Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Pages 49-51

Congress Watch

Despite New Settlements, Assassination Attempt, Congress Renews Israeli Aid at Full 1997 Level

By Shirl McArthur

After returning to Washington from its August recess, the House passed the foreign aid appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 1998. As we noted in the October/November issue of the Washington Report, the House bill does not earmark specific amounts for any country, but the accompanying committee report "recommends" the same amounts as the Senate bill for Israel and Egypt. For Israel these are $1.2 billion in economic aid, $1.8 billion in military assistance, and $80 million for refugee resettlement. For Egypt the amounts are $815 million in economic aid and $1.3 billion in military assistance. The bill also asks the administration to continue to help Jordan, without putting a dollar amount on it.

The House bill retains the various mischievous clauses affecting the Middle East described in our last issue, including the Saxton Amendment, which would delay U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) for three months, and then allow aid only during the following six months if the president provides a detailed report on Palestinian actions in six specific areas. At the last minute, Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA) succeeded in passing an amendment that reduces the Economic Support Fund (the account that funds the economic aid to Israel and Egypt) by $25 million and increases the Africa Development Fund by the same amount. Interestingly, Campbell earlier had tried to shift a much smaller amount—$2.5 million—from the Economic Support Fund to the Development Assistance Fund, but was beaten back by Israel's supporters in the House International Relations Committee.

Another amendment, sponsored by Rep. Michael Forbes (R-NY), which would totally eliminate any assistance to the PA because of the recent terrorist bombings in Jerusalem, was withdrawn at the insistence of foreign aid appropriations subcommittee chairman Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-AL). Explaining this action on the floor of the House, Callahan said, "I do not think it is any secret to anybody in this body that I am a big believer in giving the administrative branch of this government the authority to handle foreign policy. Nothing in this bill is earmarked for any country, including Israel."

In our last issue we overlooked a mischievous amendment, sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), in the Senate version of the foreign aid appropriations bill, which would withhold five percent of all non-humanitarian assistance to any country found to be violating the U.N. sanctions on Libya. This appears to be specifically targeted at Egypt, for allowing certain Libyan overflights. There is no similar provision in the House bill.

At press time, the foreign aid appropriations bill is held up in conference committee, as is the foreign affairs authorizations bill. The latter is now known as the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act (FARRA), and it includes reform of the foreign affairs agencies, plus repayment of a major part of the U.S. arrears to the U.N. Although there are differences between the bills on Middle East issues, these are not the major points of contention. For both bills, the biggest fight apparently is over the issue of funding for family planning activities. For each bill, the House version includes much more stringent prohibitions in this field than do the Senate versions.

Possible New Sanctions Against Syria and Sudan

On July 8, the House passed H.R. 748, sponsored by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-FL) and co-sponsored by Reps. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Jim Saxton (R-NJ), which would cut off all financial transactions "with countries supporting terrorism." Currently, under the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Departments of State and Treasury can issue exemptions for certain such transactions. The McCollum bill would strip this exemption authority away from the executive branch. The bill effectively applies to Syria and Sudan, since the other terrorist-list countries—Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Cuba—are under sanctions under other provisions of the law.

The State Department strongly objected to the bill, saying that by stripping away all flexibility, the law could result in the U.S. failing to meet treaty and other international obligations. Nevertheless, the bill passed the House by a vote of 377 to 33.

The bill has not been acted on in the Senate, however, because the Senate version of the FARRA includes an amendment, sponsored by Sen. John Ashcroft (R-MO), that is similar to H.R. 748, but that provides a limited amount of presidential flexibility. We understand that the Senate leadership has decided to withhold action on H.R. 748 until the FARRA conference committee finishes its work. If the Ashcroft Amendment survives the conference, H.R. 748 will probably be allowed to die.

House Hearings on Religious Persecution

Following the Senate hearings on religious persecution, described in our last issue, the House International Relations Committee held two days of hearings on Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-VA) "Freedom From Religious Persecution" bill on Sept. 9 and 10. Wolf's original bill drew fire from different directions. The State Department objected for a long list of reasons, including the fact that it would create a new bureaucracy within the White House and risk harming relations with key allies. Some people complained that it could have unintended consequences for U.S. immigration policy, because of its provision for religious persecution asylum. To meet some of these objections, Wolf withdrew his first bill and submitted a revised version (H.R. 2431) that is longer and more complex than his first bill. However, as with Wolf's original proposal, H.R. 2431 still would establish an Office of Religious Persecution Monitoring in the White House, require the office to send reports to Congress, and impose specific sanctions on those countries named in the report as engaging in religious persecution. And a large part of the text still is devoted to detailing a broad range of sanctions against Sudan.

The subject of world-wide religious persecution seems to be gaining increasing attention in Congress, and many observers believe that some kind of sanctions bill will eventually emerge. However, because Wolf's bill crosses so many jurisdictions, it has been referred to four other committees in addition to the International Relations Committee: Ways and Means, Judiciary, Banking and Financial Services, and Rules, thus increasing the chances for conflicts of priority and interests, and decreasing the chances that the bill will be enacted in this session of Congress.

