“There was no more eloquent and effective advocate on behalf of every major democracy movement over the past three decades” than former U.S. Congressman Stephen J. Solarz. He was not only “a muscular voice on foreign policy …who challenged dictators and colleagues alike,” but, David Lowe writes, he was one of that rare breed – a reflective practitioner whose memoirs are as educational as they are entertaining.  

          Memoirs by political figures are often written to defend and justify one’s career, answer critics, settle scores, or simply entertain. The political memoirist who writes to educate and succeeds in doing so is rare indeed. Such is the case of the late Stephen J. Solarz in his recently published autobiography Journeys to War and Peace: a Congressional Memoir (Brandeis University Press, 2011).

          Solarz represented the 13th Congressional District encompassing part of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn from 1974 to 1993.  The child of a broken home in which he was abandoned first by his mother and later by his step- mother, he acquired an interest in politics at an early age. Managing an unsuccessful congressional campaign as a young graduate student in government at Columbia in the mid-1960s, he learned, among many valuable lessons, “the politically toxic effects of our escalating involvement in Vietnam.”

          After a brief stint in the New York State Assembly, Solarz managed to defeat a popular Brooklyn congressman by capitalizing on the latter’s indictment for bribery and perjury, which, as his friend Barney Frank later pointed out to his audience’s amusement at a Solarz campaign fundraiser, would become a recurring pattern, each time advancing his career.  Joining the celebrated “Watergate class” of young liberal Democrats elected in 1974, Solarz decided that a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee would enable him “to combine my personal commitment to Israel and to ending the American military involvement in Vietnam,” two popular positions in a district that had both the largest number of Jews and Holocaust survivors in the country and a sizeable anti-war constituency.

          Members of the U.S. Congress who succeed in influencing foreign policy are either Senators (think of Richard Lugar, John Kerry, and John McCain) or those in that select group of representatives who manage primarily through seniority to ascend to the chairmanship of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Solarz never achieved his dream of becoming the chairman, his career shortened after nine terms by a New York State redistricting plan that carved up his district and by the check overdraft scandal at the House bank in which he was identified as one of the leading offenders.

          Nonetheless, he was able to use the platforms provided during his tenure by his two subcommittee chairmanships (Africa and Asia) to become a major player on issues affecting these two regions. He managed this feat through an extraordinary work ethic, a punishing travel schedule, a talented staff, and an expertise built around a formidable intellect, an insatiable curiosity, and a healthy ego that enabled him to deal directly with foreign leaders as if they were his peers.

          Solarz became associated with many of the major foreign policy issues of his time, particularly those within the jurisdiction of his subcommittees: the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, the demise of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, the transitions to democracy in South Korea and Taiwan, and the political settlement to the conflict in Cambodia. He describes these and other involvements in international issues through the lens of his personal encounters with world figures such as Nelson Mandela, Shimon Peres, Anwar Sadat, and Lech Walesa, as well as tyrants such as Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, and Kim Il Sung, the latter of whom no American official had met with since the end of the Korean War. (One wishes he had avoided placing Singapore’s longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew among “some of the world’s greatest statesmen” with whom he met, which he does in his preface.) 

          Journeys to War and Peace is sprinkled with the author’s witty observations and his keen sense of irony. On Ferdinand Marcos and the 1986 Philippine election: “One lesson I learned from this experience is that if you’re a dictator and want U.S. support, you shouldn’t steal an election on American television.” On his decision to oppose the embargo on Turkey for its actions in Cypress: “I figured I could compensate for the lost support of the Greek Americans by winning the support of my Turkish American constituents. So I started looking for them. After several years, I finally found one.” And on his constituents in a newly drawn Hispanic majority district: “The fact that my ancestors had left Spain five hundred years earlier when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula didn’t qualify me as a Hispanic in their eyes.”

Solarz describes himself as an “idealist without illusions,” arguing for an activist foreign policy in the service of moral imperatives within practical limits. Although he cut his early political teeth on opposition to the Vietnam War, his thinking was deeply informed by the Holocaust (“the greatest evil in human history”) and the obligation it brought “to do everything we could” to make sure that its victims’ suffering was not in vain, a belief he said played a major role in his effort to seek an end to the Cambodian genocide.

Solarz’s tenure in Congress coincided with the period Samuel Huntington characterized as the “Third Wave” of democratization, and much of his effort was directed toward helping to push U.S. policy behind those struggling for democracy and human rights. In an excellent foreword, Norm Ornstein describes his own meetings during trips to the Philippines and Cambodia with political elites and common citizens alike who wanted to know if he actually knew Solarz, who had become a hero to them.

          Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Solarz met his greatest challenge when he became the leading spokesman in the House and arguably the entire Congress for military intervention. To say the least, it was not a popular position, not among his Democratic colleagues, not with his party’s leaders, and not in his district, where daily peace vigils were held outside his district office in Brooklyn. (“I wasn’t sure whether they were praying for my salvation or my defeat.”)

