Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 11:56:39 +0100

To: pr.bruxelles@agora.stm.it

From: John Roberts <101540.3640@compuserve.com>

Subject: Pinochet WL8

Where will it all end?

The arrest of Pinochet, the retired Chilean dictator, has been greeted with a mixture of bemusement, delight, fury, horror and incredulity across the world. Once the legal process was announced, the politics began. The wonderfully injudicious statement by the British minister Peter Mandelson

that the thought of not extraditing "such a brutal dictator" was "gut-wrenching" has probably given his left-wing credentials a greater boost than anything since the formation of the Blair government.

Torture, abduction, murder, rape and sytematic oppression were hall-marks of the Chilean regime under Pinochet. Apart from the common or garden crimes of which his minions stand accused, he is clearly suspect of greater villany, including conspiracy and ordering mass-murder, even genocide, although the definition of that may have become stretched. He, as president, not only approved but certainly did more to ensure that his government was responsible for a whole series of crimes against humanity.

The whole of civilization is a process of bringing power beneath the sway of law. Within states we have long since learnt the trick of doing this so that by and large most countries accept law as both right and necessary. This has important implications and we learn these as we grow up. But our international relationships have never been brought properly under law. Instead we have 'international' or 'half-law' which has inadequate provision for enforcement and has not yet established the individual as its proper subject.

With the arrest of Pinochet we come to a turning-point. In the past there was no institution capable of preventing the escape of international criminals. Now, 50 years after the precedents of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials the United Nations is on the verge of setting up an international criminal court. Its scope would permit the trial of men such as Pinochet if they are not arraigned by some national tribunal for the same crimes.

But there is a serious political difficulty, which involves first a few governments complicit in the oppression of the Pinochet regime in Chile, but afterwards virtually every government in the world. One can finger the United States, where 400 agents were allocated to Chile for the overthrow of a democratic regime. Nor does the CIA and US government involvement in such crimes stop at Chile. Most undemocratic regimes in South America have consistently benefited from the sympathy and support of US governments. Many have been guilty of crimes such as murder of Archbishop Romero in his cathedral with the connivance of the CIA.

Of course, the writing on the wall is there for Slobadon Milosevic and his opposite number in Croatia, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban leaders, the SLORC in what was Burma and numerous other petty dictators. Every undemocratic ruler who has acted in the usual arbitrary way of such men will have cause to fear the precedents now being laid down. But so will their former apologists and sympathisers, including Margaret Thatcher and other once-lauded leaders. Nor does it stop with past times.

The guilt of Pinochet and the US involvement must alarm any US administration. Who knows where it would stop? The illegal bombing of a Sudanese factory renders President Clinton liable to a similar plaint. And the prompt assistance offered by Tony Blair could equally lay him open to a charge of aiding and abetting an international crime.

As further kinds of implications sink into the consciousness of the British and other European governments we shall find immense poliitical obstacles to doing anything to further strengthen the application of international law and its enforcement. This is why Peter Mandelson's pre-emptive dismissal of Pinochet as "a brutal dictator" is so welcome and so timely. It has certainly made it much more difficult for the British government, despite its frequently abject adherence to American policies, to bend to formal Chilean protests.

John Roberts