Return of the ugly American

President Clinton's choice of Carol Moseley-Braun as ambassador to New Zealand elevates a hypocrite who put her fianci's financial gain ahead of concern for human-rights violations.

By Bruce Shapiro

Nov 9, 1999 | In Nigeria, there is a soft-spoken but persistent investigative journalist named Sunday Dare. One afternoon a few years ago, Dare sat in my office in New York describing in casual fashion what it was like to practice the craft of reporting under the government of General Sani Abacha, who was at the time the country's dictator and plunderer-in-chief. To evade imprisonment or assassination, Dare and his colleagues slept in cars or public parks. They buried their notes and documents to avoid police scrutiny. They printed their magazines in secret and readers passed copies from hand to hand.

I thought of Dare on Friday while watching the testimony of Carol Moseley-Braun before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. General Abacha died in 1998, ringing down the curtain on what Nelson Mandela labeled an "illegitimate, barbaric, arrogant dictatorship." Moseley-Braun -- the former senator from Illinois nominated by President Clinton as ambassador to New Zealand -- was recalling the Abacha years in Nigeria. She suddenly spoke the phrase "longtime fighter for human rights" -- an honorific that might well have been applied to my friend Dare, or to the famed Ogoni community leader Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged by Abacha in 1995, or to the Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka who was charged by Abacha with treason.

Carol Moseley-Braun was instead describing herself -- and trying to explain why during the very years that Sunday Dare had to sleep in parks and cars to avoid being killed, this United States senator befriended Nigeria's ruler. In fact, she had devoted her last appearance before this very same committee to pleading Abacha's case.

Moseley's Braun's ambassadorial nomination -- to be voted on by the full Senate this week -- has roused more commotion than is usual for diplomatic posts. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., the Foreign Relations Committee chair, tried to block Moseley-Braun in retaliation for her 1993 role in revoking a patent for the Daughters of the Confederacy's stars-and-bars logo.

So nakedly partisan and petty was Helms' attack on the African-American former senator that Democrats kvelled and fellow Republicans ran for cover. If that bipartisan kiss-kiss session is any indication, Moseley-Braun will be on that ambassadorial flight to Wellington soon.

But as Malcolm X liked to say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and as I watched Moseley-Braun testify, I couldn't help wondering if this time that old buzzard Helms might just have a point -- or at least the right conclusion based on the wrong reasoning.

Senators were not anxious to press Moseley-Braun about Nigeria, focusing instead on some easy questions about her campaign finances. But an ambassador's job is foreign policy, not election-expense paperwork. And when Sen. Paul Coverdell, R-Ga., finally delicately raised Nigeria, Moseley-Braun responded with precisely the same combination of dissembling, evasion and megalomania that won her, and lost her, the Illinois Senate seat.

The appointment to New Zealand is hardly a case of being put out to pasture, despite the country's well-known lamb industry. In the debate over human rights in the emerging global economy, New Zealand is a country that very much matters. As a neutral industrial democracy at the edge of an Asian-Pacific region roiling with struggle among authoritarian regimes, corporations and democracy reformers, New Zealand plays an increasingly pivotal role in that debate.

It was New Zealand that last year brought the issue of an international ban on land mines to the United Nations and secured the signatures of virtually all industrial nations except the United States. New Zealand is also the most vocal opponent of nuclear testing in the Pacific, to the consternation of both France and Washington.

To the Beltway press corps, meanwhile, the Moseley-Braun nomination fight is simply another round of Clinton vs. the Republicans -- a round the president seems likely to win. In fact, the choice of Moseley-Braun to be a diplomat is a highly questionable move by the administration.

As a young journalist 20 years ago, I was an admirer of Carol Moseley-Braun. She was a hard-working, progressive-minded state representative from the Chicago neighborhood where I helped publish a community monthly. When Moseley-Braun was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 -- just months after the Clarence Thomas debacle dramatized the dangers of an all-white, overwhelmingly male Senate -- I rejoiced, even though I'd long since left Chicago and hadn't, therefore, stayed closely informed about her rise.

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