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End Sought to Cold War Law for Russia
January 1, 2002
By JIM ABRAMS
WASHINGTON (AP) - After spending decades arguing just the opposite, a Holocaust survivor and human rights advocate now wants to free Russia from a Cold War policy that used trade to pressure Moscow to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.
``Clearly there are no restrictions on Russian Jewish emigration,'' says Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., a Hungarian Jew who escaped from the Nazis with the help of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. ``I am delighted with this outcome.''
Lantos, the top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, said that even before he was elected to Congress in 1980 he worked in support of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, which withholds normal trade relations with communist states that restrict emigration.
The law, named after the late Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., and former Rep. Charles Vanik, D-Ohio, was ``one of the most important pieces of human rights legislation in our nation's history,'' Lantos said.
``It had bite, it had power, it had punch,'' he said.
But now, he contends, the law is no longer relevant. Russia is now a diplomatic partner and ``it disturbs and humiliates the Russian government because it is part of the Cold War,'' Lantos said.
Lantos, 73, carries weight on the issue because of his own flight to freedom. Born in Budapest, he fought in the underground against the Nazis and escaped from a slave labor camp. He made his way to the United States in 1947 and is the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress. He heads the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
With White House backing, Lantos said he plans to move legislation through Congress by March, just in time for President Bush to present it to Russian President Vladimir Putin when he visits Moscow next spring.
While not requiring annual presidential reviews as the Jackson-Vanik law provides, trade relations would continue to be linked to Russia observing emigration freedom and human rights. Just last Friday, Bush signed a proclamation ending the application of Jackson-Vanik to trade relations with China.
Jewish emigration actually fell for a few years after 1974 because of Soviet anger over Jackson-Vanik, but over the years the legislation is credited with forcing the Soviets to give exit visas to more than 1 million Jews.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, writing President Ford in 1974, said the U.S. pressure on the Jewish emigration issue was ``causing great joy to the people of Israel and to Jewish communities everywhere.''
More recently, Jackson-Vanik has been at the center of annual debates over the human rights records of China and Vietnam, with lawmakers challenging presidential waivers of Jackson-Vanik made to promote trade. Lantos consistently voted against giving that waiver to China because of its human rights record.
Putin asked Bush at an October meeting in Shanghai to exempt Russia from the law. A month later when Putin was visiting the United States, Bush announced he would work with Congress to lift the application of Jackson-Vanik, saying, ``Russia is a fundamentally different place than it was during the Soviet era.''
David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said after Bush's statement that, with the dramatic changes in the lives of Russian Jews, Russia warranted the end of trade restrictions. He said Jackson-Vanik was ``one of the most important contributions America made to gaining the freedom of Soviet Jews.''
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said his group agrees that Russia deserves exemption but it was also ``perfectly legitimate for the United States to ask for fundamental progress before it gives up this leverage.''
He added that Jackson-Vanik was still relevant for a number of former Soviet states in central Asia that have not moved toward democracy. ``People think Jackson-Vanik is a Cold War relic, but these countries are also relics of the Soviet past,'' he said.
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