John Shattuck, CEU’s fourth President and Rector is an internationally recognized human rights lawyer who has occupied several distinguished positions. He started his career in the American Civil Liberties Union and was Vice President of Harvard University from 1984 until 1993, when he became Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (1993-98) under president Clinton. In this capacity, he was closely involved in restoring a democratic government in Haiti and played an active role in establishing an International Tribunal for Rwanda and the ex-Yugoslavia; he was also a key actor in the negotiations of the Dayton agreement that somehow brought peace to Bosnia. Later on he was appointed as US ambassador to the Czech Republic, and currently serves as fourth President and Rector of CEU.
RODRIGO AVILA B: How does the John Shattuck of today resembles the John Shattuck that you imagined when you were a child? If you could live again, is there something that you would differently?
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, when I was a child I always imagined or hoped that I would get see the world. I imagined that the world was a really big place and until I was about sixteen I never traveled anywhere beyond about three or four hundred miles from my house. The world seemed out there but it wasn’t something that I had yet discovered. And then, when I was a student, I was given the opportunity to become an exchange student, and the country in which I became an exchange student was Syria. Syria is in the news now; it’s a tragedy what’s happening in Syria, but one part of my high-school career was spent in Damascus. It was the first time I ever travelled away from my home. It was an amazing experience as you can imagine. I spoke pretty much only French when I was there. I didn’t speak Arabic but I had to speak French, because the family I was living with spoke French. So I began to think, and this was in a period when JFK was the president of the United States, which is a long time ago of course, but he was really inspiring for young people like myself. So the decision that I made at that time was that I wanted to really have a role in the world in some way, travelling and seeing it.
Earlier, when I was even younger I was given a lesson about the world by my father. My father was a lawyer and during the time I was a very small boy there was a crisis of civil liberties in the United States. People were accused of being communists loosely. They were just charged this way because there was a fear of communism during the Cold War. My father found that a woman that was running for the board of the school in our small town had been accused of being a communist with no evidence whatsoever. So he got quite concerned about that and started offering to defend her in public settings. And pretty soon I’ve found that he was being in some way accused of being a communist. He wasn’t! He was a very conservative man in many ways, but deeply concerned about civil liberties. So I asked him: What’s going on here? I was about eight years old. And he said: Look, people need to be treated fairly and we need to get to the bottom of the truth of every statement and fact that’s been offered. And it had a very powerful impression on me.
So these two experiences, one traveling as a high school student in Syria, and another being told by my father what human rights and civil liberties and truth were all about, really kind of gave me a sense of what I wanted to be.
R.A.: After this synthetic but inspiring introduction about yourself, let me go to a topic that I have a particular interest for: the Balkans. You were one of the key actors on the ground in Bosnia, collecting the information that provided evidence to Madeleine Albright, the US Ambassador to the UN, to raise awareness for the need of an international intervention in order to stop the killings. Could you please recreate this journey for us?
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| John Shattuck in Bosnia |
J.S.: This was a terrible time in the middle of the catastrophe in the Balkans, that we now look back at it and we call it the Balkan Wars or the War in Bosnia, but it was a time when the worst genocide in Europe since the Second World War had just occurred. But nobody knew quite what had happened at that stage. At town called Srebrenica, in the eastern part of Bosnia, had been taken over by Serb paramilitary and Bosnian-Serb forces, and the women and children had all been essentially lined up and taken into buses and send off to a refugee camp in a place called Tuzla. And the men were left behind and no one knew what really had happened to these men.
I worked with the International Committee for the Red Cross from Washington when I was Assistant Secretary of State trying to see whether they had any information about where these men were, and they had some vague information that they were held in warehouses, and they were basically made prisoners. Yet there were a few stories that began to come out that maybe something much worse had happened.
So as the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights I asked for the Secretary of State to approve a trip for me to take to the region and go to this refugee camp and start interviewing refugees and see if they had any information about what happened with the men that had been left behind. When I got there I got the names of several refugees to interview, who I was told might have information. This was on the airport tarmac, it was a hot July day, there were some firing still going on the hills around, so it was a very uncertain circumstance. I met these people, several of whom who told me extraordinary stories, several men actually who told me that they had been with these men in Srebrenica, they had gone in these warehouses, they had been lined up with other men and they had been shot with what turned up to be 7000 others.
