Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 18 2005 (IPS) — A month after President George W. Bush’s national disaster chief resigned after bungling the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, his nomination of a right-wing Republican politician as the State Department’s next director for refugee programmes is coming under sharp attack.

A coalition of 10 women’s health and rights groups Tuesday urged Bush to withdraw the nomination of Amb. Ellen Sauerbrey as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), calling it “yet another in a long string of crony nominations of unqualified individuals for critical positions”.

The groups’ statement followed editorials denouncing Sauerbrey’s appointment by two of the country’s most important newspapers, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which called her unqualified and too ideological, as well as criticism by prominent emergency relief groups.

“This is a job that deals with one of the great moral issues of our time,” Joel R. Charney, vice president for policy at Refugees International, told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month. “This is not a position where you drop in a political hack.”

Sauerbrey, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Maryland twice during the 1990s, has served in relatively low-profile State Department positions since Bush took office in 2001, most recently as U.S. representative to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women.

While such ambassadorial posts are often awarded to political appointees with little or no background in the relevant substantive areas, an assistant secretary’s post with major operational responsibilities and an annual budget of more than 700 million dollars usually goes to either a senior career officer or a political appointee with major relevant experience.

“Amb. Sauerbrey falls short on every count,” said June Zeitlin, executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, one of the groups which urged her withdrawal. “She has no experience managing refugee or humanitarian crises and no experience administering the type of large-scale programmes that fall under the direction of PRM.

“She has expressed ardent opposition toward efforts to strengthen multilateral cooperation at the United Nations and to U.N. treaties affecting the rights of women and girls,” Zeitlin added.

Other groups that called for Bush to withdraw the nomination included the Feminist Majority Foundation, Americans for UNFPA, the Western Hemisphere section of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

As assistant secretary, Sauerbrey, who is 68 years old, would work closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development in determining what countries receive bilateral aid, and with U.N. and private agencies that work on population- and refugee-related issues, including disaster relief.

“What we really need is leadership on refugee issues. We really need someone… with a good relationship with Secretary (of State Condoleezza) Rice and others in the administration and also someone with a good relationship with DHS,” said Sarah Petrin, government relations officer for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, referring to the Department of Homeland Security.

“A lot of times these days, the State Department wants to do things, but they can’t follow through for certain populations because DHS has certain concerns,” she told IPS.

A former schoolteacher, Sauerbrey was elected as a Republican to Maryland’s state legislature in 1978 and ran for governor in 1994 and 1998 as the leader of the party’s right-wing faction. In 2000, she served as state chairman of Bush’s presidential campaign.

Her first appointment was as a “public member” of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. While she made two carefully scripted speeches on behalf of the delegation there, she also told her hometown newspaper at the time that she opposed providing aid, including medicine to AIDS victims, to countries where such assistance could “perpetuat(e) dictators and tyrants”.

Her actions and statements as representative to the U.N. Women’s Commission have attracted more attention, and criticism. During a discussion about the political participation of women, she asserted that “women by nature are not risk-takers”.

She also strongly defended the Bush administration’s opposition to CEDAW, which only Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan and several of the most conservative Arab states, along with the U.S., have failed to ratify.

Last March, Sauerbrey was also widely criticised for holding up a two-week U.N. conference reaffirming the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action by insisting on the inclusion of a statement to the effect that the Platform did “not include the right to abortion” or “create any new international right”.

Backed only by Egypt and Qatar, the U.S. delegation led by Sauerbrey finally agreed to withdraw its amendment when representatives of the European Union (EU), as well as every regional grouping represented at the 189-nation gathering, opposed the change.

“This unilateralist tactic alienated many countries and totally undermined Sauerbrey’s credibility as an effective leader or spokesperson for the U.S. government,” noted Zeitlin.

In addition to opposing CEDAW’s ratification, she has taken a number of other stands on reproductive health and women’s issues that may prove particularly problematic given her proposed responsibilities.

She has objected to language in U.N. documents, for example, that requires countries to “condemn violence against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination as set out in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women”.

She has also declared that abortion should not even be considered a legitimate element of reproductive health assistance and that adolescents have no right to exercise autonomous control over their reproductive health.

“She has shown outright hostility toward women’s human rights and toward reproductive health services, such as family planning and maternal and child health, a stand which is particularly problematic given that the majority both of refugees and of clients of family planning services worldwide are women, and that these programmes also are directly under the purview of PRM,” according to Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Centre for Health and Gender Equity.

A close political associate of John Bolton, Bush’s right-wing U.N. ambassador who failed to be confirmed by the Senate, Sauerbrey follows a number of other loyal political activists appointed to sensitive diplomatic posts despite their lack of relevant experience.

Two years ago, Bush appointed the former head of an aggressive Republican fund-raising and lobby group, Louise Oliver, as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), which had been boycotted by Washington for almost 20 years before.

Oliver had also been a founding director of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum along with Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. Oliver’s daughter, Anna Louise Oliver, was appointed special assistant to the State Department’s PRM Bureau in 2001 primarily to work on population issues, particularly with respect to reproductive services and abortion.