has a right to development,
but remains sadly impoverished thanks to what enlightened opinion
the world over recognizes as dastardly imperialist machinations,
then the international community has an obligation to step in and
help Cuba. That, I stressed, was the logic of the Right to
Development. But did we really want to go down this road —
funding the world’s worst dictatorships in the name of a newly
concocted human right?
Although all of the other participants (with the surprising
exception of the Swedish expert, who argued that human rights
only belonged to individuals, and not to states) disagreed with
me and strongly backed the Right to Development, we adjourned
without achieving any sort of consensus. In that very limited
sense, I suppose, my one and only foray into international
diplomacy ended successfully.
But while the “Right to Development” has stalled, the Right to
Development in Gaza has apparently won universal recognition. On
March 2, the Egyptian government hosted an “International
Conference in Support of the Palestinian Economy for the
Reconstruction of Gaza.” The Conference, attended by delegates
from 71 states, raised $4.5 billion. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton pledged $900 million.
Why is the international community so seized with the plight of
Gaza? The conventional answer, that the people of Gaza are living
in a virtual rubbish heap because of Israeli attacks, is false.
As a recent visitor to Gaza, Yvonne Green, reported in the March
3 Jerusalem Post, “The Gaza I saw was societally intact.
There were no homeless, walking wounded, hungry or undressed
people. The streets were busy, shops were hung with embroidered
dresses and gigantic cooking pots, the markets were full of fresh
meat and beautiful produce…Mothers accompanied by a 13-year-old
boy told me they were bored of leaving home to sit on rubble all
day to tell the press how they’d survived…”
But even if Gazans were living in a rubble heap, why are
Western nations obliged to help them out? After all, the
Palestinians are part of the Arab world, Arab states are not
exactly cash-poor and (so they never tire of telling us) are
obsessed by Palestinian suffering. So why not let them pick up
the tab for Gaza reconstruction, while we attend to our own
needs?
But even if the Arabs were cash poor, why must we begin
the Gaza reconstruction process now — even before a
ceasefire has been reached, and while Palestinian rockets
continue to rain down on Israeli towns and villages? And why lift
a finger to support the main beneficiary of the world’s largesse
— the Hamas government of Gaza, a totalitarian regime that
cynically uses its captive population as “human shields,” while
relentlessly seeking Israel’s destruction?
Evidently, the world has bought into the logic of the Right to
Development —not as a universal right for all (Darfurians and
Tibetans, for example, need not apply) — but as a right that
applies solely to Palestinians. The reasoning goes like this:
Palestinians have an inalienable right to development; Israeli
aggression is preventing the Palestinians from exercising that
right; Israel was foisted on the Arab world by the West —
therefore the West is indirectly responsible for Palestinian
underdevelopment; hence, it must pay…and pay… and pay.
The only way out of this trap is for the West to tell the Arab
states that it is their refusal to come to terms with Israel that
is responsible for the Palestinian plight, and that it is
therefore their responsibility, not ours, to fund Palestinian
reconstruction. But no Western statesman (or stateswoman) has
ever summoned up the courage to say anything so bold, and it is
unlikely that anyone ever will.
