tainly not all countries on the left. Central African Empire was never on the left and some of the others were on the left in only very strange ways of saying they were not in any meaningful sense on the left, for example Equatorial Guinea. Uganda called itself all kinds of things but I would not call it on the left so I don't think this is a fair criticism of this particular list.

The other point is that in any one of the countries that would fall just above this listing there are some mitigating circumstances in the evidence I received to indicate there is a form of civil liberties and a form of expression, for example-maybe a little more freedom of religion here than elsewhere. On the political side, often there have been some kinds of elections, although often very poor elections.

Mr. BONKER. What about Zimbabwe where 8 million blacks are disenfranchised? Don't they qualify on your scale anywhere?

Mr. GASTIL. Let me say several things about Zimbabwe. One, it is in the middle of a civil war so that there are many people in prison for violence; this makes them quite different than strictly prisoners of conscience. It is a little hard to judge prisoners there as we would in Benin which is not in this situation. As far as political rights are concerned they have gone to a great effort to include the black population in the political system with competitive politics.

I am fully aware that the whole of the black population is not included in the sense that certain leaders chose not to compete in the election. They were offered a chance to compete. It may be interesting to you that there was in the African report an article on what would have been the outcome on an election in Zimbabwe Rhodesia if it were fully free. This was written before the elections occurred by a professor resident in Zambia. His analysis was in many ways reflected in the actual election results. For example, the number of seats ascribed to Sithole was almost exactly the number of representatives he in fact obtained in the election. This kind of an election, an imperfect election in which not all political forces are correctly represented, is typical of many of the middle, partly free, countries that we have to deal with, for example, in Egypt or Morocco. I happen to have gone to Zimbabwe and observed their election as some of you may know, but I think my analysis would not have been that different if I had just examined its results at a distance.

Mr. BONKER. I have one final question. I am rather surprised that somehow you could characterize the Western Sahara as a human rights issue in the sense that it is a plus for Morocco. In fact, I think it is rather incredible that you could make that assertion.

Mr. GASTIL. In the sense that it is what?

Mr. BONKER. In the sense that it was a

Mr. GASTIL. It was a plus for Morocco?

Mr. BONKER. Yes; that is what you are saying in effect. You say, for instance, there is considerable justice in Morocco's claim to the Western Sahara and I don't know how you can make that statement in view of the International Court's decision that says in effect that the people of the Western Sahara deserve their own independence.

Mr. GASTIL. I think if you read my submission more carefully you will note that what I say is, it is an important human rights problem especially in the self-determination area. That is not a plus, it is a negative. I am saying it is an important problem but compared to the

other problems we are considering here there are three kinds of reasons why I would not make it one of the more important problems; one of those reasons is there is considerable justice to the Moroccan claim. I don't think it is enough justice.

Mr. BONKER. On what basis?

Mrs. FENWICK. I can give you the basis because we had testimony on that. The International Court held that on no less than three historic times and they date back 800, 1,000, or 1,100 years ago, there were sovereignty agreements and relationships between the tribes of the Western Sahara and Morocco. Certainly the Spaniards interfered with these arrangements. However, the International Court went on to say that despite these relationships that were historic they had the right to self-determination. That was the conclusion.

Mr. BONKER. I yield to my legal adviser, Mr. Solarz.

Mr. SOLARZ. Well, this is a very interesting question and one which I attempted to address during the course of my own trip to Morocco in August because in the course of my 2 weeks there I heard everything I always wanted to know but was afraid to ask about the Western Sahara. Of course you hear completely conflicting claims to the region, and I heard the International Court of Justice opinion referred to so often by the Moroccans as the justification for their claim that I finally decided I better read it myself.

Fortunately, assisted by able staff that had put together a compendious briefing book for me which included the full text of that opinion, I was able to read it in the course of the flight from Rabat to Dakhla and lo and behold much to my amazement I found that virtually all of the Moroccans with whom I had spoken to who had cited that opinion as justification for the Moroccan claim had literally wrenched it completely out of context. If you read the opinion, it is fairly clear that the bottom line of the International Court of Justice is, and I am now quoting almost verbatim, that while there were historic ties of allegiance between some of the tribes in the Western Sahara and Morocco, they do not constitute an adequate basis for a contemporaneous claim of sovereignty over the Western Sahara by Morocco and that therefore pursuant to or over a whole variety of U.N. resolutions which have been passed as well as the U.N. Charter the people of that territory should be entitled to determine their own future.

