GREEK HELSINKI MONITOR
(Greek National Committee of the International Helsinki Federation)

& MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP - GREECE
(Greek Affiliate of Minority Rights Group International)

P.O. Box 51393, GR-14510 Kifisia, Greece Tel. 30-1-620.01.20; Fax: 30-1-807.57.67; E-mail: office@greekhelsinki.gr

PRESS RELEASE

3/8/1997

By Panayote Elias Dimitras and Aaron Rhodes

Since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act over 20 years ago, the name “Helsinki” has become emblematic of specific political principles and values. The so-called “Human Dimension” commitments undertaken by the members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are “politically-binding” pledges to uphold the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief; the freedom of expression and the principle that independent media should be permitted; the freedom of movement; and the obligation to hold free and fair elections. The “Helsinki” commitments also obligate the participating countries to prevent torture and cruel and degrading treatment; to uphold international humanitarian law; to work toward the abolishment of capital punishment; to uphold the “rule of law”; to promote tolerance and protect the rights of national minorities.

Following the lead of the first “Helsinki committees,” who in the 1970s stood up to the Soviet government by citing its failures to abide by its commitments under the Helsinki Final Act and recommending how it could better comply, human rights groups that call themselves by the “Helsinki” label thereby associate themselves with these basic principles and values. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) and its constituent 31 national Helsinki committees in Europe, North America and the former USSR, committed to the defense of human rights principles consistently and across the political and geographical spectrum, have by now established a long record of strong criticism of all OSCE governments for whatever human rights violations are recorded. We have done this in both the East and the West, and regardless of a government's political orientation. In many cases, including the troublesome case of Greece, an EU member, the IHF has been the sole source for the international exposure of such problems. But lately, the official defensive rhetoric of two of the Europe's most human rights-abusing governments is being supplied by an organization named the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. This organization is not affiliated with the IHF, whose British member is the Parliamentary Human Rights Group. But the IHF now finds itself dogged by reporters and angry members, especially in Belarus and Albania where the British human rights organization has staked out strongly political positions defending Presidents Lukashenko and Berisha against criticisms of their human rights records, and the group has also defended the policies of Slovakia's authoritarian Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar.

In Belarus, Hitler-admiring President Lukashenko has made much use of press releases, articles and statements by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group to defend his program of returning Belarus to totalitarianism. Anyone believing in liberty, in freedom, in civil society, in the cherished democratic principle of checks and balances, in the need to constrain the absolute power of the state, and in free markets has to be horrified by the concentration of huge powers in the presidency; by a rubber-stamp parliament consisting of presidential appointees; by a program of “rule by decree;” by police violence and inhumane conditions in pre-trial detention for those having participate in opposition demonstration; and by the regime's economic re-nationalization program and it flaming attacks on civil society. But in a 1 December 1996 article published in the Wall Street Journal, a representative of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group defended the rigged referendum, which massively violated the law and democratic principles, and by which Lukashenko destroyed the 1992 constitution; they claimed it proved that Lukashenko was “genuinely popular.” How would anyone know that, in the absence of a free and fair poll? Of course, the red-brown Lukashenko regime has made maximum propaganda use of such political assertions by a “human rights group,” and as part of a program of degrading the IHF-affiliated Belarusan Helsinki Committee.

In recent days the British Helsinki Human Rights Groups has taken to de-legitimating the results of the recent Albanian election, in which its apparently favored candidate Sali Berisha lost his shirt. The story actually started a year ago, when virtually every international governmental and non-governmental organization monitoring the 1996 parliamentary elections concluded that Berisha's Democratic Party had improperly used the state apparatus, plus old-fashioned vote fraud, to win a landslide. A report by the British group at that time was a long political harangue against the OSCE, including a ludicrous charge that Albanian socialists have manipulated the OSCE's election monitoring mission by packing it with left-wing fellow-travelers from countries like Norway. The charge was made again two months ago in the pro-Berisha newspaper “Albania”.

The corruption of the 1996 elections was one of the factors feeding into the final collapse of confidence in the president and his party, whose undemocratic practices started soon after he first come in power in 1992. Now we are hearing from the British Helsinki Human Rights Group that the OSCE has papered-over the problems in the May 1997 elections. The group followed the official Berisha line that “the communists” are behind the armed gangs that made it impossible for Democratic Party candidates to campaign in some of the areas they control. They have even used selected and distorted incidents of violence to back their arguments, such as claiming that a Democratic Party leader's relative's assassination was politically motivated, which even the victim's family denied. They have also apparently deliberately ignored equally condemnable incidents of violence involving victims who are members of other parties, the result of the chaos into which the country had slid.

It is hard to find any Albanian outside of the desperate inner circle of the Democratic Party who accepts this distortion of the facts. The Democratic Party also has ties with many of the gangs, while some of them are political free-agents. And, not every armed group is a criminal gang. The Democratic Party, too, has been associated with many of the attempts to disrupt the elections by violence; indeed, the “Presidential Guards” under Berisha's direct control were responsible for several such actions. The British Helsinki Group's Jonathan Sunley, in another Wall Street Jounral article (2 July) quotes Vlore's “Public Salvation Committee statement that they well topple Berisha “dead or alive,” but forgets the oath of Berisha to his guard that he will prevent the socialists from coming to power. Anyone who has spent a night in Tirana in the past months knows that the armed violence there is often highly coordinated and would be impossible without some level of approval or even cooperation with the police and other officials.

All the Albanian parties agreed to accept the results of the elections, but in recent days, and using arguments like Sunley's, it seems that the Berisha clique has joined forces with the other big loser, viz. the would-be King, attempting once again to create chaos, which always serves to keep those who would have dictatorial powers. The IHF published a well-documented statement about the recent Albanian elections. Irregularities were mentioned, but overall, and especially under the circumstances, we considered the elections free and fair, like almost all other monitors. This did not prevent us from including in our statement a warning that Albania's human rights record is a far cry from expected standards, and an appeal to the new government to work towards its improvement.

To avoid confusion, our statement carried a note that the IHF is not associated with the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. To retaliate, British Helsinki Human Rights Group published a denunciation of the IHF in -where else?- “Albania”, as full of distortions as anything ever published in the notoriously truth-trashing Albanian state media-a piece that sounds like denunciations the IHF receives from statists in the region who resent independent human rights monitors, decorated with prickly Oxford debating-club flourishes. Our uncompromising 15-year record is a guarantee that we will be as vigilant in Albania as in Belarus, Croatia, Serbia, Kosova or Turkey. But our job isn't made any easier by the work of another group which, rather than monitoring adherence to the Helsinki principles, seems to prefer the role of PR flack for a new breed of authoritarian rulers in Europe.