1985: A LOOK BACK: Human rights (12/29/85)

1985: A LOOK BACK

Human rights

While the West observed the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Accords this year with ceremonies in Helsinki and follow-up meetings in Ottawa and Budapest, Soviet and Warsaw Pact repression of dissidents continued throughout the year with arrests, re-arrests, house searches and interrogations of Helsinki monitors, human-rights activists and refuseniks, and religious activists, particularly defenders of the Uniate Church.

The year also witnessed the death of Ukrainian poet and Helsinki monitor Vasyl Stus, and news of Armenian Helsinki Group founder Eduard Artunyan's death late last year reached the West.

Foreign ministers from all 35 signatory states, including the United States and the Soviet Union, gathered in Helsinki on July 29-31 for three-day anniversary observances of the 1975 Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which committed its signatories to respect human rights, avoid interference in each others' internal affairs, respect post-World War II borders and work toward free flow of information.

The CSCE held a session from May 7 to June 17 of experts on human rights in order to review to what extent the 35 signatory states were living up to their promises to respect minorities and promote human rights.

The meeting was characterized by heated exchanges between East and West, particularly the U.S. and Soviet delegations, which ultimately resulted in a lack of consensus over a concluding document.

Ambassador Richard Schifter, who headed the U.S. delegation, scored the Soviets numerous times for rights abuses, while East European monitoring groups lobbied and demonstrated outside the closed sessions against Warsaw Pact human rights violations. Among the lobby groups were the World Congress of Free Ukrainians and the Ukrainian Canadian Student Union.

The 35-nation CSCE Cultural Forum held in Budapest on October 15 -November 25 similarly ended with no consensus on a concluding document amid a barrage of angry rhetoric between East and West.

Meanwhile, the Soviets continued to crackdown on members of Helsinki monitoring groups with the arrests and re-arrests of Ukrainian Helsinki Group members Yosyf Zisels and Petro Sichko, respectively. Mr. Zisels, 37, was sentenced on April 10 to three years in a strict regimen camp for "anti-Soviet slander," and Mr. Sichko was re-arrested on unknown charges several days before his scheduled release from a labor camp in May.

Ukrainian Helsinki Group member Mykola Horbal, 43, was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp and three years of internal exile after he was convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" at a three-day trial April 8-10.

Tatiana Osipova of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group received an additional sentence of two years' strict-regimen camp plus five years in exile for "maliciously disobeying the orders of the administration of a corrective labor institution." Ms. Osipova was completing her five-year sentence for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" in a women's political camp and was awaiting another five-year term in exile.

Some good news came late in the year when 80-year-old Ukrainian Helsinki Group founding member Oksana Meshko was released after nearly five years in exile in the Khavarovsk region of Ukraine and was allowed to go home to Kiev.

In July the Ukrainian- and English-language editions of News From Ukraine, a newspaper published strictly for distribution outside the USSR, printed what were purported to be excerpts of a recantation written by Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group member and longtime dissident Yuriy Shukhevych. In the alleged recantation, Mr. Shukhevych denounced his father and his own "mistaken path," the excerpts appeared along with a photo-reproduction of a portion of the recantation in what was claimed to be the dissident's own handwriting. Observers in the West, including former Soviet political prisoners, human-rights organizations and handwriting experts, reported that the recantation was a fabrication. Stressing that, for various reasons, it is clear that the recantation was a forgery, Nina Strokata and her husband, Sviatislav Karavansky, both former prisoners of the gulag and members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, stated that the fabrication was aimed at halting Western defense actions on Mr. Shukhevych's behalf, as well as another maneuver in the USSR's "psychological war with the West."

1985 also saw a crackdown on religious activists, particularly defenders of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was dissolved by an illegal synod in 1946. While nine regular issues as well as one special issue of the samvydav Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine, documenting activities of the underground Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Believers and the Church, founded in 1982, surfaced in the West, members of the group suffered official harassment and arrests.

The group's first chairman and editor of the Chronicle, which appeared in consecutive issues of The Weekly from January through June, Yosyp Terelia, 42, was sentenced August 20 in Uzhhorod to seven years in a labor camp and five years in exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Mr. Terelia had been in hiding from November 1984 until his arrest in February 1985.

Vasyl Kobryn, 46, who served as the second chairman of the religious group, was arrested late last year and subsequently sentenced in March to three years in a general regimen camp for "disseminating of knowingly false fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social system."

Both of these men actively campaigned for the legalization and restoration of the Uniate Church, which claims some 4 million members in the USSR.

It is apparent that one Soviet dissident benefitted from the upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Geneva this November; Yelena Bonner was granted a three-month exit visa for medical treatment in the West after years of failed attempts and a hunger strike staged in protest by her husband, Soviet physicist and human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who remains in exile in the closed city of Gorky. A handful of separated spouses were reunited, also on the eve of the summit.

The superpower summit also resulted in an agreement to open consulates in Kiev and New York.