Why human rights defenders love John McCain
By Berivan Orucoglu July 28 at 2:47 PM
Berivan Orucoglu is the program coordinator of the Supporting Human Rights Defenders program at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. (Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the McCain Institute.)
I’m a Turkish journalist. I’ve spent my career criticizing politicians. I have always seen that as my job.
Yet I now find myself in the unaccustomed position of singing the praises of one of them — the remarkable Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). When we learned last week that he was afflicted with brain cancer, the news not only jolted Washington’s political scene but also sent a shock wave through the community of human rights defenders around the globe. It’s important to appreciate just how unusual this is. These two worlds — the politicians and the activists — almost never agree on anything. Yet McCain enjoys immense respect in both of them.
That should help to explain why his medical diagnosis was top news not only in the United States but also across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Since the news of his illness broke, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Journalist and activist friends — from Afghanistan and Ukraine, from Egypt and Turkey — have been calling in shock and dismay, refusing to accept the news.
The first time I met McCain was at a meeting in Brussels during the George W. Bush administration. At the time, the European Union was outraged by the CIA’s clandestine flights and torture policies. McCain’s clear and resolute stance against torture came as a huge relief to the United States’ allies in Europe. “The world would be a safer place if Sen. McCain was the U.S. president,” one Dutch diplomat told me.
I next met the senator several years later, in a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey. By then, I had been to many camps and covered several high-level meetings. In striking contrast to other high-level visitors, McCain spent most of his time actually talking with the Syrians who had been forced to flee their war-torn homeland. It was refreshing to see a politician who didn’t care about photo ops and who paid more attention to the refugees themselves than to the official statement from the camp authorities. I wasn’t the only one impressed by the senator’s visit. One Syrian who attended the meeting with McCain told me: “He was the only visiting politician to give us more than lip service.”
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