Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH
She never allowed the leaders of the Soviet Union to forget what horrible creatures they were. And she plotted, with her “virtual boyfriend”, Ronald Reagan, to bring down the Soviets’ “evil empire”. To listen to her waxing lyrical about the “values of the free world” you would have thought she would run a mile if she saw a dictator coming.
Her name is Margaret Thatcher and to the British right wing she is the next best thing to the Adolf Hitler they were not allowed to worship. On hearing of the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London, she wrote to The Times, firmly demanding that Pinochet be released “forthwith”. The British right wing was as electrified as if it had been given a shot of Viagra.
Although the “Iron Lady” is now well past the age for S&M, menopausal blokes in the media nevertheless fawned all over her with front-page leads and ponderous editorials, supporting her claim that Pinochet was a “friend of Britain”, who had done “so much to save so many British lives” during the Falklands War of 1982.
Pinochet a “friend” of Britain? That’s news to at least one British citizen. Her name is Dr Sheila Cassidy and she was working in a hospital in Chile in 1975 when a Chilean Jesuit priest asked her to treat a member of the Chilean opposition who had a bullet lodged in his leg – the work of Pinochet’s soldiers.
Somehow, the news got out that Cassidy had fulfilled her Hippocratic oath and treated a wounded man and she was arrested by the Dina, Chile’s secret police.
Recounting what happened to her in The Independent, Cassidy wrote: “I was taken to one of the main torture centres, the Villa Grimaldi, and led blindfold to a small room which contained three or four men – members of the Dina. I was immediately told to remove my clothes. I declined, so one of my captors began to rip them off. I was tied naked to a metal bunk and tortured with electric shocks …
“They put the electrodes in my vagina and the pain was much worse. I was interrogated on and off during the night, and at dawn, I gave in and told the name of the priest … [Even so] I was held for a [total of eight weeks, three of them in solitary confinement] until I was expelled from the country on New Year’s Eve 1975.”
This woman doctor was working legally in Chile and carrying a British passport. Did Thatcher demand that she be “released forthwith”? You bet not.
In the wake of Thatcher’s appeal, several bigwigs, including the archbishop of Canterbury and the former foreign secretary, Lord Geoffrey Howe, have also chipped in, saying: Pinochet is an “82-year-old man” who is “on a sickbed”, so “compassion” should be extended to him.
One retort I read asked the archbishop of Canterbury whether his compassion was “one-sided” or also went to Pinochet’s victims, especially Christians in Chile whom he had tortured in droves, and who needed to know that the good God wanted such evil to be punished, so that similar would-be torturers might be deterred.
And reacting to the “pussyfooting” about Pinochet, Cassidy quoted Jos Blogges, a Chilean who “lost his daughter, his friends and his sister- in-law to the Dina”, who asked: “This man authorised my daughter and her unborn child to be tortured; [she was] raped and killed. How can you think he should not stand trial?”
Whatever happens to Pinochet in the end – and there are pointers already that the British establishment may be seeking a way to extricate itself from the “embarrassment” caused by the arrest – one good thing would have come out of it. At last named persons made of flesh and blood are talking to us and making us personally feel the impact of those abstract words often tossed about in news bulletins: “torture”, “oppression”, “detention without trial”, “mass murder”, “crimes against humanity” – words that inure us to the presence of evil in politics.
For me, one particular image that will remain whenever I think of the Pinochet episode is a description provided by a Chilean woman, of the state her lover’s body was in when it was found. He had been “disappeared” and it took many grim days of viewing hundreds of bodies before she finally found his. He had, of course, been murdered by Pinochet’s men.
But even in her total distress, she noticed that there was something extremely unusual about the body. Both his hands were limp, and appeared to have been deliberately broken.
One of the torturers, noticing that she was puzzled by the state of the dead man’s hands, explained, with a shrug: “He was a guitarist, right? Well, we wanted him to know that there was to be no more guitar playing for him because of his politics, right? So his hands were broken.” And then they killed him anyhow.
This reminds me of the cold sarcasm with which Pinochet himself, upon discovering that the bodies of hundreds of his victims had been buried two to a coffin, remarked: “Who was the clever fellow who thought of this? He has saved the nation a lot of money in the cost of wood and nails.”
It would make a good conversation piece when he is released (if he is) and is having tea with Thatcher, don’t you think? After all, before she became rich, Thatcher used to buy cans of food and stockpile them, in case their prices rose in future. Apparently, this was one of the reasons British housewives thought Thatcher would be a good “housekeeper” for the British economy.