Just Politics: Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of Great Powers

[5] Human Rights and Vital Security

This chapter focuses on humanitarian norms in cases where partners are believed to be especially vital, contrasting decisions by the United States to terminate aid to Turkey, Guatemala, and El Salvador with Washington ’s preservation of military assistance to South Korea, the Philippines , and Greece. Many of these latter cases are mentioned by critics as evidence that human rights matter little in great power politics. This chapter demonstrates, though, that under the conditions discussed in chapter 1, humanitarian norms played a critical role in all of these vital relationships. Above all else, the importance of both liberalizing developments and the nature of activist pressure come into sharp relief. U.S. Relations with South Korea and the Philippines South Korea and the Philippines were longstanding U.S. allies in the Cold War. Their perceived value to the United States was largely geostrategic. The 1952 Mutual Security Assistance Act that established the executive-legislative mechanism for providing countries with military assistance in the battle against communism was called into being by the Korean War. The United States was determined to protect states in the developing world against Soviet bloc aggression. Not surprisingly, South Korea quickly became one of the leading recipients of aid, with Seoul collecting nearly $13 billion in military and economic assistance by the late 1970s.1 The Philippines represented another major aid recipient, signing a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (MDAA) with Washington in 1947. In return for U.S. assistance (approximately $876 million between 1946 and 1976), the Philippines served as a major outpost for the U.S. military in [5] Human Rights and Vital Security [144] Asia. It housed sixteen U.S. military bases, including the Clark Airfield and Subic Bay Naval Base. These outposts provided the best geostrategic location for the United States to act quickly in Southeast Asia, an advantage not afforded by other U.S. bases in Guam, Japan, and Hawaii due to their greater distance from the region.2 Like other allies of the United States in the developing world during the Cold War, South Korea and the Philippines faced growing internal political turmoil that eventually led to repressive, nondemocratic regimes by the 1970s. Until 1972, the Philippines was a relatively free but unstable democratic state. The situation worsened over time. As a result of deep and highly volatile ideological cleavages, the government faced daily bombings and work stoppages by the early 1970s. As the disorder reached crisis levels, President Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972. It was the beginning of almost fourteen years of uninterrupted state-led oppression , including political arrests with long detentions, instances of torture , and summary executions. In the first few years of the martial law regime, approximately fifty thousand people were arrested for political reasons. Between 1972 and 1979, 250 demonstrations against the government occurred. Thirty-three of those ended with beatings and gun-fire from security forces.3 By 1984, Fred Poole and Max Vanzi estimated that one hundred thousand civilians had died since 1972 in the battles between security forces and guerrillas; the Marcos regime became particularly infamous for its brutal treatment of prisoners: “Torture, rape and murder had become so prevalent in these new detention areas that the Philippines had moved toward the top of Amnesty International’s list.”4 The story of South Korea followed a similar trajectory, though with an even longer period of repressive rule. After the brutal government of Syngman Rhee fell during the widespread student protests of 1960, Korea’s short-lived experiment with democracy over the next year ended with a military coup by General Park Chung-Hee in 1961. Under pressure from the United States, Park civilianized the regime and won consecutive rounds of relatively free presidential elections in 1963 and 1967. The 1971 elections brought a narrow victory for Park, however. Combined with concerns about the drawdown of U.S. troops under the Nixon Doctrine and U.S. normalization of relations with China, Park feared internal political problems and imposed martial law in 1972.5 Extensive political repression followed. Most scholars agree that thousands of citizens “disappeared,” and many thousands more faced torture at the hands of the regime. The most brutal violence was prosecuted against students, intellectuals , and religious leaders.6 Abuses increased further when the Park regime became the victim of a coup by General Chun Doo Hwan. Human Rights and Vital Security [145] Chun declared his commitment to martial law in...