I was really the first person to have these in person interviews, and I recorded all the information and had it sent back by diplomatic cable to Washington and to New York, to the UN where Madeleine Albright was. This was really the first evidence of what it actually happened. As it turned out there were mass graves in the area and 7000 men had been shot. All unarmed Bosnian Muslims. This was really the most important piece of evidence of what had actually happened in the Town of Srebrenica. As a result, the decision was taken by the UN Security Council at the leadership of Ambassador Albright to authorize a NATO intervention to stop all this killing, an intervention largely by airpower at that time. From there on we went to Dayton peace accords which Richard Holbrooke, a larger than life diplomat who I had the pleasure working with, really led the effort to end the war, to end the killing. The war ended in November 1995, so about four months later.
R.A.: Now I would like to ask you about what is currently happening there. You have spoken before about the forces of integration. Do you find the integration narrative to be still prominent? We know that Croatia will be joining the EU, but what do you foresee about the other republics in the region?
J.S.: I think that there is still a great deal of frozen peace. There is peace, the warring parties have been separated, but I’m afraid that the ethnic and religious divisions have remained. In my own view it was unfortunate that the people who were most responsible for these criminal acts were not arrested right away and taken out of the conflict area. Some of them ended up going into politics and it all ended up basically making this a frozen peace. I’ve travelled recently in Bosnia, and today there are many people, young people, and heroic young people, some of them CEU graduates who are working very hard to bring peace to their countries and to enter politics. I think that the fact that Croatia is going into the EU is good. I think it is important that at some point soon Serbia and Bosnia also begin the process, and really get integrated into the EU, because I think that’s where they belong.
R.A.: Now I would like to turn our discussion to US domestic politics. At a first glance the US politics seem to be today very polarized. Do you see any worrisome elements, or it is just a contemporary representation of the US pluralism?
J.S.: Well, that’s a very good question. I think open society is facing a major contest around the world, including in the United States. Certainly open and free speech is an important element of Open Society but so is democratic politics, that is to say the ability to solve problems peacefully in a regular political process. In many places that is more and more difficult, for a whole lot of complicated reasons including the proliferation of new media and instant communications, and the fact that political leaders have to react almost instantly to everything that takes place. There are very good developments in the sense that there is more participation, more engagement, particularly through media elements, but I think that given the economic crisis there is a lot of uncertainty and fear and insecurity, and that sometimes leads to insularity. I think we see that here in Hungary, we see that in Central Europe, and to some extent I think that the polarization of the politics in the US relates to this larger phenomenon.
I think that the election of Barack Obama and particularly the coalition that re-elected him to office last year in 2012 is a demonstration that the United States is truly a pluralist and diverse society. We are on the verge of having a majority-minority society; the majority of people in the US are otherwise to be considered minorities. In some ways this mirrors CEU, so I would connect this with CEU. This is a very positive development, but also diversity scares people sometimes and makes them feel that their own kind is under some attack. Right now I think that we have in the politics of the US a polarization which results from some elements in the political system, particularly those who were labeled the Tea Party or those who are against any kind of government action for social benefits. These groups are acting in part out of fear, and out of their loss of status and standing in a society that is becoming increasingly a majority-minority. But I am optimistic; I think that the world is heading in a good direction, the United States are heading into a good direction where more participation and more diversity is ultimately going to lead to new forms of open society, new forms of democratic governance. We are in a very transitional period of the world right now, but it is an exciting period. And CEU is intellectually and morally in the center of all of that.
R.A.: There is a discussion going on about banning the use of drones and targeted killings without due process on American citizens. Given your civil rights lawyer perspective but also your policy making experience, what could be a solution to this issue?
J.S.: This is one of the most important issues for international security and for US foreign policy. The use of drones and mechanized warfare with little human intervention is probably inevitable, but it’s disturbing and seductive because you can imagine as a president you don’t really want to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops. President Obama is in the process of disengaging from Afghanistan and from Iraq. At the same time he makes use of these mechanized warfare machines. What is seductive about the drones is that you can operate them without the engagement of forces on the ground, and you can probably limit the amount of civilian damage that’s done in a setting where you’re doing counter terrorism or where you’re fighting a war. But, in a setting where they’re completely unregulated either by international law or domestic law, I worry that we’re entering into a world that is really going to be lawless. And drones are certainly not going to be the sole purview of the United States. Other countries and even other shadowy forces of the world, including terrorists, might end up using them.
My own view is that there needs to be a high degree of regulation brought to bear on mechanized warfare, and I am glad to see that there is now some debate beginning in the United States, including within the Administration itself as well as in the congress about requiring a much more elaborate system of checks and balances against the use of these kinds of mechanisms.
