http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm
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Featured Views
Published on Tuesday, June 11, 2002 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
Is Henry Kissinger a War Criminal?
Thirty years after the death of Charles Horman inspired
a bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie, his widow still
pursues those she believes are really to blame --
including the former U.S. secretary of state. It's one
reason the quest for international justice makes the
United States so nervous.
by Marcus Gee
THE ACCUSED
Henry Alfred Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of state, national
security adviser and Nobel laureate
THE ACCUSATIONS
Complicity in coup against Chilean government plus the "killing, injury
and displacement" of three million people during Vietnam War.
CURRENT WHEREABOUTS
Head of Kissinger Associates, Inc., international consulting firm in
Washington.
It was a rainy day in spring when they brought Charles Horman home.
The U.S. journalist and filmmaker had been
abducted and killed after the Chilean military
overthrew president Salvador Allende in
September, 1973. Six months later, his body
arrived by plane in a crude wooden crate with
"Charles Horman from Santiago" scrawled on the
side.
As the makeshift coffin was unloaded at
Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., the
driving rain washed the words away, sending trails
of black ink down the box. It was April 13, 1974.
Even before Mr. Horman's widow, Joyce, found
herself standing in the rain that day, she had
vowed that no one would ever erase the memory
of what had been done to her husband.
She has been true to her word.
In the chaos that followed General Augusto
Pinochet's decision to depose Mr. Allende on
Sept. 11, 1973, hundreds of the leftist president's
supporters were taken away to be tortured, beaten
or killed. Mr. Horman, an Allende sympathizer
living in Santiago, was one of them.
In the month that followed, Ms. Horman, then 29,
and her father-in-law, Ed, searched frantically for
Mr. Horman -- an ordeal dramatized in the
Oscar-winning 1982 film Missing, starring Sissy
Spacek and Jack Lemmon.
The movie ends when Joyce and Ed discover that Charles is dead,
killed by the military and his body hidden in a wall at a Santiago
cemetery. But Joyce Horman's search continues. For 28 years, she
has struggled to track down those who killed the man she loved. And the
person at the center of her quest is none other than Henry Alfred
Kissinger.
A leading citizen of the world's most powerful nation, Mr. Kissinger
served as U.S. Secretary of state and was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in the same year as the coup in Chile. He was also national
security adviser to president Richard Nixon, and Ms. Horman believes
that he and other U.S. officials were deeply involved in the events that
cost her husband his life.
It has been almost 30 years, and she doesn't seem bitter. At 57, she is
pleasant and straightforward, in her stylish glasses with owlish frames,
and has friends, a career and a social life. Nor does she seem
obsessed with her dead husband. No photographs of him are to be
seen in her bright apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Even so, the events of 1973 still cast a dark shadow. Asked what she
misses most about Charles, she dissolves into tears and then explains:
"He was intelligent, friendly, interesting -- he just loved life, and that's
why his friends loved him."
Of course, nothing can replace the life she and her husband might have
had. All that she wants now, she says, is the simple truth -- and that
leads to Mr. Kissinger.
"There's no way around him," she says. "He is the most responsible
person for the behavior of the U.S. government in Chile at that time. He
needs to be put on trial."
A few years ago, that would have seemed wildly improbable. The armor
of sovereign immunity protected all officials from the acts they
committed on government service, no matter how unsavory.
But the 1998 arrest of the man behind the coup, Gen. Pinochet, has
knocked a gaping hole in that armor Since then, a posse of victims,
human-rights activists and crusading prosecutors has tried to apply this
"Pinochet precedent" to others accused of mass killing, torture,
abduction and war crimes.
Mr. Kissinger is their biggest quarry yet, and they are getting closer all
the time. Now, prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain and France want
him to testify about what happened in Chile. Last month, a Chilean
judge staged a re-enactment of the Horman killing at Santiago's National
Stadium, and now wants Mr. Kissinger at least to answer written
questions about U.S. involvement in the coup.
