Ambassador Andrew Bremberg is the President of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is the former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.
Federal Newswire
What is the importance of having a defined party platform?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
I'd been asked to serve as the Policy Director for the development of the Republican Party's platform for the 2016 convention. I was very familiar with party platforms before then but I never worked on it up close. Really to me [it] was a great shining example of the kind of different civic levels within our democracy of parties that elect and select delegates to a convention that are going to be put forward.
These are not individuals that are all in Washington, these are people that come from all across the country to represent their community within a party to [have a] say, argue, and discuss…these principles. This is what our political party stands for in that instance.
…Many may know party platforms change over time and it's amazing to watch the evolution…It's amazing to see this part of our democracy.
Federal Newswire
What are lessons you observed while helping to stand up a new administration?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
I’ll break that…down into a…couple pieces. One, on the nature of transitions in general and two, what does that look like as you transition into governing?
Think of the size and scope of the federal government and all the policies that need to be implemented, the scope of its regulatory reach, and everything it tries to do. Say we take not just the CEO [of an organization], but the CEO and entire management team and remove them. You're going to have a short two-month window where the transition takes place with the new CEO and senior management team.
Although, that new team's going to show up over the course of the next 6-12 months.
Transitions are incredible and, I think, [need] more attention. I applaud the work that's been done in the past to start transitions earlier in the process even before the election, but I think that's still difficult for a number of reasons.
Transitions are important to focus on the type of policy work that a new administration plans to implement. Having been on several transitions in and out of the executive branch, what you see is true regardless of parties.
What you see is much of the policy velocity of an administration starts off very fast and slows down over time, for better or worse. What’s critical then is to make sure that a new administration has the kind of policy and personnel support ready so that they're capable of hitting the ground running.
The way our governing works–with executive branch elections every four years and congressional elections every 2 years, which are vital to retaining the real representative part of our democracy–[this] does pose challenges to being able to effectively manage or implement policies.
Now I'll take the democratic protections over greater efficiency.
Federal Newswire
What was your time and experience like as Ambassador to Switzerland?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
When I ran the Domestic Policy Council, my focus was domestic issues. It didn’t directly relate to the China challenge, but you couldn't help it if you were aware of what was happening in our country, particularly in the government in 2017 and 2018. You had to become aware of what was going on with China, so I'd picked up a lot of that to be sure.
I was looking for another opportunity. To serve in the West Wing is [like having] three full time jobs all at once. I was looking to leave the West Wing but still serve.
[When] you think of [the UN]...most people think of New York. [But] many of the UN’s bureaucratic organizations are actually headquartered in Geneva or a couple [of]...other mostly European cities. The policy agencies in Geneva [include] the World Health Organization, the International Labor Union, and the World Intellectual Property Organization.
I thought, “okay this will be an opportunity for me to help advance US policy in these policy areas.” Particularly with the context that Geneva has the reputation of being the workhorse versus the show horse. You have more technical policy issues come up in Geneva that are less political.
That's how I went into it. It was an incredible learning and eye-opening experience. Seeing firsthand the aggressive approach by the Chinese Communist party to interacting with multilateralism and dealing with these organizations was very eye opening.
I expected them to act in their interest or their perceived self-interest, and advocate for their policies. But I was not prepared for the absolute unwillingness and just willful blindness of virtually every other country in the world to see what was happening right in front of them. That to me was the most shocking part of it.
If you would have asked back then “when you leave the government what will you do?,” I would have told you I would return to domestic regulatory policies. But my time there [was] so eye-opening to the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Federal Newswire
What are the impacts in America and around the world of Covid and the the CCP’s international operations?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
Where do I begin? I know exactly where I'll begin because it begins before Covid even happened as you know and many may suspect.
When you're an ambassador, you have a seemingly infinite list of options and invitations to speak at or participate in. You have to prioritize what those are going to be. My staff had briefed me on a number of things. One [event] I'd been invited to [was to] speak at the WHO to commemorate the eradication of smallpox. They had assumed I wouldn't want to do it. I had other issues going on.
I said “no I am going to go speak on behalf of the United States on this critically important public health achievement”-- one of the most successful public health achievements in human history.
Now this was all pre-Covid or maybe Covid actually just popped up in China but no one knew about it. This is December of 2019 and I sat there with the Ambassador from Russia…[and] the Ambassador from the UK, because the United States, Soviet Union at the time, and the UK had been the three countries that led global efforts to eradicate smallpox.
