Tribute to Ambassador Warren Zimmermann

TRIBUTE TO AMBASSADOR WARREN ZIMMERMANN -- (Extensions of Remarks - February 10, 2004)

SPEECH OF
HON. STENY H. HOYER
OF MARYLAND
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2004

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, last week a prominent thinker and actor in American foreign policy passed away. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann died on Tuesday, February 3, from pancreatic cancer. He was a career foreign service officer, who later taught at both Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities.

I had the honor and privilege of working with Ambassador Zimmermann in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Our collaboration began when he was chosen to represent the United States at the Vienna Follow-Up Meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. At the time, I was Chairman of the Helsinki Commission. Under his leadership, State Department officers and Commission staff together formed the basis of the U.S. delegation. Ambassador Zimmermann recognized the talent, expertise and political support offered by the Commission and ensured that bureaucratic hurdles would not jeopardize its integration and effectiveness.

Warren Zimmermann also agreed essentially with Commission views about being bold on human rights, on naming the names of political prisoners and divided families as well as the names of the countries whose governments were denying them and many others their basic human rights. Ambassador Zimmermann challenged the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies to uphold their Helsinki Final Act commitments. This happened during the critical first years that Gorbachev was in power in Moscow, and the Vienna meeting helped to give real meaning to words like glasnost and perestroika by insisting, before it would conclude, on actual implementation of existing commitments along with more specific and forward-looking new human rights commitments.

To his credit, and with potential implications for his, career, Ambassador Zimmermann was prepared to remain in Vienna until the Soviets resolved long-standing human rights cases. During the course of the meeting, over 600 of the 750 Soviet political prisoners listed as such by the United States were freed, including all Helsinki monitors. The number of bilateral family reunification cases was reduced from 150 to about 10, and foreign radio broadcast jamming ended. While other, larger factors were, of course, at play, Warren Zimmermann, the U.S. Delegation and the friends and allies of the United States meeting in Vienna from 1986 to 1989 helped in no small way to bring an end to the Cold War and the decades-long, artificial division of Europe.

Warren Zimmermann not only engaged his fellow diplomats. He also developed close contacts with Soviet human rights activists during his postings at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow which he maintained through the Vienna meeting. For his efforts on behalf of refuseniks, he was awarded the Anatoly Sharansky Freedom Award by the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.

After the Vienna meeting ended in 1989, he went on to serve as the United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia. In that capacity, he would again work with the Commission at a decisive time, namely the beginning of the violent disintegration of the Yugoslav federation. The Helsinki principles, which we had just defended in Vienna, were about to witness their most severe violations primarily at the direction of Slobodan Milosevic. Ambassador Zimmermann knew well the complexities of the Balkans, but, like the Commission, he also knew that human rights violations-in this case taking the form of ethnic cleansing-could not be explained and accepted as the historical inevitability that the region's nationalist propagandists would want us to believe.

Warren Zimmermann's approach to U.S. foreign policy embraced the broader, comprehensive view of security that was relevant to the Cold War, to the Balkan conflicts and to our world today. In 1986, he noted the vital connection between a state's approach to human rights domestically and its conduct internationally. "If a state is pathologically distrustful of its own citizens," he asked, "is it not prone to a certain paranoia in its foreign policy? If a state does not earn the trust of its own citizens, should it have the confidence of other states? If a state is a threat to its own people, can it fail to present a potential threat to peoples beyond its borders?"

Mr. Speaker, Warren Zimmermann was an American patriot who served this Nation with honor and distinction for decades. His professional legacy is marked by a continual striving for freedom, democracy and human rights, and today there are innumerable people in Europe and elsewhere who live freer, happier lives because of his life's work.
I want to extend my sincerest condolences to Ambassador Zimmermann's wife, Teeny, his entire family, many friends and admiring colleagues.

END