Cameron Duodu : LETTER FROM THE NORTH
Ever since I voted for Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the last general election in the United Kingdom, I have felt like a mug.
I listen to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown justifying the high interest rates by which my money is ruthlessly filched for a usurious mortgage company and I ask myself, ”What’s the difference between this guy and Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, Norman Lamont?”
So imagine my delight when I heard that Blair’s government had arrested the former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, while Pinochet was recovering in a London hospital.
What? Blair has discovered that the Labour Party is supposed to be a left-wing party after all? Okay, I know one swallow does not make a summer and all that. But if you’re dying of thirst in the desert and you see a riverbed, do you say to yourself that the water might be muddy?
Pinochet represents everything that is evil in the so-called Third World. His close relations with the CIA and the ”brilliant” former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger (who apparently values democracy so much he insults the Chilean people as being ”irresponsible” merely because they exercised their free vote in favour of Salvador Allende) are the stuff that make historians of neo-colonialism dance with joy.
But worse, Pinochet’s regime was responsible for murdering, in cold blood, an estimated 3 000 Chilean men, women and children. Another 2 000 or so are estimated to have ”disappeared”. And all that Pinochet had against them was that they held left-wing opinions.
That this monster should be strutting around London, having tea at Belgravia with Thatcher, giggling like a child at Madam Tussaud’s, shopping at Burberry’s and topping it with luncheon at Fortnum and Mason, while surviving victims of his torturers – both Britons and Chileans who now live in Britain – look helplessly on, would have been a crime against human sensitivity.
And now the Labour government has acted to stop the charade.
Britain is being asked by a Spanish magistrate to extradite Pinochet to Spain so that he can face charges relating to the murder of Spanish citizens by Pinochet’s government.
Pinochet thought he was beyond such legal constraints because he was travelling on a diplomatic passport issued by the Chilean government. What he did not know was that unless a person holding a diplomatic passport is accredited by the country in which he wants to claim diplomatic privileges, the passport is worth nothing.
Extradition cases are always complex, so it is by no means certain that Britain will in fact send Pinochet for trial in Spain. It is emerging, however, that there are Pinochet victims in Britain who can bring charges that will result in Pinochet being tried in Britain itself.
New laws on crimes against humanity are now binding on most European countries, and it would be ironical if Britain were to refuse to prosecute Pinochet in Britain on behalf of Pinochet victims who live in Britain, while Britain and Nato are seeking to execute arrest warrants on the perpetrators of similar atrocities in Bosnia.
Amazingly, in the US – some of whose citizens were murdered by Pinochet in Chile, and in whose capital, Washington, Pinochet’s secret agents actually blew up, by car bomb, a Pinochet opponent – the former Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, is reported to be working behind the scenes to dissuade Blair’s government from extraditing Pinochet.
Perhaps one should not be surprised, for as The Guardian put it, ”In the United States, these matters are considered as history.”
For us in Africa, the Pinochet case is of extreme importance. This is because some of our worst rulers are still alive. These include people under whose regimes terrible murders were committed, such as Idi Amin and PW Botha.
Such people should not be allowed to strut around the world with impunity, for that will only encourage others of their ilk to continue inflicting torture and death on their fellow human beings, without a thought about future punishment for themselves.
In Nigeria, terrible accounts of torture in prison have been surfacing, ever since the evil dictator, Sani Abacha, died in June. There is a great deal of annoyance in the country that Abacha’s top security operatives, especially army Major Hamza al- Mustapha, are still enjoying freedom, while the people whose bodies and spirits they afflicted are still recuperating.
Meanwhile, a group of Nigerian journalists are seeking ways to get the government of General Abdulsalami Abubakar to reopen the investigation into the death of Dele Giwa, founding editor of Newswatch magazine, who was blown up by a parcel bomb in 1986.
The ruler of the time was General Ibrahim Babangida, and it was suspected that his government was connected with Giwa’s murder, because a few days before the parcel bomb arrived in his home, Giwa was interviewed by two of Babangida’s top security men about allegations that Giwa was ”importing arms” into Nigeria.
Giwa was so shaken by the allegations that he immediately asked his lawyer to find out what he could do to clear his name. But he need not have worried about legalities – he had been slated for a fate that was far worse than a legal prosecution.
Well, there were rumours recently that Babangida wanted to travel to the US. I am sure that after the Pinochet incident, he will ”reconsider” his travel plans, if he had any. For even if the US won’t ask him for an account of Giwa’s murder, he might well stop in transit somewhere – like Blair’s Britain.
Meanwhile, some clever chap has written a letter to a London newspaper, inviting Botha to visit England!