There were already concerns that WHO was getting involved in ancillary issues that were not critical to the shared global interest around public health surveillance and communicable disease. I used the opportunity to speak about the US commitment to that, and why it was so important. I stressed that this example is a way to show how multilateralism or multilateral platforms can work.
At the height of the Cold War when the US and the Soviet Union were not friends, we were able to work together in this environment that was nonpolitical, that did not get involved in political elements at all, was purely technical to cooperate and successfully eradicate…one of the…deadliest diseases in human history. I'd put that forward as…the model that the WHO should use to encourage countries to work together.
A couple weeks later. Covid is popping up all over the place and we realize “my God, is this about to happen?”
I served at the US Department of Health and Human Services throughout the Bush administration in 2005-2007. I'd worked on pandemic preparedness. I was there when we worked to rewrite what more people are aware of now called the International Health Regulations. These are rules that countries had negotiated inside the WHO context after the SARS disease outbreak that China had hid for months and lied about. [They] were specifically written to fix that problem.
This is in the early 2000’s. China is still on the right side and we really need to work with them and pull them close. We've brought them into the WTO. Sure they're cheating, but we're not going to do anything about it yet.
We just need to remember this time. They were bad in this SARS case–we just needed to fix the rules. We needed to make the rules clearer and [thought] that'll fix it in the future. That was the intention.
We now go through Covid and I'm the one talking with WHO [officials] on a seemingly daily basis about what's happening. We are unfortunately watching the WHO Secretariat play politics. I would have conversations with him where, because the United States’ Centers for Disease Control had been the model. The Chinese system was built off of CDC and had very close working-level relationships.
The WHO had not been getting timely updates or complete information about the state of the epidemic in early January of 2020. WHO Secretary Tedros…knew I'd come from the White House so I could call someone [and ask] “are you guys getting this information, because we haven't been getting it?” I said to him “I'm so glad you asked. No, we haven't [and] I was going to ask you the same question… and we need you to encourage the Chinese to be transparent.”
Then Tedros personally came out with these statements saying China has set the new standard in public health transparency. It's a lie. This began the undoing in my mind of the real role of the WHO and its opportunity to play a non-political role.
In every one of my conversations with Tedros at that point going forward, I made explicitly clear that the United States is not asking you or the WHO to criticize China. We're asking you to stay out of politics. Don't make praiseworthy or condemning statements. Just talk about what information you have, what information have you asked for, and what information you received.
I don't think it's the role of the WHO to compel countries to do anything, but its role is to be an objective technical agency that says we've asked for this information.
China wasn't living up to its obligations under the international health regulations. It was incumbent upon WHO to use diplomatic and economic pressure on the Chinese to be more compliant. But the WHO staff basically provided political cover for the CCP to protect them from potential helpful bilateral criticism from other countries.
It was just really stunning to see that level of influence and fear that the WHO was now feeling. This was a stark relief from almost 20 years earlier where the Director General of the WHO, during the SARS outbreak, read the the CCP the ‘riot act’ over its lack of transparency.
The WHO asked China to share live virus samples in January. Lots of people…paid a lot of attention to the fact that the genome sequence had been uploaded. Everyone ignored the fact that the first response by the Chinese government was to punish the scientists that had uploaded the sequence. They would later take credit for it as an act of transparency but it had not been.
But everyone wanted to get live virus samples of the original strain. China refused. The WHO asked the Chinese to do it. They never acknowledged to the world that they had asked them to do it, and the Chinese weren't going to do it.
This began a month-long process of trying to get the WHO to fulfill its core mission, and to stay out of politics.
This huge influence by China and the reaction by many countries to circle the wagons and protect China from any criticism, in my mind, is naive belief that if we criticize China, it could be worse.
That was an eye opening experience to see that very bureaucratic reaction inside Geneva.
Federal Newswire
How do your views on China shape your current work?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
I want you to understand the number of issues that I had to deal with across the UN bureaucracy that dealt with China's influences. [Especially] in terms of their aggression on human rights, their attempt to take over the leadership role of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
They are cheating Americans. [China is] the greatest thief trying to take over this organization.
They are also cheating our shippers and domestic producers at the Universal Postal Union. [They are using] their leadership of the international telecommunications union as an inappropriate platform to hock for Huawei across the developing world.
That entire experience when I left government led me to the conclusion that the challenge…of communism never went away. It's back, it's here, it's front and center, and we have to do everything we can to educate Americans and those around the world about its dangers today.
