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Senate Panel Backs Negroponte for UN Post - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Senate Panel Backs Negroponte
for UN PostBy Jonathan Wright,
Reuters
September 14, 2001
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, anxious to fill the long-vacant post of US ambassador to the United Nations, yesterday endorsed controversial nominee John Negroponte for the post.
After some tough questioning on his attitude toward human rights abuses as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, the committee voted 14-3 in favor of the nomination. Senators said the United States needed an ambassador in New York as soon as possible to mobilize international support for President Bush's campaign against terrorism.
The position has been vacant since Bush took office Jan. 20, possibly contributing to Washington's embarrassing failure to keep its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission. Another incentive for a quick appointment is the upcoming start of the UN General Assembly at UN headquarters.
Negroponte received bipartisan praise for his long record of public service, but three Democrats, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and Barbara Boxer of California, said he had not given satisfactory answers regarding his embassy's reporting of human rights abuses and on his contacts with right-wing Contra guerrillas.
Negroponte, pressed on various human rights cases in Honduras and on what he discussed with the Contras, told the Senate committee he could not remember.
Wellstone, the senator most strongly opposed to the nomination, said that as ambassador in Tegucigalpa between 1981 and 1985 Negroponte had denied the existence of death squads in the Central American country, contrary to evidence subsequently accepted by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. ''I just can't understand why you were not more outspoken, why you were not more public and why, even today, you seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that the state was involved, that the government was involved. ... That's my concern,'' Wellstone said.
Negroponte, 62, a career diplomat who has also been US ambassador to the Philippines and Mexico, replied: ''Could I have been more vocal? Perhaps in retrospect I could have been but that's the way I handled it.'' But he again denied any knowledge that death squads existed or that he tried to restrict or tone down reporting of human rights abuses to the State Department.
Boxer said she was worried that Negroponte wanted to ignore the history of what the United States did in Central America. She challenged him on his meetings with leaders of the Contra guerrilla movement, which the Reagan administration covertly funded in an attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. Boxer had campaigned for the Boland amendment, which made it illegal to fund the Contras.
''I certainly didn't discuss anything that would have been contrary to the Boland amendment. The specific tenure of our conversations I don't recall,'' Negroponte replied. Feingold said his objection to the nomination was based on the accuracy of Negroponte's reporting to the State Department on human rights, a duty mandated by Congress.
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