Hanford tabbed for ambassador position

Salisbury native John Hanford III is about to become the nation’s second ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

President George Bush has announced he intends to nominate Hanford for the position, which will make him the principal advisor on international religious issues to the president and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

His primary responsibility will be to promote religious freedom as part of U.S. foreign policy.

The appointment process requires the president to announce his “intention” first and then send the nomination to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where N.C. Republican Jesse Helms is the ranking minority member. Hanford’s aunt, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, has just launched her campaign to take Helms’ Senate seat when he retires at the end of his term.

The Foreign Relations Committee will consider Hanford, 48, and then send a recommendation to the Senate for approval. The Senate schedule will dictate how quickly that takes place.

Hanford said he’s “pretty excited” about the announcement.

“And I’m tremendously honored over the president’s intention to nominate me,” he said. “It will be a great privilege to continue to serve on problems of religious persecution through this position if I’m confirmed.

“This is the issue I’ve worked on for 14 years in Sen. Richard Lugar’s office, and now I’ll simply continue working on the issue but from a different vantage point.”

The position was established by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and Hanford, a congressional fellow in international religious freedom in Lugar’s office since 1987, was the lead architect of the act. He has been the executive director of the Congressional Fellows Program in International Religious Freedom since he worked to establish the program in 1986.

Congressional fellows

Positions as congressional fellows are not funded by Congress or the government. His position was funded by the non-profit National Heritage Foundation.

Sens. Don Nickles, R-Okla., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., sponsored the bill, and it passed the Senate 98 to 0 and the House on a unanimous voice vote. President Clinton signed it into law and appointed Robert Seiple, previously the president of World Vision, a large international relief and development agency, as the first ambassador.

Lugar has been widely known as a champion on the issue, working on problems around the world involving religious persecution. The cases range from people imprisoned or tortured for their faith to policies countries were threatening to pass that would have brought about repression.

As a result of the act, the State Department is now required to prepare an annual report on religious freedom throughout the world and explain what the U.S. has done to promote such freedom.

The third report will be issued next week, according to Tom Farr, director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and deputy to the ambassador. The report will give the status of religious freedom for each of the 195 countries and is a fundamental policy tool for U.S. policy makers, Furr said.

That report, he said, “is generally acknowledged as the most comprehensive compendium on religious freedom around the world. It has an executive summary highlighting 35 to 40 countries in which serious problems of religious freedom, discrimination and persecution exist.”

The act requires the president to designate countries of principal concern, and Bush has delegated that responsibility to Powell.

Last year’s report cited one “regime” — the Taliban in Afghanistan — and five countries as guilty of severe violations of religious freedom. The five governments are Burma, China, Iran, Iraq and Sudan.

Powell is currently reviewing the report to determine if any other countries come up to the act’s standard of “particularly severe violations,” Furr said, adding that his office “is very concerned to insure that Islam as a religion is not tarred with the actions of the terrorists.”

The office also runs outreach programs to American religious groups, meeting with them several times a year for candid discussions.

“We talk about our report,” Furr said, “and ask Buddhists and Hindus, ‘Are we articulating properly the beliefs of your faith or are we using terms that are offensive without realizing we are doing so?’ ”

Those meetings are “terrifically valuable,” he said. “We have been able to change a few bad laws that were going to discriminate or cause problems.”

But as director, he said, he’s proudest “of some of the suffering we’ve managed to alleviate, to get a few people out of jail and to take care of a few families fleeing religious persecution. It’s the greatest thing in the world to really help somebody. That’s what makes you want to come back to work the next day.”

And that’s what has made John Hanford work at this issue for the past 14 years.

Salisbury ties

The son of John Van Hanford Jr. of Charlotte and Dottie G. Nelson of McLean, Va., and grandson of Mary Hanford of Salisbury, he grew up here, graduating from Salisbury High School in 1972. He was president of the Student Government Association and had been president of his class since he was in the ninth grade, tied for academic first place in a class of 269.

He participated in track and lettered in wrestling.

He captured a prestigious Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a BA degree in economics, intending to study law when he graduated in 1976.

But those plans changed.

He said later he was undecided between law and business when a friend said he’d heard Hanford was going into the seminary.

“I said no way. It had never entered my mind,” he recalled.

But he worked in a Charlotte law firm as a paralegal to give himself a chance to decide “ ... and in the process, my Christian maturity was developing, and I realized the burning desire of my life was to encourage and help people spiritually.”

So instead of law school, he went to interdenominational Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., and gave the graduation address there, sharing the podium with evangelist Billy Graham.

He then served as assistant to the pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Va., before going to Washington.

And Thursday, he added a family footnote to the news of his nomination.

He and his wife, Laura, are expecting their first child, who was due Wednesday.

Bush’s announcement, Hanford says, prompted his wife to comment that “I guess I’m the ‘at large’ part of that right now.”

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .