Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, page 45

Special Report

Congress Passed Modified Religious Freedom Bill

By Shirl McArthur

Sometimes the legislative process works the way it is supposed to. For nearly a year and a half, beginning with the first, draconian “religious persecution” bill introduced in the House by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and in the Senate by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) during the first half of 1997, Congress went through a series of drafts, redrafts, hearings, and revisions to produce a compromise “International Religious Freedom Act” on Oct. 10.

Many congressmen still hope to force mandatory actions against enemies of Israel.

The final bill was modified to provide enough flexibility and escape clauses to overcome the objections raised by the administration and by many senators and representatives. However, as was demonstrated by an Oct. 15 anti-Saudi Arabia tirade by Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), many congressmen still hope to force the executive branch to take mandatory actions against enemies of Israel. Even with the moderating features, in the final analysis the bill still represents one more instance of the Israel lobby encouraging the U.S. Congress to impose American values on the rest of the world, thus preventing any U.S. rapprochement with Israel’s “enemies.”

The original Wolf/Specter bill was truly terrible. It would have established a religious persecution monitoring office in the White House, and imposed harsh mandatory sanctions on countries deemed by the political appointees in that office to be practicing religious discrimination. It also devoted an entire section to specific sanctions against Sudan.

After protests from many directions, including from some Christian leaders who feared that the bill would cause an anti-Christian backlash in many countries and do more harm than good to their work, Wolf revised his bill to take some of the objections into account. It still would have imposed mandatory sanctions, however, and it still contained an entire section devoted to Sudan. Nevertheless, the revised Wolf bill passed the House on May 14, 1998.

Senator Nickles’ Bill

In the Senate, Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), introduced a more flexible bill on March 26, 1998. It provided for a broad range of sanctions, both harsh and mild, and it provided a limited presidential waiver provision. Senators raised objections, however, both because of the fear of backlash and because of concern that unilateral sanctions would hurt American businesses and farmers more than the offending country.

Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Rod Grams (R-MN), and Joe Biden (D-DE) were particularly outspoken in their objections. In July, the Nickles bill was withdrawn from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s agenda.

However, an alliance of the Christian right and the Israel lobby continued to push for the bill, and in an election year they could not be denied. Nickles, Lieberman, Hagel and Grams worked with Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, a Clinton administration political appointee and a former Jewish organizational leader, to put together a more flexible bill that all of them could live with.

The Improved Bill

On the floor of the Senate, Biden, after saying that he still did not think the legislation was necessary and he still believed that applying unilateral sanctions is not sound foreign policy, said that he would vote for the bill anyway, because of four key improvements over previous drafts:

• The bill provides a broad menu of presidential options, ranging from a simple private démarche to prohibiting any U.S. government contracts with the offending country. If the president doesn’t like any of the choices on the “menu,” he is free to take “commensurate action,” that is, action commensurate to the items on the menu.
  
  
• The bill provides a broad waiver authority. The president may waive the application of the sanction if the foreign government has stopped the “violations,” if using the waiver would “further the purposes of the act,” or if important national interests justified the waiver. (Previous versions called for a waiver based on “national security interests,” a much tougher test.)
  
  
• The sanctions automatically terminate after two years, unless specifically reauthorized. The president may also terminate them if the foreign government has “ceased or taken substantial and verifiable steps to cease” the violations.
  
  
• Food, medicine, medical equipment or supplies, and other humanitarian assistance are exempted from the sanctions.

Other Legislation Dies

Nearly all the rest of the Middle East-related bills described in previous issues of the Washington Report died without being passed by one or both houses of Congress or, in one case, without the presidential veto being overturned. However, parts of some of the bills were slipped into the omnibus appropriations package approved on Oct. 19 (see separate article, p. 51).

The presidential veto that was allowed to stand was for the Iran Missile Sanctions Bill (H.R. 2709), which Clinton vetoed on June 23. The bill would have required that sanctions be imposed on any “foreign person” found to have transferred goods or technology, or provided technical assistance or facilities, that contributed to Iran’s efforts to acquire, develop, or produce ballistic missiles. Although the bill passed both houses of Congress with large margins, the congressional leaders apparently decided not to pick a fight with Clinton over this issue, since they had already earned their Brownie points with the Israel lobby by passing the bill.

Although legislation rationalizing U.S. existing sanctions policy was not passed, progress was made. In the last days of the session, the Senate passed a resolution authorizing the printing and distribution of the testimony from the hearings of the Task Force on Sanctions, thus indicating that the subject will likely be pursued further by the next Congress.