Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu said on Monday that he ”would never be able to gloat” over the death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died on Sunday without ever facing justice for the torture and killings that took place during his 1973 to 1990 regime.
Tutu, who was speaking to reporters in Geneva, said he ”would want to send condolences to the family of General Pinochet”, adding that the ex-dictator ”remains a child of God”.
Chile’s government says at least 3 197 people were killed for political reasons during Pinochet’s rule, and thousands more disappeared. But after leaving the Presidency in 1990 Pinochet escaped hundreds of criminal complaints because of his declining physical and mental health.
The announcement of his death led to celebrations in the streets of Chile’s capital, Santiago.
”I think that he is human and I hope that he may have been himself touched by the people who were saying ‘We want to know what happened to our loved ones during the time when you were ruler of Chile’,” Tutu said.
”He did what he did and everybody has agreed that it was wrong, and his country dealt, or sought to deal with him, within the confines of their laws,” he said.
Tutu was instrumental in setting up South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of white rule. The commission granted amnesty to those who confessed and showed repentance to their Apartheid-era crimes, but many who refused to confess have gone unpunished.
Last month Pinochet’s wife read out a message from her husband in which he took ”political responsibility for everything that was done, which had no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration”. — Sapa-AP