          To Solarz, the Vietnam War was an incorrect analogy to a situation he regarded as “America’s first big test as the sole superpower left in the world,” one that would determine “whether, in the post-Cold War world, international relations would or would not be characterized by the rule of law.” He described his decision to play a leading role as the most difficult decision he had to make in his eighteen years in Congress.

          Although Journeys to War and Peace focuses primarily on Solarz’s encounters with foreign leaders, its most valuable contribution comes at the end in a brief epilogue of lessons learned. Here the man who gave up a one-year career teaching political science at Brooklyn College to enter public life offers a number of thoughtful foreign policy guidelines and prescriptions on such critical matters as striking the proper balance between the moral imperative to act and its potential consequences, calculating when to use military force, and resolving seemingly intractable conflicts. An early congressional enthusiast of the National Endowment for Democracy who later served on its Board of Directors, Solarz wisely advises those seeking to determine how to promote democracy in nations with repressive regimes to “consult the leaders of the struggle for democracy there, who usually know their countries’ political dynamics better than we do.”

          Steve Solarz completed this memoir only three months before his untimely death from esophageal cancer last fall.  To a political career of formidable accomplishment, he has added this important volume rich in insights about how America can continue to strive for a more just and humane world.

Democracy advocates are mourning the loss of a “champion of human rights,” a “great opponent of repressive regimes” and “certainly one of the smartest, most accomplished people” in U.S. foreign affairs.

Former New York Congressman Stephen J. Solarz died on Monday. He was 70 years old.

“Steve was that rare member of Congress who, by the sheer force of his intellect and personality, and the respect he commanded from our country’s leading decision makers, managed to play a major role in shaping U.S. foreign policy,” said Richard Gephardt, chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Solarz served on NED’s Board of Directors from 1992-2001.

During his nine terms of office, he was a “relentless critic of the corrupt and autocratic Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos; expressed support for democracy movements in South Korea and Taiwan; and highlighted human rights abuses against Vietnamese refugees.”

He was the first senior US official to meet with communist North Korea’s founder Kim Il-Sung, making the case that the hermetic state needed more exposure to the outside world. Kim’s determination to reunify the Korean peninsula was “not just verbal but visceral,” Solarz said.

While on the NED’s board, he encouraged support for NGOs working to promote human rights in North Korea.

“There was no more eloquent and effective advocate on behalf of every major democracy movement over the past three decades,” said NED President Carl Gershman.

“From Solidarity in Poland to the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, from the ‘people power’ movement in the Philippines to those struggling to bring democracy to South Korea and Taiwan, ‘small d’ democrats knew that they could count on Steve to champion their cause.”

Solarz, who was one of the earliest congressional supporters of the Endowment, received NED’s Democracy Service Medal in 2001.

“Steve used his skills and energy to champion the rights of the most vulnerable – victims of conflict, of abuse and of neglect, whether they were from Burma, Mozambique, or Haiti,” said Assistant Secretary of State Eric Schwartz.

One leading policy-maker said of him that “Solarz understood that idealism and realism actually go together.”

He joked that his commitment to promoting democracy and human rights may have been a factor in losing his seat.

“I may not have much influence in Brooklyn,” he said in 1991. “But they think I’m very important in Mongolia.”

Solarz was part of a generation that believed in a bipartisan approach to foreign policy in general and to democracy promotion in particular. During the most recent U.S. presidential election, he told a meeting of the London-based Henry Jackson Society that both Barack Obama and John McCain “will want to promote democracy around the world.”

He was an international patron of the society, a project for democratic geo-politics in the tradition of former US Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson ’s “muscular liberalism,” rooted in the promotion of liberal democracy, rule of law, civil rights, environmental responsibility and the market economy.

The United States is “deeply concerned” about human rights in North Korea, the administration’s special envoy told a Washington conference.

Yet the meeting heard concerns that security and nuclear issues would take precedence over human rights in any future rapprochement with Pyongyang.  

Activists took heart from recent developments which suggest that the regime is becoming less monolithic and the country’s citizens more restive.

The current leadership crisis, in which Kim Jong Eun emerge as his father Kim Jong Il’s successor, has seen elite factions jockeying for advantage, holding out the prospect of an eventual fracturing of the ruling class.

Members of an elite schooled in Marxism-Leninism must be uncomfortable with being the world’s only communist dynasty, the forum heard, and the regime’s patrons in China are openly contemptuous of the third-generation succession.

The badly-managed currency conversion not only prompted widespread protests, but also left a legacy of distrust in the government’s basic competency and fitness to rule. 

“We are deeply concerned about human rights conditions and the plight of North Korean refugees,” Robert King, the special envoy for North Korean human rights, told a forum at the National Endowment for Democracy.  

President Barack Obama denounced “a North Korean regime that enslaves its own people” in his recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

Ten years after calling for an end to the silence over the regime’s human rights abuses and atrocities, NED president Carl Gershman is encouraged by the growing signs of changes within the secretive state and in the international community’s concerns.

The most significant development is the emergence of 20,000 defectors who are providing vital information and insights into life under the regime, he told the forum, co-sponsored by the endowment, the Network for Democracy and Human Rights in North Korea (NKNet) and the Sejong Institute, a Seoul-based think tank.

