Kissinger may have escaped being brought to trial for crimes against humanity, murder, torture, etc., but history has recorded his acts and the people of Chile, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cyprus, Bangladesh and others will never forget his deeds.
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PARIS was Dr Henry A. Kissinger’s favourite city and he often visited it. During the US–Vietnam peace talks, he is supposed to have visited it nineteen times. He once claimed that he knew every nook and corner of Paris.
In the month of May 2001, on one of his visits, the criminal division of the French gendarmerie visited his suite at the Ritz Hotel carrying summons issued by Judge Roger Le Loire, to appear at the Palais de Justice the next morning to answer questions about the “disappearance” of five French citizens in Chile during the Pinochet regime.
That evening, under the cover of darkness, Kissinger fled Paris. It is unlikely that he visited his favourite city ever again.
Kissinger had reasons to be worried. In October of 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, the butcher of Chile, who ruled that country for seventeen years from September 1973 to March 1990, was arrested in London. During his reign, hundreds of thousands were killed, tortured or disappeared.
The arrest was made on the basis of an indictment for human rights violation committed in his native Chile by the Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. Pinochet claimed immunity from prosecution as a former head of State.
The Law Lords in the UK in a 3:2 decision ruled that international crimes, such as torture, did not grant him immunity. However, the judgment was set aside on technical grounds later. Those reasonings in the judgment are for another piece.
In October of 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, the butcher of Chile, who ruled that country for seventeen years from September 1973 to March 1990, was arrested in London.
Remember it was the Thatcher era in the UK. After nineteen months of house arrest, Pinochet left for home. Before he left, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent him a bottle of single malt.
Kissinger was not so sure of the French. He was not certain if Jacques Chirac would send him a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
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Kissinger, who died recently at the age of 100, strode the world in the late 60s and the better half of the 70s as a colossus, determining and ordering the fate of nations and peoples with realpolitik, détente and “shuttle diplomacy”.
Doing so, he ordered or conspired to murders, tortures and kidnappings, collided with tyrants and dictators to kill their own people, bombed countries out of existence, destroyed flora and fauna with Agent Orange, incited and enabled genocide, and was complicit in the killing of non-combatant innocents.
He institutionalised these policies through the 40 Committee which he headed. The 40 Committee, named after the room in which the meetings were held, was a super-cabinet, a semi-clandestine body answerable only to Kissinger.
Dr Henry Alfred Kissinger was a Jew of German origin, his family, having fled to the US during the Nazi regime. He entered the US at the age of fifteen. Kissinger earned his doctorate from Harvard. His dissertation was on Metternich and Castlereagh and the Congress of Vienna.
His subject at Harvard was put into practice when he became special assistant to the US President on security affairs, later that office was to be named National Security Advisor; and after ousting William Rogers, he became the Secretary of State. The offices of National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State were combined into one for Kissinger.
Kissinger was appointed by President-elect Richard Nixon as his special assistant on security affairs the very next day after he was elected. It was Nixon’s very first appointment. Therein hangs a tale and the first crime of Kissinger.
In the election year of 1968, Hurbert Humphery, the Democratic candidate, was leading Nixon by a few percentage points. The Paris peace negotiation initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson (who declined to stand for a second term) and vice-President Humphrey with the North Vietnamese was seen to bear fruition.
If the peace accord was signed, Humphrey was sure to win. Kissinger then was on the staff of Nelson Rockefeller, the candidate opposing Nixon for the Republican nomination. At the same time, Kissinger was on the delegation to the peace negotiation in Paris. He had inside news of the progress of the talks.
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Now with Rockefeller having lost the nomination, Kissinger, as always the opportunist and self-server, switched sides. He surreptitiously sent news that there was a possibility of an agreement and leaked the terms of the agreement to John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and vice-Presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew.
For Nixon, this was a disaster. He sent word to the South Vietnamese President, Nguyen Van Thieu, through fixer, deal-maker and an all-purpose intriguer, Anna Chennault, known to all as The Dragon Lady, asking Thieu to hold on and that Nixon, when elected president, would get the South Vietnamese a better deal. In the event, Thieu pulled out just two days before the elections. Humphery lost. There is no doubt who the villain was in this whole episode.