So whatever else the International Court of Justice opinion means an opinion which by the way was requested by Morocco and Mauritania, not by the people of the region-it clearly does not constitute a basis for Moroccan assertion of sovereignty.

Mr. GASTIL. I am sorry, if I may wonder exactly how this came up because I certainly never made any claim that it did support the Moroccan case. I realize what you say. I do not think Moroccans have handled this as adequately as they should have. For example, the suggestion has been made that there should be a vote taken now. This has been opposed by both Polisario and the Moroccans, and that kind of solution is the one I would look for. I was trying in this paper to put certain problems in order of importance as human rights considerations. This is how the question of Sahara got in.

Mr. SOLARZ. I don't want to take any more of your time. Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BONKER. I will turn over the remaining time I have to you. Mr. Gastil, I don't know why you ever mentioned it in the first place in your statement.

Mr. SOLARZ. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Since we are on Morocco, you do have somewhere in your testimony the statement that Morocco's claim to the Sahara is more just than Zaire's claim to Katanga. I don't necessarily come to defend Zaire's claim to Katanga but I am interested in what the basis is for that interesting comparison.

Mr. GASTIL. When I said it was more just I was looking at the degrees of similarity of the peoples involved. It seemed to me there was a greater divergence of ethnic allegiance as you moved across Zaire to the area of Katanga than there was as you moved down the coast from Morocco. It appears to me in my judgment as if there was more of a case for Zaire breaking up in that particular way.

Mr. SOLARZ. You mean on ethnic grounds?
Mr. GASTIL. Yes; on ethnic grounds.

Mr. SOLARZ. It is an interesting argument. If that argument were accepted, it would be a prescription not only for the entire continent but for a number of countries in the U.N. You have 250 tribes in Zaire; it is not just Katanga. On the basis of that reasoning would they have a right to secede? Also, we would be even more isolated in the General Assembly than we are now. We would have to admit all the new states to the Security Council also.

Mr. GASTIL. What I was trying to do in this kind of presentation was to ask the question why international organizations and American foreign policy concentrate more on certain kinds of ethnic problems and not on others. It is true that Africa is faced with many of these problems. But Western Sahara has been brought to public consciousness.

Mrs. FENWICK. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SOLARZ. Certainly.

Mrs. FENWICK. I think we all know that any country that opposes the United States and is unfriendly receives more sympathetic treatment than those that are more friendly to the United States. I don't know why but it is one of the facts of life that we have to wrestle with. I don't know why it is true, but it is.

Mr. SOLARZ. By the way, I want to make it clear that my attitude toward President Mobutu notwithstanding, I am not in the camp of Tshombe or any of his followers or gendarmes or whatever.

One final question on Morocco. You did say on page 5 of your testimony, "there is considerable justice in the Moroccan claim." What was the basis for that, the ICJ opinion or something? I was not clear on your answer to that.

Mr. GASTIL. The point is the Moroccans have a claim to this area that they feel was historically at various times in the past a part of Morocco. The King's family, I believe, came from what is now in the Western Sahara area. There is an overlapping of tribes along the border so that some of them move across the Moroccan border seasonally. On the other hand, Ethiopia, for example, was put together less than a hundred years ago.

Mr. SOLARZ. I don't disagree with what you said at all. The Moroccans do have a claim, it is not a black and white case, and their assertions of sovereignty over the area are not made up out of the whole

cloth. There was some kind of historical relationship. Whether it is an adequate argument is another question but it is clearly not a political fabrication designed simply to satisfy whatever expansionist tendency there may be.

Let me ask the representatives of Amnesty and Freedom House whether, if you look at human rights in Africa, and I am broadly speaking in comparison to developing parts of the world such as Asia and Latin and South America, could you reach any conclusions overall about the state of human rights in Africa compared to these other developing parts of the world?

Mr. GASTIL. Do you want to direct that to me?
Mr. SOLARZ. Decide among yourselves.

Mr. GASTIL. There are several points of view. One is that among developing countries, more of Africa should probably be considered as poor and undeveloped than any other continent. In this sense it is natural that we find more problems related to poverty and less influence of the ideas that flowed out of Europe in the 19th century. Literacy, for example, is much lower in Africa than it is typically in other areas of the world.

