My husband, Homer Byington, who, like his father, grandfather and great, great grandfather, once served as a consular officer, has experience to share which sheds light on an issue that’s being used as a political football–inappropriately as you will read. He’s been bursting to share his thoughts with you.
He writes:
Whether this campaign issue in the current presidential election is good for the country or not, that is what the recent assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stephens in Benghazi, Libya, has become.
As a consequence, we are subjected from all sides to a bombardment of misinformation about consulates and consuls. As a former vice consul, who twice experienced being inside a locked up, battened down consulate under siege by a mob, this annoyed me sufficiently that I decided to ask Jeanne whether I might do a piece for her blog.
Of course, it took just a touch of superficial digging to discover that we do not now, and as far as I can tell, never did have a consulate in Benghazi, a place I’ve actually been a few times. Our facility there, which the Libyan militants attacked, couldn’t have been an embassy either as ours is where it ought to be in Tripoli, on the other side of the country.
The facility was something very different. Indeed, we only just recently assigned a “real” consul to the country, and he’s stationed at the embassy.
I realize that this makes knowing what purpose consulates usually serve sort of irrelevant, at least to the presidential campaigns, but I’ll go ahead anyway.
Consuls, a title derived from ancient Rome, have been around for centuries. They work in consulates. Unlike diplomats who work in embassies, they are not entitled to diplomatic immunity, and what they do is not diplomacy. They are officials of a foreign government, “licensed” by a host government to reside in its country to look out for, foster, and protect the interests of their country and their fellow citizens who travel, live, or do business there. The one thing they are not supposed to be is spies.
As part of their job, consuls perform a host of commercial and legal functions, such as issuing visas, replacing lost passports, providing their nationals born abroad with the equivalent of birth certificates, taking depositions, and notarizing documents. They also stand ready to help their fellow citizens when they find themselves in legal or other trouble, can recommend reliable local lawyers, doctors and other professionals if they are needed, and follow up by monitoring the appropriateness of the treatment they receive at the hands of local authorities.
On the commercial side, our consulates promote American business interests and provide American businessmen doing or seeking to do business with or in their host country with nuts and bolts advice, as well as background on local business and economic conditions. Conversely, they do the same when foreigners seek to import from the US.
Lastly, American consuls traditionally have always also been charged with looking out for and protecting U. S. seaman who are in trouble.
While consulates, unlike embassies, [as I mentioned above], do not have diplomatic immunity, host governments may provide them with special protection and privileges such as the right to import or buy their personal and office needs duty and tax free. (Any New Yorker will have noticed the police cars parked outside of consulates around the city, and if you have ever sold anything to a consul, you probably didn’t charge him or her sales tax.) For this reason, traditionally, our consulates, unlike our embassies, did not have detachments of marine guards assigned to them.
In past centuries, the best of our consuls dedicated many years to learning languages and understanding the local customs of the countries where they were serving. They lived and made friends in the community. (These days, for reasons of security as well as economy, our consular personnel abroad are often housed together in self-contained and self-sufficient compounds.) Over time they established reputations locally not just for integrity and efficiency, but also for fair-mindedness and straight dealing. The favorable impressions they made frequently created much good will. As well, many of them often become encyclopedically knowledgeable about local affairs, and undoubtedly became useful as sources of local intelligence.
Times and the world have changed, but we have lost an ambassador, killed in the line of duty, doing what we do not know, but the implication is that it was something different than what ambassadors conventionally do.
Might it not be appropriate to rethink what we are accomplishing by meddling clandestinely (or openly as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan) in the affairs of sovereign, if hostile, foreign nations? Might we not be better served by reverting to the traditional means of carrying out our foreign policy?