Bush Meets Dissidents In Campaign For Rights

The recent Bush and Rice meetings have won applause from organizations seeking to highlight despotism around the globe. "These meetings send a signal so that it's not only the government that's on the agenda of the [U.S.] leadership but the people who are on the forefront of fighting for change," said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, which promotes liberty abroad.

Windsor, Malinowski and other activists gave Rice a list of imprisoned political activists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They recommended that she press the governments there about their fates during her upcoming trip to the Middle East, much as Reagan did with the Soviet government. Windsor said she also urged Rice to meet with the demonstrators who were beaten by pro-government mobs in Egypt. Rice encouraged the activists to also focus on North Korea and Venezuela.

Bush rarely met with dissidents during his first term, but he appears to be more eager to do so in his second. After reading former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's book extolling democracy late last year, Bush invited him to the White House for a meeting. He similarly became interested in Kang after former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger recommended the North Korean's book two months ago.

"I thought the book gave a good description of life in North Korea," Kissinger explained in an interview yesterday. Bush's meeting with Kang "signals that the president of the United States is concerned about their fate, and not just their individual fates, but the conditions that made their fates possible."

Bush plowed through the book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag," and then began urging advisers such as Rice and Gerson to read it as well. During their 40-minute meeting Monday, also attended by Vice President Cheney, Bush asked Kang to describe life in the prison camp, where he was forced to perform hard labor starting at age 9.

According to an account published by Kang in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo -- and confirmed by Gerson -- he urged the president to make it his priority to free those held in North Korea's prison camps. "For North Koreans," Kang said he told Bush, "human rights issues are more desperate than nuclear issues."

Bush, according to Kang, said he thought that the human rights situation in North Korea was serious but that others often did not understand it. He told Kang that "it breaks my heart" to learn of pregnant women and children starving in North Korea. Kang told him that the North Korean military often takes donated international food for itself. Bush said that if Pyongyang makes fundamental changes, "the U.S. will deliver a lot of food and funds to North Korea," Kang recalled.

Bush's meetings with such figures can carry unintended consequences. Bush met May 31 with Maria Corina Machado, founder of a Venezuelan civil society group called Sumate and a leading critic of President Hugo Chavez. Machado faces a possible prison sentence after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy.

In an interview from Caracas, Venezuela, yesterday, Machado said the meeting with Bush stretched from a scheduled 15 minutes to 50 minutes and was a "recognition and signal that the world does care about what is happening" in her country. She added that it has inspired people who face intimidation by the government. But she also said that the government has reacted negatively to the meeting, with its allies in the news media and the legislature threatening to revoke her citizenship.