Kissinger, who died recently at the age of 100, strode the world in the late 60s and the better half of the 70s as a colossus, determining and ordering the fate of nations and peoples with realpolitik, détente and “shuttle diplomacy”.
Ironically, a peace accord was signed four years later on the same terms at the loss of thousands of servicemen of the US (official US death toll 20,492) and Vietnamese, both North and South armies; and hundreds of thousands unknown non-combatant civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The person who signed the accord was Dr Henry A. Kissinger.
After taking office as Nixon’s assistant for national security, Kissinger pretended to be plus royaliste que le roi. According to Christopher Hitchens, who pursued Kissinger as a war criminal throughout his life, “[Kissinger] had to confect a rationale of ‘credibility’ for punitive action in an already devastated Vietnam theatre, and he had to second his principal’s (Nixon’s) wish that he forms part of a ‘wall’ between the Nixon White House and the Department of State.”
For Kissinger, it all came down to ‘credibility’ and ‘face saving’. In 1972, when Nixon campaigned to retain office for a second term, the US started what is called, infamously, the “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam. It started during the re-election campaign and continued after Nixon won. The bombing was not for any ‘military reason’ but to make a show of strength to the US Congress and to put the Democratic party on the defensive. This must surely count as a war crime.
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The United States was at war with North Vietnam. However, it was not at war with Laos or Cambodia. Both these countries were neutral and took no part in the conflict. The North Vietnamese were using the territories of these States to ferry arms and ammunition to the Viet Cong (the Southern communists) through what is known as the Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of rudimentary rutted roads and paths through the jungles of Laos and Cambodia. The bombings against villages suspected of harbouring Vietnamese guerrillas was a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention on civilian protection which prohibits ‘collective penalties’ and ‘reprisals against protected persons’.
At his firm Kissinger Associates, Kissinger made millions advising his former friends, the same old tyrants, tinpot dictators, the military-industrial complex of the US.
Kissinger treated the two countries as if they were disposable hamlets. As many as 350,000 civilians lost their lives in Laos and a further 600,000 in Cambodia.
According to the US Constitution, only the Congress has the right to declare war. The President can only execute it on approval. The bombings were without the approval of Congress. Nor was Congress informed. When the news leaked, Nixon and Kissinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the areas were uninhabited. A lie.
Winding back to 1971, we all know the story of the liberation of Bangladesh. The famous ‘tilt’ that put the US on the side of those committing genocide in East Pakistan. The sending of the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India, Kissinger’s urging of China to attack India, his support for the whiskey-sodden Yahya Khan and his silence over the ethnic massacre in Bangladesh (detailed in the Blood Telegram).
But what is unknown is Kissinger’s complicity in the murder of Mujibur Rehman. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the knowledge of the State department, especially the 40 Committee, was in touch with the junior officers and one senior officer— the future dictator, General Ziaur Rahman. In the coup, Mujib and his entire family was killed. The only person who escaped death was his daughter, Hasina, who happened to be in West Germany.
In 1970, the Marxist Salvador Allende won the popular democratic elections in Chile. Nixon and Kissinger were upset that a Marxist government was in power in its backyard (remember the Monroe Doctrine?).
Kissinger observed that he saw no reason why a country should be allowed to “go Marxist” merely because “its people are irresponsible”. Kissinger and the CIA did their best to scuttle Allende during the traditional sixty-day interregnum. They tried to persuade the chief of the Chilean General Staff, Gen. René Schneider, to carry out a coup.
Kissinger’s subject at Harvard was put into practice when he became special assistant to the US President on security affairs, later that office was to be named National Security Advisor.
But the general stayed faithful to the democratic tradition of his country. The only way then was to get rid of the general. One morning, while Gen. Schnieder was on his way to his headquarters, a group of ultra rightists led by a crazy general, Roberto Viaux and his crony, Captain Arturo Marshal waylaid and killed the general with carbines and grenades supplied by the CIA under instructions from the 40 Committee. The men were paid US $50,000. A huge amount in those days.
