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The Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 11, 2002
Is Henry Kissinger a war criminal?
Thirty years after the death of Charles Horman inspired a bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie, his widow still pursues those she believes are really to blame -- including the former U.S. secretary of state. It's one reason, MARCUS GEE reports, the quest for international justice makes the United States so nervous.
THE ACCUSED: Henry Alfred Kissinger, former U.S. secretary of state, national security adviser and Nobel laureate. THE ACCUSATIONS: Complicity in coup against Chilean government plus the 'killing, injury and displacement' of three million people during Vietnam War....
...In the chaos that followed General Augusto Pinochet's decision to depose Mr. Allende on Sept. 11, 1973, hundreds of the leftist president's supporters were taken away to be tortured, beaten or killed. Mr. Horman, an Allende sympathizer living in Santiago, was one of them. In the month that followed, Ms. Horman, then 29, and her father-in-law, Ed, searched frantically for Mr. Horman -- an ordeal dramatized in the Oscar-winning 1982 film Missing. The movie ends when Joyce and Ed discover that Charles is dead, killed by the military and his body hidden in a wall at a Santiago cemetery. But Joyce Horman's search continues. For 28 years, she has struggled to track down those who killed the man she loved. And the person at the centre of her quest is none other than Henry Alfred Kissinger.
A leading citizen of the world's most powerful nation, Mr. Kissinger served as U.S. secretary of state and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year as the coup in Chile. He was also national security adviser to president Richard Nixon, and Ms. Horman believes that he and other U.S. officials were deeply involved in the events that cost her husband his life.
....'There's no way around him,' she says. 'He is the most responsible person for the behaviour of the U.S. government in Chile at that time. He needs to be put on trial.' A few years ago, that would have seemed wildly improbable. The armour of sovereign immunity protected all officials from the acts they committed on government service, no matter how unsavoury. But the 1998 arrest of the man behind the coup, Gen. Pinochet, has knocked a gaping hole in that armour. Since then, a posse of victims, human-rights activists and crusading prosecutors has tried to apply this 'Pinochet precedent' to others accused of mass killing, torture, abduction and war crimes. Mr. Kissinger is their biggest quarry yet, and they are getting closer all the time.
Now, prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain and France want him to testify about what happened in Chile. Last month, a Chilean judge staged a re-enactment of the Horman killing at Santiago's National Stadium, and now wants Mr. Kissinger at least to answer written questions about U.S. involvement in the coup.
....It was a heady time in Chile. Mr. Allende had come to power in 1970 and brought in radical changes: land reform, wealth redistribution and the nationalization of key industries. Mr. Horman began writing for a local magazine that often attacked Mr. Nixon for undermining the Allende government. When the military stepped in, he was in the coastal city of Vina del Mar with friend Terry Simon; they met two U.S. officers who seemed to know a lot about the coup. Mr. Horman concluded that his country had plotted with Gen. Pinochet, and made copious notes -- which may have cost him his life.
...Ms. Horman never gave up wondering about her husband's death, and in 1998 an event gave her new hope. On Oct. 16, she turned on the news to hear that Gen. Pinochet had been arrested in London on an extradition request from a Spanish judge seeking to prosecute him. Exhilarated, she travelled to England to join the attempt to persuade British courts to hand him over. Eventually, the British government let him go home for health reasons, but Gen. Pinochet's detention set a precedent that galvanized the international justice movement.
Ms. Horman and her lawyers tried again to get the U.S. government to release classified documents relating to her husband's disappearance. Finally, in 2000, it gave them the full results of two internal reviews of the killing, one of which uncovered 'circumstantial evidence' that the Central Intelligence Agency 'may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death.' It went on to say that 'the government of Chile might have believed this American could be killed without negative fallout from the U.S. government.' The second review said it was hard to believe that the Chilean military would have killed Mr. Horman unless it had some kind of signal from Washington....
...Joyce Horman believes U.S. officials tipped off friends in the Chilean military that her husband had found evidence of U.S. involvement while in Vina del Mar. Rafael Gonzalez, a disgruntled Chilean intelligence agent, told reporters in the 1970s that the army's head of intelligence, Gen. Augusto Lutz, decided that Mr. Horman 'knew too much,' and an American military officer was in the room at the time. Ms. Horman hopes to track down that man. 'I want to find out exactly what happened to Charlie: who picked him up, why they picked him up, who questioned him, how they came to decide he had to disappear.' Those questions lead her straight to Mr. Kissinger who, as well as being national security adviser, led the high-level '40 committee' that helped to oversee U.S. intelligence efforts. Even if he played no direct role in her husband's death, she believes he knew how and why it happened....
...Mr. Kissinger, now 79, denies everything.... But Mr. Kissinger also has others on his trail. Last May, a French judge sent the police to his Paris hotel to ask him to appear at the Justice Ministry the next day and answer questions about five French citizens who disappeared after the Chilean coup. Instead, Mr. Kissinger promptly left town. That same month, an Argentine judge said he wanted Mr. Kissinger to testify about American involvement in Operation Condor, the scheme by South American dictatorships, including Argentina and Chile, to abduct or kill opponents living in exile.
In April, a British human-rights campaigner asked a London judge to arrest Mr. Kissinger under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957 for the 'killing, injury and displacement' of three million people in Indochina during the Vietnam War years. The judge rejected the application, but not before Mr. Kissinger had to endure a protest by 200 activists calling him an 'evil war criminal.' Plans for a similar protest apparently led him to cancel a planned trip to Brazil as well. Finally, in Washington, Mr. Kissinger faces a $3-million (U.S.) lawsuit by the family of René Schneider, a Chilean general assassinated in 1970 for opposing plans for a coup against Mr. Allende.
This quickening pace of the pursuit raises a touchy issue for international justice: Whose justice is it?
Until now, those brought to trial largely have come from poor or defeated countries such as Serbia and Rwanda. But activists say that must change. To have any force, international law must apply to the rich and powerful too. 'If the drive to put Kissinger in the witness box, let alone the dock, should succeed, then it would rebut the taunt about 'victor's justice' in war-crimes trials,' writes British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who asserts in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger there are grounds for an indictment. 'It would demonstrate that no person, and no society or state, is above the law. Conversely, if the initiative should fail, then it would seem to be true that we have woven a net for the catching of small fish only.'
But Mr. Kissinger is one fish the United States does not want on anyone's hook. The attempts to arrest or even question him touch off Washington's worst fears about the evolving movement for international justice. Just last month, the administration of President George W. Bush declared it would have nothing to do with the world's first permanent war-crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court. If foreign judges could second-guess their every decision, U.S. officials argue, it would be open season on the United States....
...Joyce Horman argues that the officials of a democratic nation like the United States must be accountable for their actions. If that takes a foreign prosecutor, so be it. 'The American military and the American government have an incredible amount of power and the abuse of that power was typified by the Chilean coup,' she says. 'For Americans to be bumping off Americans in foreign lands is not what American citizens want their government to be doing.' ( Truncated )
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Source and full article:
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/GIS.Servlets.
Epilog: And to think Ronald Reagan--mass murderer, along with his Israeli co-conspirators in the US/Israel black war in Central America in the 1980's is unfit to stand trial--or is he?
TheAZCowBoy,
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