The Pinochet Principle
by Roane Carey
The Nation magazine, Feb.21, 2000
The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in England more than a year
ago stunned the world and emboldened those seeking to bring dictators
and war criminals to justice. Until his arrest, the old concept
of sovereign immunity- and the natural tendency of political leaders
to protect their own-shielded former dictators. Although it now
looks probable that the British government will bar Pinochet's
extradition to Spain on health grounds, the legal justification
for his arrest has been upheld by Britain's Law Lords. In the
hope of inspiring more extradition requests and war crimes trials,
what follows is a late-twentieth-century bestiary. The list is
of course incomplete, with special attention given, where appropriate,
to the US role as enabler and accomplice. Reigning tyrants have
been excluded, given that they're beyond reach of the law when
at home and enjoy diplomatic immunity when traveling. Let a thousand
prosecutions bloom!
* Jean-Claude Duvalier has been living in France since he
was spirited out of Haiti in 1986 by the US Air Force, which helped
him escape an angry populace fed up with his fifteen-year dictatorship.
Until he ran out of the money he stole from the Haitian people,
Duvalier luxuriated on the Cote d'Azur; now he's said to be living
in penury in one of the scruffier suburbs of Paris. In the wake
of Pinochet's arrest, a group of Haitian exiles in France who
were tortured in Haiti before they fled filed suit against Duvalier
alleging crimes against humanity. The case was thrown out because
French law addresses only such crimes committed during World War
II and because the crimes alleged occurred before 1994, when the
law was adopted. The plaintiffs plan to file a civil suit, and
if that fails, they will go to the European Court of Justice.
Among the coup leaders who ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide in 1991, Raoul Cedras and Philippe Biamby are now living
in Panama; Michel Francois, a former CIA asset, is in Honduras;
and Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, also a CIA asset and leader
of the blood-soaked death squad FRAPH, which was formed at the
urging of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, is living in Queens,
New York. Haiti has filed extradition requests for these men but
has been turned down by all governments. In 1995 a US immigration
judge ordered Constant's deportation, but the State Department
intervened, allowing him refuge in the United States. The department
says the deportation order is still valid but claims that he hasn't
been shipped back because doing so might bring about "social
disorder." This newfound concern for Haitian civil society
is touching, in light of Washington's earlier encouragement of
Constant's depredations.
* Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish magistrate seeking Pinochet's
extradition from England, recently issued an international arrest
warrant for ninety-eight members of the military junta that ruled
Argentina in the seventies and early eighties, charging genocide,
torture and terrorism. The new Argentine president, Fernando de
la Rua, has not acted on the request. Two of the junta leaders,
Leopoldo Galtieri and Gen. Roberto Viola, as well as many other
officers implicated in human rights crimes, were trained at the
US-run School of the Americas (SOA).
* Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia was defense minister of El Salvador
from 1979 to 1983. Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova was commander
of the National Guard during the same period and succeeded Garcia
as defense minister. Under the supervision of these two-both of
whom are SOA graduates-tens of thousands of Salvadorans were tortured
and murdered, as were three American nuns and a lay worker in
1980. Although the US government has rejected asylum requests
for thousands of Central Americans attempting escape from death
squads, Garcia and Vides Casanova have been granted residence
in Florida. The families of the murdered nuns have filed a federal
wrongful-death suit against the two generals, and a group of Salvadoran
refugees and torture survivors has also filed federal charges.
* Between 1978 and 1983, Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efrain Rios
Montt slaughtered Guatemalans, especially the Mayans, with a savagery
so appalling that the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission
declared their regimes to be genocidal. Such behavior was clearly
pleasing to the Reagan Administration, whose Assistant Secretary
of State Thomas Enders (who directed from the US Embassy in Phnom
Penh the B-52 carpet-bombing of vast, heavily populated sections
of Cambodia in the early seventies) praised Rios Montt for his
"effective counterinsurgency"; Reagan himself told Congress
that the dictator had been given a "bum rap." Lucas
is living in quiet retirement in Venezuela. Rios Montt entered
civilian politics after he was overthrown in 1983; his Guatemalan
Republican Front is now the leading party in the National Congress,
with Rios Montt himself having been elected to a seat and his
ally Alfonso Portillo having been elected president this past
December. Before the election, former members of the army's civil
patrol threatened that if Portillo won, they would kill anyone
who has testified about or denounced human rights
violations. One positive development is the January arrest
of three men for the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi. In December
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Rigoberta Menchu, inspired by Garzon's
case against Pinochet, filed charges in Spain against Lucas, Rios
Montt and six other officials of the dictatorships, charging them
with genocide, state terrorism and torture. The charges include
the Guatemalan military's 1980 assault on the Spanish Embassy;
among the fourteen Spanish officials and twenty-five Guatemalan
protesters burned alive was Menchu's father.