Allende was duly sworn in. But the effort to remove him continued. On September 11, 1973, a coup was staged against Allende, the duly elected President of Chile. The presidential palace was bombed with fighter jets supplied by the US.
The President died with an AK-47 in his hand. While the coup was taking place, Kissinger was appearing in the Senate for his confirmation as the Secretary of State. He lied to the Senate that the US government was in no way involved in the coup. The coup was led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The man we met earlier.
In April of 1974, a coup led by left-wing military officers took place in Portugal. It overthrew the dictatorial regime, once led by António de Oliveira Salazar. It was called the Carnation Revolution.
With the new regime coming to power, they released all Portuguese colonial possessions. One such possession was East Timor. East Timor is situated in the Indonesian archipelago. The independence movement against Portugal was led by the Front for the Liberation of East Timor popularly known as the FRETILIN, a left-leaning organisation. The Indonesians, naturally, had an eye on this part rich in oil and coffee. Timorians are mainly Catholics while Indonesians are Muslims.
In December of 1975, President Gerald Ford (Nixon had left office in ignominy) and Kissinger, still the Secretary of State under the new President, met President Suharto of Indonesia in Jakarta.
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During the meeting, Suharto raised the question of East Timor. No records are to be found that Ford and Kissinger dissuaded Suharto. As a matter of record, he informed Suharto that he would not oppose intervention in East Timor. In fact, they told Suharto not to act until they left the Indonesian airspace. On December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded and annexed East Timor using American supplied weapons in violation of American Congress approval. (It must be noted that the US supplies weapons to friendly states for self-defense purposes only).
With Rockefeller having lost the nomination, Kissinger, as always the opportunist and self-server, switched sides.
In the first eighteen months of the occupation and on Kissinger’s watch, 80,000 to a 100,000 East Timorians were killed.
As an aside, a fact not many of us know, Kissinger justified the annexation of East Timor by comparing it with India’s liberation of Goa. What he fails to say is that in the liberation of Goa, there was no bloodbath and it completed the decolonisation of India.
For want of space, I am not able to detail the complicity of Kissinger in the overthrow of Archbishop Makarios, President of Cyprus and the partition of Cyprus into Greek-Cypriotic and Turkish zones; his acquiescence of the regime of, and support to, the colonels in Greece, his silence on the several assassination attempts on Makarios by the Cyprus ultra-rightists in cahoots with the Greek colonels and his support to the tribal warlords of Angola such as Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto in the fight against the Marxist-Leninist People’s Movement for the Liberation (MPLA).
He funded the apartheid regime of South Africa and Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, then called the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Yes, the same Mobuto who wet his pants when the CIA ordered him to kill Patrice Lumumba, the then President in 1960).
Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, funded and encouraged by the CIA and Kissinger, started Operation Candor, a campaign of state terror, extra-judicial killing and security operations which ended only with the overthrow of the dictators and the retirement of Kissinger.
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Kissinger left office after Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. He started a firm called Kissinger Associates employing his former colleagues and assistants who assisted him in his shenanigans for nearly a decade.
He made millions advising his former friends, the same old tyrants, tinpot dictators, the military-industrial complex of the US. His biggest client was Dengist China with whom he opened relations in 1971. They were ever grateful to him and offered the companies he advised with contracts and entry into a closed market.
Kissinger observed that he saw no reason why a country should be allowed to “go Marxist” merely because “its people are irresponsible”.
Many of his government colleagues went to jail. Of course, for other reasons. His boss, Nixon, had to leave office in disgrace. His other comrades-in-crime, Pinochet was under house arrest when he died, Videla of Argentina was in prison until Carlos Menem pardoned him, Stroessner of Paraguay was overthrown and fled to Brazil.
Kissinger may have escaped being brought to trial for crimes against humanity, murder, torture, etc., but history has recorded his acts and the people of Chile, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cyprus, Bangladesh and others will never forget his deeds.
