Published on Thursday, December 11, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Kissinger's Dark Legacy
by César Chelala
 

Recently released documents by the National Security Archive shed important light on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's role in Argentina. These documents indicate that Kissinger approved of Argentina's military junta's ruthless tactics to eliminate any opposition to their rule. They are a severe indictment of the Nobel Peace prize winner. This information confirms journalist Christopher Hitchens's denunciation of Kissinger's responsibility in human rights abuses world-wide in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

One key document dated October 19, 1976, indicates that Argentina's then foreign minister, Navy Adm. César Augusto Guzzetti, returned from Washington, D.C., "in a state of jubilation" when he became convinced, after meeting with Kissinger, who was then secretary of state in the Ford administration, that U.S. officials approved of the terror campaign against the opposition. Although Guzzetti assured Kissinger that the campaign against "terrorist organizations" would soon be finished, the killings increased in late 1976 and harsh repression continued until 1978.

According to transcripts of that conversation released under the Freedom of Information Act, Kissinger told Guzzetti, " Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed, the better."

According to Carlos Osorio, director of the Argentina Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, "This is final, definitive evidence that Kissinger gave a green light to Argentina's generals."

Mr. William Rogers, Kissinger's lawyer, strongly rejected any suggestion that Kissinger had approved of human rights abuses. Rogers, who served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America under Kissinger, said, "It is show business. This stuff is utterly tendentious. There has never been a credible objective analysis that he [Kissinger] has committed an international crime."

Rogers' defense of Kissinger is under increasing attack particularly as new evidence has emerged of Kissinger's connections to human rights abuses in countries such as Chile and Indonesia. Kissinger is facing legal troubles related to Dr. Salvador Allende's rule in Chile, and of former president Richard Nixon and Kissinger's support for a coup that installed a bloody military dictatorship that ruled in Chile until 1990.

In addition, two sons of Gen. René Schneider, a Chilean military commander slain in Chile in 1970, filed a lawsuit in Washington D.C. charging Kissinger of complicity in the murder of their father. According to the lawyer for Gen. Schneider's sons, the suit is based on documents declassified over the last two years which indicate that Kissinger was a coordinator of a "Track II" plan that gave $35,000 to those who carried out the assassination.

Documents obtained by the National Security Archive of George Washington University indicate that both former president Gerald Ford and Kissinger gave Ali Suharto, the Indonesian dictator, the green light to invade East Timor in 1975. Indonesian forces invaded East Timor the day after a conversation between Suharto and Kissinger in Yakarta in which Kissinger told Suharto, "It is important that whatever is to be done should be done quickly." In the following five years, almost a third of the population of East Timor was killed by the Indonesian military.

In a speech in London in April of 2002, Kissinger tried to respond to suggestions that in the future he would be obliged to defend his foreign policy record. He said in that occasion, "No one can say that he served in an administration that did not make mistakes. The issue is whether 30 years after the event courts are the appropriate means by which determination is made."

Despite Kissinger's statement, this recently released information is a searing attack on Kissinger's record, and makes a mockery of his Nobel Peace prize. It is a sad paradox of history that Kissinger would receive the Nobel Peace prize several years before former president Jimmy Carter, a true democrat, who since assuming office and until today has been campaigning relentlessly for human rights world-wide.

César Chelala, MD, PhD, is the co-author of "Missing or Dead in Argentina," a The New York Times Magazine cover story for which the authors received the 1979 Overseas Press Club of America award for the best article on human rights.

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