There are some examples of regulation that have worked in the field of electronic surveillance, which has been a standard security tactic of all governments for a long time. United States, and I was involved in this when I was a lawyer for the Civil Liberties Union, enacted a statute in 1978 called the foreign intelligence surveillance act, and it required a court to oversee the intelligence wire taping that has been done by security agencies involving American citizens and requiring some kind of judicial warrant oversight, so it would not be simply the decision of a few bureaucrats or even the President alone. That’s not a perfect solution either. The critics of that solution say that it’s not really very effective oversight but the policymaker says that we should make sure that we develop systems that are workable, because if we try developing systems that are unworkable then it’s likely that something else is going happen that could be even worse.
This is a disturbing future part of the 21st century that we’re looking at. And it’s not just the United States, but it is this whole mechanized conflict and warfare that I see developing. Here as an international lawyer I am a very strong advocate of developing through the United Nations and through treaty mechanisms a much better system of regulating and limiting these mechanical devices. That’s not going to be easy, but there have been other systems of international law that have been developed in the past and I think that we should be able to do this, and the fact that there is a debate now going on in the United States about this is a good sign.
R.A.: Now let’s switch a bit our discussion to CEU. When we had the chance to interview Gerhard Casper, President Emeritus of Stanford University, and I asked him about the challenges in leading a University he replied as follows:
“The University is not politics or the market place. It has to march to a different drummer. The search for knowledge must be carried out by critical analysis according to standards that themselves are subject to examination and reexamination. All this calls for a lot of “gardening” every day. Getting out the weeds when they are still small and thinking very hard about what new trees to plant. Gardening is the real challenge.”
How does John Shattuck carry out this gardening?
J.S.: I think that CEU is a remarkable laboratory for critical thinking, which is the most important element of an educated human being in the 21st century. We live in a world where there is so much information constantly flowing at us and we need to be able to analyze and navigate this world because otherwise we fall prey to propaganda and various kinds of misconceptions; misconceptions lead to conflict, conflict leads to war. Educating people at CEU to be critical thinkers, to understand what this diversity of information is about and be able to separate fact from fiction. There are facts in the world, everything is not relative. There is truth to what happened in a particular situation. We need to be able to understand how to get those facts, and beyond that we need to analyze them and to make judgments about them, These judgments need to be based on some fundamental principles, in our case principles of open society, democracy, tolerance, and an honest relationship with history so that we can come to grips with some of the terrible things that have happened in our own countries.
All of that is part of the education that we need to have here. The mechanisms of how to do this, how to engage in a university that does a great deal of research, we need to engage in cross disciplinary analyses. There is no one field that is ever going to solve the problem of the war in Bosnia. You need to have historians, sociologists, political scientists, and gender studies and policy people, and all the other elements that we have here at our university. We need to make sure that we’re promoting that we don’t allow particular fields to become isolated. We also need to connect the theory of what we’re studying with the practices of the real world. I think we are doing that more, certainly through our School of Public Policy. At the bottom it’s all about the search for truth.
R.A.: Do you think that there is a conflict between promoting an open society and the pursuit of the truth?
J.S.: In some superficial way there may well be. But I think what the university needs to do is understanding, analyzing, and getting at the roots of what are these values of open society, recognizing that they are under contest, and looking at other systems and challenging ideologies. We shouldn’t be in a bubble; we should be open to all elements of truth. That is really what CEU should be about.
R.A.: As you know, the CEU Weekly is a student and alumni initiative now in its third academic year of existence. The vision we have is that in 2031 the CEU Weekly will not only celebrate the 40th anniversary of the CEU, but also the 20th of its own existence. I would like to ask you if you could share a message for the students that will be running the newspaper in the years to come.
J.S.: Well, I think that they have a big job, to understand all the various parts of this university: Who are the people out there? What are their lives like? What brought them here? What are they inspired by? What kinds of professors are teaching them? Where they’re going with their lives?
This newspaper is about the journey of CEU, and to have this journey captured by a newspaper run by the students is a tribute both to the students, to you Rodrigo who put this together and others who work with you, and to the university that you’ve decided to write about. You bring it to life, and I think that’s what the students in 2031 will have to think about. I think it’s great!
Interview by Rodrigo Avila B.
You can watch the full 30-minute interview with John Shattuck, on our You Tube channel:
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