* Alfredo Stroessner, who tortured and disappeared thousands
during his three-decade dictatorship of Paraguay before his 1989
overthrow, now lives in a mansion in Brasilia, Brazil. In 1992
a huge trove of documents was discovered in a Paraguayan police
station that reveals not only Stroessner's deep involvement in
Operation Condor, the Pinochet-led seven-nation assassination
and torture campaign headquartered in Asuncion, but close US cooperation
with the dictatorships as well. Many of these documents have been
forwarded to Judge Garzon in Spain.
* Hissein Habre ruled Chad between 1982 and 1990 with US and
French military support, murdering and torturing thousands before
his overthrow and flight to Senegal. In January the Senegalese
government began a judicial investigation of Habre in response
to a complaint filed by his Chadian victims and several human
rights organizations alleging murder, disappearance and torture.
According to Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, one of the plaintiff
groups, "The Pinochet case helped a lot. It was only after
the Pinochet decision that we felt this was a real possibility."
* Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, slaughtered
hundreds of thousands with baroque ferocity and summarily expelled
tens of thousands of East Indians, uprooting an entire ethnic
community that had deep roots in the country. He now lives a princely
existence in a marble villa in Saudi Arabia, where the government
has furnished him with cars, drivers and other sundries.
* Mengistu Haile Mariam seized power in Ethiopia after the
1974 overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Mengistu, a Soviet client
during most of his rule, killed and tortured thousands before
he was overthrown in 1991, when he fled to Zimbabwe. The Ethiopian
government has sought his return, so far to no avail. It also
sought his extradition from South Africa recently when Mengistu
traveled there for medical treatment, but the South African government
rejected the request.
* In a precedent-setting decision on January 24, the US Supreme
Court denied an appeal from Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Seventh-Day
Adventist pastor from Rwanda, who is fighting transfer from the
United States to the international criminal tribunal in Tanzania
for his role in the massacre of several hundred Tutsis during
the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Ntakirutimana, who was defended by
former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, had fled to Texas to
avoid arrest in Rwanda. If the deportation succeeds, it would
be the first such expulsion to a current war crimes tribunal by
the United States.
* When he was defense minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon planned
and led the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, during which he ordered
the saturation bombing of heavily populated West Beirut, killing
and maiming thousands of civilians with phosphorus and cluster
bombs. Sharon then allowed the Lebanese Phalangist militia to
enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where
they murdered up to 2,000 people when the camps were under tight
Israeli Army control. (Amos Yaron, the general who held operational
command of the Israeli Army in West Beirut and who observed the
Phalangist operation through binoculars from a nearby rooftop,
has recently been named Director General of the Defense Ministry
by Prime Minister Ehud Barak.) Sharon is now head of Israel's
opposition Likud Party.
* Indonesia's Suharto, who finally left power in 1998 after
thirty-two years of dictatorship, is living in Jakarta in very
bad health and is said to be fearful of traveling to Europe for
medical care because he might be subject to the Pinochet treatment.
After he seized power in 1965-66, Suharto oversaw the massacre
of some half a million Indonesians in an anti-Communist witch
hunt. In 1975 he ordered the invasion of East Timor, after which
about 200,000 people were murdered by the Indonesian armed forces-equipped
and trained by the US government under both Democratic and Republican
administrations-before Indonesia finally withdrew from the country
this past fall.
* Henry Kissinger was never a dictator-of the United States.
But given that he was a chief architect of Richard Nixon's murderous
escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, during which hundreds
of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian civilians were
killed, and that he helped engineer Salvador AIlende's overthrow
by Pinochet in 1973 and gave US endorsement to Indonesia's invasion
of East Timor in 1975, Kissinger ranks with the dictators and
war criminals on this list. He lives in elegance on Manhattan's
East Side, traveling the world lecture circuit with the gravitas
befitting a great diplomat.
In contrast with the deplorable record of the US government,
US human rights organizations have been in the forefront in pursuing
war criminals. The Center for Constitutional Rights has used the
200-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act and the 1992 Torture Victim
Protection Act to win millions in civil damages against foreigners
living in the United States who are guilty of crimes that render
the perpetrator hostis humani generis, an "enemy of all mankind."
In one of the most important of these rulings, in two civil suits
against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic the US Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuit has held that a "private actor"
can be liable for violations of international humanitarian law
and that this is applicable even if the entity he represents-in
this case the Republika Srpska-is not generally recognized as
a state. The San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability
has brought three cases in US courts, and after the Pinochet arrest,
Human Rights Watch set up an international justice initiative
under advocacy director Brody to press for the extradition and
prosecution of former dictators and war criminals.
The rapid pace of marketplace globalization, in which the
power of national governments has been increasingly weakened,
makes judicial globalization inevitable. The new International
Criminal Court is a notable example of this trend. But justice
will be served only if all human rights abusers-those who give
the orders and their accomplices as well as those who carry out
the crimes-are held accountable, and if the citizens of all nations,
including the permanent five members of the UN Security Council,
are judged by the same standards. The arrest of Pinochet, who
until last year was thought to be immune to prosecution, is a
magnificent advance in that direction.
International War Crimes