Senate Hearing on Middle East Appointees

On Sept. 18, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally held a hearing on five diplomatic appointments to the Middle East: Martin Indyk to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; Wyche Fowler, Jr., to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Robin Raphel to be ambassador to Tunisia; Johnny Young to be ambassador to Bahrain; and Barbara Bodine to be ambassador to Yemen. The hearing originally was also to include Edward Gabriel, nominated to be ambassador to Morocco, but at the last minute Gabriel's nomination was tainted by ongoing congressional hearings on election campaign financing. Someone claiming to be Egyptian-born Lebanese financier Roger Tamraz, who had been testifying on campaign finance, telephoned the Foreign Relations Committee to say that Gabriel had received $50,000 from Tamraz to arrange a meeting with then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary. Asked about the matter, Gabriel called the charge "science fiction," and Tamraz, testifying before the House Governmental Affairs Committee, denied making the call and said that he didn't know and has never met Gabriel. Nevertheless, Gabriel's hearing was put off while this was being sorted out.

The hearing for the five nominees, chaired by Near East and South Asia Subcommittee Chairman Sam Brownback (R-KS), lasted only two hours, with more than half of the session devoted to Indyk. Indyk, currently ambassador to Israel, was born in the U.K. and educated in Australia. After working as a Middle East consultant with the government of Australia and as a media consultant to Likud Party leader and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Indyk first came to the U.S. in 1982 as a visiting fellow at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. After six months he moved to the research arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal Washington, DC lobby, as senior policy analyst. Two years later, with funding from Barbi Weinberg, wife of a member of AIPAC's board of directors, Indyk founded and became the first executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Prior to becoming ambassador to Israel, Indyk was the Clinton administration's director for the Near East and South Asia at the National Security Council from January 1993 to March 1995.

At the hearing, the senators were relatively gentle with Indyk, but hostile to the Clinton administration's policies toward the Middle East. Some senators were especially critical of the administration's unwillingness to implement Congress's Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act of 1995, which says that it is "the policy of the United States" that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel, and requires that the U.S. Embassy in Israel be moved to Jerusalem no later that May 31, 1999. The senators, especially Sen. Rod Grams (R-MN), repeatedly tried to pin Indyk down on the subject of Jerusalem. To his credit, however, Indyk did not waver and repeatedly tried to explain that because Jerusalem is a sensitive issue, the administration is trying to walk a line between congressional wishes and keeping the peace process on track. Indyk stopped just short of specifically saying that to heed congressional wishes would surely sabotage prospects for peace in the Middle East. Finally, after a particularly stupid question from Grams regarding the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, Indyk said, "We should not be trying to impose our views, particularly in this case where the parties agreed in Oslo that Jerusalem is a subject for final status negotiations."

Also of interest to the committee, especially Brownback, were reports of Chinese and Russian exports of missiles to Iran. Brownback asked whether Indyk thought such transfers were inherently "destabilizing" (a trigger-word in the Iran sanctions legislation). Indyk said anything that gives Iran the indigenous capacity to produce advanced missiles would be destabilizing, but that it has not been established that the exports have produced this capacity. He said the administration considers reports of Russian exports to be of more concern than Chinese exports.

Returning to the Israel-Palestine issue, Senators Ashcroft and Charles Robb (D-VA) raised what they called the "apparent complicity" between President Arafat and Hamas. Robb asked how much control Arafat has over Hamas, and Indyk replied that Hamas's infrastructure is widely established and Arafat "cannot turn them on and turn them off." At that point it was Robb's turn to ask a stupid question: "Why not get their attention by cutting off all aid to the Palestinians except humanitarian aid through non-governmental organizations?" Indyk replied that (a) the administration considers all U.S. aid to be humanitarian, (b) project aid does not go to the PA but to USAID-administered projects, and (c) it would be a mistake to cut off project aid, because the standard of living of the Palestinian people has dropped 40 percent since Oslo and to cut off U.S. aid would only increase the suffering of the Palestinians and further the feelings of despair on which Hamas thrives.

The remainder of the hearing, concerning the other four ambassadorial nominees, was far less eventful. All four submitted prepared statements designed to show their qualifications and grasp of the issues affecting their respective countries of assignment. Fowler, formerly a U.S. representative and then senator from Georgia, was a recess appointee last year and has actually been serving in Saudi Arabia, without confirmation, since then. Raphel, a career foreign service officer, is the widow of U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, who was killed in the crash of a Pakistani government aircraft in which Pakistan's military strongman Gen. Zia Ul Haq also died. She has just completed an assignment as the first assistant secretary for South Asian affairs after South Asia was split off from the State Department's former Near East and South Asia Bureau. Young, too, is a career foreign service officer and has previously served as ambassador to Sierra Leone and Togo. Bodine is also a career foreign service officer whose first assignment, 20 years ago, was as Yemen desk officer. Subsequently she was deputy director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs.

The only questions were addressed to Fowler, and they were mostly perfunctory, concerning Saudi Arabia's relations with Iran. (Fowler said that Saudi Arabia, along with the rest of the Gulf, watches Iran's actions very closely.) Finally, it was Brownback's turn to ask the stupid question, so he asked Fowler whether the U.S. now has any hard information indicating an Iranian role in the Khobar Towers bombing. One wonders how many people would have been injured in the stampede from the press table to the telephones had Fowler said "yes!"