BOOKS-US: Impunity Just Ain’t What It Used To Be

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Jun 19 2001 (IPS) - A specialist in dethroning the mighty, Christopher Hitchens has pursuedand skeweredquarry ranging from the seemingly blameless (Mother Teresa) to the patently shameless (Bill Clinton).

In his latest indictment, ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ (Verso, 2001), Hitchens makes a coherent case that the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former US secretary of state is a reptilian war criminal and should be made to answer for a long career of misdeeds – either in a US court or before an international human rights tribunal.

During his tenure at the Nixon White House, Hitchens says, Kissinger, as head of the so-called Forty Committee that ran US covert operations, masterminded and personally oversaw the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in which untold numbers of civilians were killed.

And the war only dragged on for those four bloody extra years because Kissinger engineered the sabotage of the Paris peace talks of 1968 in a bid to undermine the Lyndon Johnson administration – as well as Democratic candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey – and propel Richard Nixon to the presidency.

Kissinger’s cynical machinations regarding East Timor and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) encouraged mass killings there, Hitchens says. He also was key to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s ascension to power in Chile, where the democratic government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 and a mercilessly repressive military regime installed.

Most of these allegations have surfaced in print before, but Hitchens, a Washington-based journalist, summarises the known evidence and uses recently declassified US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents to shed further light – particularly in the case of Chile, where a prominent general who opposed the coup was kidnapped and murdered at the behest of the US government.

While the aged Pinochet has been scrambling to fend off human rights prosecutors in Spain and Chile for the past two years, Kissinger’s impunity seemed assured. As Hitchens vividly argues, however, there is ever only fitful rest for the guilty.

Hitchens describes an alarmed call from Kissinger to his book editor at Simon and Schuster, Michael Korda, following a December 2, 1998 ‘New York Times’ article detailing the imminent declassification of US government documents on Pinochet, then confined to his luxury villa in a London suburb. The journalist deduces:

“Sitting in his office at Kissinger Associates, with its tentacles of business and consultancy stretching from Belgrade to Beijing, and cushioned by innumerable other directorships and boards, he still shudders when he hears of the arrest of a dictator.

“One must credit Kissinger with grasping what so many other people did not: that if the Pinochet precedent became established, then he himself was in some danger.”

Indeed last week, as Kissinger sat ensconced in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, he received a most unwelcome summons from French legal authorities seeking his testimony regarding the disappearances of French citizens in Chile during the dictatorship.

Kissinger hastily departed for the airport and boarded a plane to Rome.

But others, namely Pinochet’s arch-adversary Chilean Judge Juan Guzman, also have questions for the former statesman and darling of the Washington cocktail party circuit.

Guzman has declared his intention to send a list of queries to Kissinger regarding the kidnapping and murder of a young US journalist named Charles Horman immediately after the coup. Horman’s case inspired the film ‘Missing’.

Of course, Kissinger does not have to answer. But his cloak of respectability is fraying at the edges. And it cannot be pleasant for Kissinger to see news stories comparing him to the bizarre Nazi-saluting presidential advisor, Dr. Strangelove, in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film of the same name.

In response to an inquiry over the Internet as to whether his assault on Kissinger would “further foster unfounded American fears of the proposed International Criminal Court,” Hitchens replies:

“Let’s not describe the fear as necessarily ‘unfounded.’ The US is asked to intervene in numerous tense locales. It can rightly be suspicious of a court which both expects this and reserves the right to pass judgment on it.”

“However, the Republic cannot have it both ways. It cannot lecture the rest of the world on ‘nowhere to hide’ for war criminals and tyrants, while sheltering a prime offender within its own frontiers and trusting to superpower-dom to square the moral circle.”

Hitchens adds that Kissinger refused to comment for the book, even when offered a “consultancy fee” (apparently, the usual is 20,000 dollars to 30,000 dollars).

An admitted political opponent of Kissinger, Hitchens’s scathing prose occasionally ventures into personal excess (Kissinger’s manners are characterised as “rather gross,” and his wit as “a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts”).

However, Hitchens’s central point – that the evidence of Kissinger’s complicity in what could be termed numerous instances of genocide at least merits serious re-examination – is not one that should be ignored by anyone with even a passing interest in democracy and human rights.