That's why I was thrilled to take over as the President of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. VOC was chartered by Congress 30 years ago–in 1993 to memorialize the more than 100 million victims killed by Communist regimes.
It was signed by President Clinton. In its first 15 years it was never correctly funded. It just created a statue not far from the US Capitol between the Senate and Union Station. The statue serves as a physical memorial to the victims of communism. Of course this was passed at the time when everyone thought we were only looking in the past.
[Since then the] VOC has been growing. [Today it is] an education and research organization around the challenges and threats of communism today.
I am here today sitting in our museum that's two blocks from the White House that we opened just last summer across from McPherson square. We’re on 15th and I street.
Those who didn't live at the end of the Cold War know virtually nothing about the history of communism. Of course I wasn't alive during the ‘30’s, ‘40’s, and ‘50’s, but I learned who Joseph Stalin was. I knew about his crimes.
When I speak to young people today, particularly in high school or college, usually 10-20% [don’t] know who Joseph Stalin was. They don't know who one of the greatest mass murderers in human history was.
They don't know that under Mao Zedong 70 million people were killed in both the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
We've seen now with the Russia war on Ukraine that people are starting to learn about the fact that there was a Soviet imposed famine. The Holodomor in the 1930’s killed millions of Ukrainians.
While everything we do in terms of education, museums, and books, is important, the most effective tools are cultural tools; TV shows, movies, songs, and so on.
One thing we've done is develop “Our Witness Project,” where we do short-form documentaries. These are available on our website. They are 8-10 minutes long and give you a personal experience of someone who's lived under communism and what they or their family have gone through. We're producing more and more of those every year.
We've taken a holistic approach to showing the kind of diversity of the victims of communism. We've had individuals who were in their eighties talk about their time under both the Nazis and the Communists. We got younger folks to talk about fleeing Venezuela or China today.
The two things that had the biggest impact on me growing up were reading the Diary of Anne Frank and watching the movie Schindler's List–really emotionally compelling stories that hit me both as a child and as a young adult.
They helped me, even if I didn't understand the exact history of what had happened and exactly why I connected [with] these people. These are really important tools that kids need to read about.
Federal Newswire
Victims of Communism did some breakthrough research work on Uyghurs. What was the substance of that research and what impact did it have on policy?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
Our China program, I have to say, is bar none one of the best academic research China programs in the United States, [particularly] about the human rights abuse that is taking place in China today. It's led by Dr. Adrian Zenz, the Director of our program. He has done such incredible work.
When the stories first started to break about the detention centers… he was publishing papers demonstrating that they were engaged in forced labor activities, then an important paper that showed that birth prevention was a central part of the CCP's policies in Xinjiang by forced abortion, sterilization, separating women from their families.
Then what happened last year were what we called the Xinjiang police files. A brave hacker inside China, behind the great firewall, had hacked a Xinjiang police detention center of all of its information and sent to us tens of thousands of files that we then made available last year. Including the first photos from inside the detention camps, personally identifiable and biometric information on over 750,000 individuals who have been evaluated for detention and previously never known, undisclosed, or classified speeches by senior government and party officials about what was taking place in Xinjiang.
We published just last year [and have] been continuing to draw attention. Again I mean this confirms for the entire world that yes, upwards of 2 million people have been detained. Their claim…[that this is simply] vocational education training is a lie. There are children detained here, the sheer number of elderly women in detention is just shocking and horrifying.
One of my worst experiences [in Geneva] was having to [convince] Michelle Bachelet, who at the time was the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the UN system… to release a report on the human rights challenges taking place in Xinjiang.
I then left Geneva and came to VOC. We published our Xinjiang police files. Eight minutes before she left office in the middle of the night, she allowed her staff to release this report.
It is incredible in showing the sheer scope of the human rights abuses taking place in Xinjiang. Our Xinjiang police files were the number one resource cited as evidence of this, and this happened one year ago. This should have been a moment for the United States leadership and for those that talk about multilateral UN human rights leadership to stand up and demand accountability for China's human rights abuses.
Unfortunately we failed.
If we purport to stand up and believe in human rights we have to do something about it. It's just unconscionable that we continue to participate in this kind of human rights charade where we go after certain issues but ignore the most glaringly dangerous human rights abuse taking place on the planet today.
Federal Newswire
Where can we go to follow your work?
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg
Please come visit us at our museum or online. Check us out at www.victimsofcommunism.org or on Twitter @VoCommunism and we're across other social media platforms too.
