by AFT President Sandra Feldman
May 1999

Our own freedom depends
on how much we are
willing to sacrifice for
the rights of others.

As terrible images of shattered lives and lines of distraught refugees from Kosovo have become an integral part of our everyday experience, Americans and our allies have responded with strength of heart and generosity of spirit. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe our involvement there is right. The real debate taking place is over whether we went in early enough and whether we should send troops.

Whatever your opinion--and mine is that we need to do all we can, sooner rather than later--it's useful at times like these to reflect on the extraordinary experience of American democracy. Because in the end, our humanitarian impulses and our resolve in dangerous situations, like the one in Kosovo, are tied to our underlying understanding that our own freedom as a nation depends a great deal on how much we're prepared to sacrifice for the rights of others.

Revisiting Tiananmen Square

In just one month from now, we'll be revisiting some other horrific images from another part of the world, those of the June 4, 1989, massacre of innocent students and workers demonstrating in Tiananmen Square.

While our government works at the nature of our "engagement" with China--and engagement clearly is necessary---the tenth anniversary of Tiananmen Square gives us the opportunity not only to reassert our support for those in China still imprisoned for trying to exercise basic rights but for those who, despite the brutal crackdown they experienced and know could come again at any moment, continue to struggle for the right of free association, the right to organize unions, the right to speak their minds freely. We need to make sure attention continues to be paid to people like Xu Wenli and Wang Youcai, who received prison terms last year for attempting to establish an independent political party.

The Basic Principles

Whether in China or Yugoslavia, for educators and trade unionists, the standards remain the same. Is there a right of free association? Can dissenters exercise rights of free speech? Is there freedom of the press? The American Federation of Teachers, along with the AFL-CIO, has long been at the side of those who struggle for basic human rights, not just in our own country during the Civil Rights Movement but elsewhere in the world. During the Cold War, we helped dissidents in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the former Soviet Union in many different ways. In South Africa, we provided support to black trade unionists in their fight against apartheid; in Chile, we aided our sister teachers' union in the struggle against Pinochet; and we have supported democracies in other places in the world.

A Dangerous World

But as has become clear in the recent post-Cold-War past, and certainly as we see in Kosovo, the world remains a dangerous place, complicated by the fact that we live more and more in a global economy, linked by important economic ties to some nations whose human rights policies we abhor. We have to balance many considerations. But when it comes down to a choice, there's no question about where we should stand.

In Kosovo, complexities notwithstanding, we must continue to make it increasingly hard for Slobodan Milosevic to carry out his evil campaign against the basic human rights of the Kosovars. As for China, we must make sure the government is constantly aware that the rest of the world supports the Chinese citizens who insist on exercising their human rights.

 The Global Petition Campaign

One way we can do that right now is by supporting the Global Petition Campaign. The petition, which can be signed on the Internet (at www.june4.org), was mounted by a group of Chinese dissidents in exile, and it has won the support of labor and human rights organizations and people from all over the world. It calls on the Chinese government to free those still imprisoned as a result of the 1989 crackdown and all other "prisoners of conscience" and to extend, to all Chinese citizens, basic human rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.

We don't have a crystal ball that will reveal the future of democracy in China or the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars--or what will happen in any of the crises that will threaten human freedom and dignity tomorrow. But concern for human rights has been a precious and reliable compass for us in the past, and we must continue to make it our guide.