“The totalitarian system will come to an end,” Gershman said, but it is vital to prepare the country for a genuinely democratic transition.     

“Regime change does not necessarily lead to democracy,” he cautioned.  

Anticipating the need to nurture a future democratic state is a critical aspect of current assistance programs, the forum heard.

Economic engagement and humanitarian assistance are essential for meeting basic needs and reducing dependency on the regime, said John Knaus, NED’s senior program officer for Asia.

But it is also vital to support initiatives that “help create independent spaces of action and thought,” he said, including samizdat-type initiatives like Imjingang and independent broadcasting – which Kim Jong Il views as the greatest threat to the regime.

Veterans of the struggle against South Korea’s authoritarian regime in the 1970s have emerged as key advocates for democracy and human rights in the north of the peninsula, said Sae Hee Yoo, chairman of Nknet.

The international community’s understandable focus on the nuclear issue should not be at the expense of human rights, he argued.

“As long as the dictatorship continues, the regime will never give up nuclear weapons,” he said.   

The prospect of a “perestroika” faction emerging within the ruling elite has been dampened by Kim Jong Eun’s apparent succession, said Dae Sung Song, director of the Sejong Institute. Given the repressive nature of the regime, there is little prospect of genuine change without external pressure.

But his apparent triumph could spark inter-generational discord within the elite, NKnet researcher Kim Young Hwan suggested.

“Kim Jong Il’s succession occurred with Kim in his late 30s, while core cadres were in their 50s and 60s, so there was discord with them,” he noted. “Kim Jong Eun is now in his late 20s, but his core cadres are in their 60s and 70s. Therefore, there is a higher possibility of conflict and constraints.”

Given that the political of the ruling clique are so opaque, there is an “urgent need” to prepare for various outcomes of the current maneuverings, said the Sejong Institute’s Oh Gyeung Seob. We need to prepare measures through close examination of third generation succession success and failure scenarios,” he said.

Kukmin University’s Andrei Lankov has previously argued that regime collapse is “a very likely probability” and, furthermore, that he does not “believe there is going to be a peaceful, gradual end of the North Korean regime. It will be dramatic, and probably violent.”

But he chose to be devil’s advocate, cautioning against expectations of imminent change arising from the elevation of Kim Jong Eun – “the world’s youngest five-star general.”

Just as it is a mistake to assume regime stability, he said, it is equally mistaken to interpret recent internal tensions within the elite as signs of imminent change.

The evidently widespread discontent with the regime means that North Korea exhibits one of the classic indicators of a pre-revolutionary situation, Lankov argued. But it lacks the other two preconditions – a popular belief in a viable alternative and the possibility of organizing politically.  

The Asia Foundation’s Scott Snyder questioned the consensus that denuclearization is not possible without regime change. He detected signs of a shift from totalitarianism to authoritarianism and held out the prospect of “regime transformation” – a change in its character – as an alternative to regime change.

There is growing evidence that independent radio broadcasts into North Korea are starting to “change people’s minds and ideology,” said Gwang Baek Lee. Surveys of defectors confirm that broadcasters like Open Radio for North Korea and his own Radio Free Chosun are having an impact, but they need more resources and, most importantly, more frequencies.

While the U.S. and Japan have consistently demanded that North Korea abide by universal human rights norms, South Korea has been less engaged, Korea University’s Ho Yeol Yu complained.

With the government only going through the motions of supporting the human rights law currently stalled in the parliament, there is an urgent need to “institutionalize” efforts to promote North Korean human rights.

NKNet’s Ki Hong Han has made 30 trips to the Hermit Kingdom and he has never seen its citizens so openly subordinate and contemptuous of the regime. He credited the NED with funding efforts to publicize conditions within North Korea and disseminate information within the closed state, including NKNet’s broadcasts of spontaneous protests that regularly occur.

Dismissing the consensus of those experts who claim that we don’t know enough about North Korea, Chuck Downs insisted that it certainly is known that Kim Jong Il will die sooner rather than later, precipitating “tremors” within the regime.

Insight and intelligence from defectors like Kim Kwangjin, a former senior official, suggests that the status quo will prove unsustainable.  Kwangjin had correctly foreseen that Kim Jong Eun would be the designated successor and security chief Chang Sung Taek emerge as Regent.

“The next regime, regardless of who succeeds, will be unable to maintain the same policy that the current regime is pursuing,” he had predicted.

We also know the U.S. and the international community place human rights in third place, behind security and the nuclear issue, on their North Korean agenda, said Downs, executive director of the Committee for North Korean Human Rights.

But former Congressman Stephen Solarz, amongst others, has identified several practical policy steps that can be taken, including realistic human rights demands on Pyongyang, from demanding the release of innocent family members from the regime’s gulag to accounting for foreign abductees.

A multilateral framework would help integrate human rights into the broader security agenda, said Brookings Institution’s Roberta Cohen, lending support to Carl Gershman’s proposal for such a Helsinki-type mechanism in north-east Asia.