There are certain kinds of human rights violations that are typical in certain areas and not so typical in others. In Latin America "disappearances" and torture are more common. But there is more respect and understanding of political and civil freedoms in a larger percentage of the population in Latin America and in many of the countries of Asia than there is in most of Africa.

Mr. SOLARZ. More what did you say?

Mr. GASTIL. More understanding and respect for the kinds of political rights we are talking about in larger segments of the population in those countries, in those other two continents than in most of Africa. Mr. SOLARZ. And Amnesty International?

Mr. MCGEE. Well, we really prefer not to rate countries or continents. I might put my own personal reaction to your question in the context of a remark that Justice Douglas made in a case where he stated that he thought the Constitution of the United States was concerned with the protection of the individual human soul and in that context given the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights and the concerns of human rights around the world how can one compare the human rights situation in the midst of starvation of Cambodia or Haiti and the incredible starvations of different parts of the world or the starvations of different neighborhoods in New York City?

Mr. SOLARZ. Well, I just have a few more questions here and then I will let Mrs. Fenwick take care of you. [Laughter.]

Mr. MCGEE. I was afraid of that.

Mr. SOLARZ. I am a little bit disturbed, as was the gentleman from Washington, about the Freedom House listing of the worst human rights violators which appeared to leave out South Africa. Are you seriously suggesting that in human rights terms a black person is better off in say South Africa than Somalia? Are you really saying that if you are black and you have one of these two countries to choose to live in, your primary concern is human rights, and you have been offered a job with equal pay in both countries, that you should choose South Africa rather than Somalia?

Mr. GASTIL. I think different people can make different definitions of human rights. This paper is based on a concept of freedom, includ

ing political and civil liberties. If you accept this definition, then I think a black in South Africa has a better chance than does a black in Somalia. Also, let me mention that 17 percent of the population is not an inconsiderable number when most countries in the world have little more than that among the educated people that are the primary political participants.

Mr. SOLARZ. It seems to me that is the trouble with your index which is often cited by people around here as a justification for reaching a certain conclusion and that is that you seem to have a check list of a variety of rights and freedoms-freedom of the press, freedom of political parties, freedom of speech, whatever. Then you kind of attempt to do a quantiative analysis-this country check off four, another one you check off two; the country with four has more freedom than the country with two. But what it seems to overlook is that sometimes a violation of one of those rights can be so overwhelming or so politically or psychologically significant that it can far outweight whatever modest advantages you may have in the other

areas.

For example, take South Africa. Now I am not black obviously and I am certainly not South African but I would imagine from a psychological point of view the system of apartheid, the systematic exclusion of blacks from the social, economic, and political life of the country for no other reason than the color of their skin, must be from a psychological point of view enormously debilitating because it strikes at the very dignity of the human being whereas in Somalia, and I have no beef with the Somalian Government, whatever else you may say about it, to the extent that someone is deprived of the freedoms in that you would like them to have at least they are not deprived of it in that particular country because of the color of their skin, and it would seem to me in that sense in terms of their own sense of dignity and self-worth that however bad conditions may be in Somalia at least they don't suffer from the disability that black people suffer from in South Africa. In those terms I would think, maybe it is just a projection of my own values, that a black person in probably human rights terms is better off in Somalia than in South Africa. Now obviously disagree with that.

you

Mrs. FENWICK. It depends on what you want, if I may, Mr. Chairman. I disagree with Freedom House's conclusion but I think that Amnesty's conclusion is also wrong. I don't think starving is the the worst thing. I think being humiliated daily is the worst thing. I would far rather be free and starving than living in somebody else's sanitary day care center. Human needs are food and clothing and shelter but they are not human rights, that is quite different. President Carter made that difference clear when he went to India, and I agree. We are talking about two different things.

No country, if it is poor, can guarantee food, clothing, and shelter for its people but it can guarantee decent treatment and liberty. I would far rather be in a free country than a rich one, if I had to choose. In Cambodia people are being killed by the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese want the land and the power. It is an entirely different thing.

Of course if you are in the last straits of starvation, you would give anything for food. Speaking from the point of value, we have human