Compliance and defiance

Compliance and Defiance

OUR FRIEND Michael Novak, chief American delegate at the recent Helsinki follow-up talks at Bern, did his eloquent best to show that the Soviets have failed to abide by the treaty's human-rights provisions. With special emphasis on the right of emigration and on permitting family contacts across the Iron Curtain, he called for "not more documents but more compliance.' In the end he refused, on behalf of the United States, to sign a bland statement of consensus among the conferees.

We applaud. The U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee reports that of the hundred or so people who dared act as Helsinki monitors within the Soviet bloc, 51 are now in prisons, labor camps, or "psychiatric hospitals'; twenty others have completed sentences; 17 have emigrated to the West; and four have died while serving sentences. (Another died in a fishy car accident.)

The Soviets plainly never had any intention of complying. The nature of a Communist regime makes compliance inherently impossible. And the Soviets are obviously willing to absorb the marginal bad publicity over their refusal to comply.

The lesson is one the West shouldn't have had to learn again: You can't trust Communists. The United States should declare the treaty void by reason of Soviet abrogation. The it should announce that it withdraws recognition of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and call loudly for independence for the Captive Nations, not because those nations will gain freedom soon, but because the Soviets will lose legitimacy at once. The Soviets still won't be paying much for their treaty violations, but at least the West will stop paying for keeping its word.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
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