Pinochet may not see Chile again

By Gwynne Dyer

"I am not an outstanding student, but I read a lot, especially history. And history teaches you that dictators never end up well." -- Augusto Pinochet

LONDON (JP): One day short of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, British Home Secretary Jack Straw made the defining decision of his career. By not overruling the House of Lords decision two weeks ago that Gen. Augusto Pinochet is liable to extradition to Spain for human rights violations, Straw has made it quite likely that the former Chilean dictator will never see Chile again.

His decision is more far-reaching than that, for even Britain's highest court can only make judgments about the law. Jack Straw represents the British state, which by long tradition sees itself and other states as exempt from ordinary laws -- and one of the most important of those exemptions is the rule that former heads of state are immune from prosecution for acts committed in execution of that function.

In other words, if you are a head of state you can be tried for murdering your wife's lover, but not for murdering your political opponents. Even countries like Britain, where it is not customary to murder political opponents, normally observe this rule in order to defend the sacred principle of 'sovereignty'.

That was the position of Lord Lloyd, who voted last month to release Pinochet because "it has not been suggested that he was personally guilty of any of the crimes of torture and hostage- taking in the sense that he carried them out with his own hands."

Lord Steyn, who voted against freeing the general, retorted that by the same logic Hitler's order for the extermination of the European Jews "must be regarded as an official act deriving from his function as head of state, and therefore would have been immune from prosecution."

Lord Nicholls concurred: "Certain types of conduct, including torture and hostage-taking, are not acceptable conduct on the part of anyone. This applies as much to heads of state, or even more so, as it does to everyone else."

The post-World War II Nuremberg and Tokyo trials applied that revolutionary principle to Nazi and Japanese war criminals, but they were singular events that seemed to leave no legacy. More recently, the tribunals on Bosnia and Rwanda made the perpetrators of those genocides subject to international judgment, but they too remained exceptions. Jack Straw's decision makes all ex-dictators who murdered or tortured their citizens liable for their crimes.

First, of course, they must travel somewhere that cares about such things, and dares to prosecute them. So former Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras can safely go on touring the jazz bars of Panama City; ex-Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin will continue to receive a pension from the Saudi government; and deposed Ethiopian strongman Haile Mariam Mengistu will go on trying the patience of his host, Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe, with his huge phone bills.

Besides, old-fashioned ex-dictators are a diminishing problem on the global stage as democracy becomes the norm, and some of them have a pretty rough time of it anyway. Argentina's Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, who launched and lost the Falklands War, works as a janitor in his run-down Buenos Aires apartment block. 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's high-maintenance wife Michelle ran through most of his money and then ran off with a neighbor on France's Cote d'Azur, leaving him so broke that he had to move into a humble apartment.

Pinochet matters more than these irrelevant has-beens because he seemed to have got away with it. He overthrew the government in a country that hadn't had a coup for generations, he had thousands tortured and killed, and he ruled by decree for 17 years. But he left Chile in good shape economically, he wrote his own amnesty, and even after retiring as army commander early this year he continued to intimidate Chile's democratically elected rulers.

So it's good for Chile that Pinochet will probably spend the next few years facing court charges in foreign countries, even if the Chilean government must say otherwise in public to mollify the military. "The country is no longer polarized," said Jose Zalaquett, a member of Chile's 1991 Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "I don't see any chance of a new coup. Some army extremists could create problems or plant bombs, but that is all."

And it's good for the world that even "successful" ex- dictators like Pinochet must sometimes answer for their actions. Nothing terrible will happen to Pinochet even if he is eventually found guilty of torture and genocide by a Spanish court: Spanish law forbids the jailing of people over 75 years old, and Pinochet is already 83. But he will be out of circulation for years, and he may well die in exile.

All this may make potential dictators elsewhere more cautious about abusing human rights, but that's not the main point. It is that the world's moral climate has changed so much that even a conservative, "family values" politician like Jack Straw (who claims to have worn a tie every day at university) has no choice but to concede that even heads of state are not above the law.

Straw probably hates the decision he has made. The British Foreign Office certainly hates it, as do diplomats everywhere. Jose Maria Aznar's center-right government in Spain privately deplores the enterprising initiative of Judge Baltasar Garzon, who had the bright idea of demanding Pinochet's extradition in the first place, and has been praying that Straw would send Pinochet home.

It doesn't matter. They were all trapped, once Garzon set the process in motion, for public opinion at home and abroad would not tolerate Pinochet's escape. It is a great victory for international law, and a great defeat for the tradition of absolute sovereignty.