Ms. Horman is thrilled, but she has a different reason for chasing the
great statesman: "My main goal is to find out what happened to
Charles."
As author Thomas Hauser wrote in The Execution of Charles
Horman,the book that inspired the film Missing,both Mr. Horman, the
brilliant son of a New York industrial designer, and Joyce, the lively
daughter of a Minnesota grocer, had absorbed the questing, skeptical
spirit of the Sixties.
Mr. Horman covered the riots at the Democratic National Convention in
1968 for the liberal journal The Nation and made a film about napalm.
The couple had been married less than three years when, in 1971, they
set off in a camper van through Latin America. When they reached
Santiago, they decided to stay.
It was a heady time in Chile. Mr. Allende had come to power in 1970
and brought in radical changes: land reform, wealth redistribution and
the nationalization of key industries. Mr. Horman began writing for a
local magazine that often attacked Mr. Nixon for undermining the
Allende government.
When the military stepped in, he was in the coastal city of Vina del Mar
with friend Terry Simon; they met two U.S. officers who seemed to
know a lot about the coup. Mr. Horman concluded that his country had
plotted with Gen. Pinochet, and made copious notes -- which may have
cost him his life.
Back in Santiago, essentially a war zone, he and his wife decided to
return to the States as soon as possible. But on Sept. 17, a light green
truck pulled up at their house, and a dozen soldiers carried out Mr.
Horman and armloads of papers and books. Ms. Horman wasn't home
at the time, and never saw her husband again.
The truck drove straight to the National Stadium, a clearinghouse for the
thousands of Chileans being rounded up. At least four dozen were killed
there -- a first installment on the more than 3,000 killed during the
Pinochet regime.
Returning home to find the house in a shambles, Ms. Horman contacted
the U.S. Embassy seeking help. She got the run-around. When she
finally asked if the embassy could get her into the stadium, a U.S.
diplomat asked, "What are you going to do, Mrs. Horman, look under all
the bleachers?"
For four weeks, she pounded the pavement, meeting with anyone she
thought might be able to help, while her father-in-law, who had flown in
from New York, visited hospitals and morgues. Finally, they got into the
stadium. A Chilean colonel led Ed Horman to a platform, where he
addressed the roughly 2,000 prisoners under guard in the stands.
"Charles Horman, this is your father," he said. "If you are here, I would
like you to take my word that it is safe and come to me now."
His heart jumped when a young man ran forward, but he realized that it
was not his son. "Right then," he said later, "I knew I'd never see
Charles again."
Five days later, an official of the Ford Foundation, a U.S. philanthropic
agency, told Mr. Horman he had learned from a military contact that his
only child "was executed in the National Stadium on Sept. 20."
The next day, a U.S. official confirmed that Charles's body had been
found in a local morgue. Two days later, Ms. Horman and her
father-in-law flew home, and it was then that her real struggle began.
She and her husband's parents brought a wrongful-death suit against
the U.S. Government and Mr. Kissinger, but it was dismissed for lack of
evidence in 1978. The book followed, along with the Oscar-winning
1982 movie by director Constantin Costa-Gavras.
By then Ms. Horman was struggling with an attack of lymphoma and
she decided she had to get on with her life.
For the next two decades, she worked as a computer and systems
consultant for the United Nations Development Program, the office of
the Mayor of New York, Oracle Corp. and others. She dated other men,
but did not remarry.
Before the coup, she and her husband had planned to return to the
United States to raise a family. He would have turned 60 on May 15 (an
occasion she marked by holding a 20th anniversary party for Missing,
with proceeds going to the Charles Horman Truth Project).
She remained close to the Hormans, moving into the Manhattan building
where her husband grew up and helping to care for them as they aged.
Ed Horman died in 1993, followed last year by his wife, Elizabeth, at the
age of 96.
Ms. Horman never gave up wondering about her husband's death, and
in 1998 an event gave her new hope. On Oct. 16, she turned on the
news to hear that Gen. Pinochet had been arrested in London on an
extradition request from a Spanish judge seeking to prosecute him.
Exhilarated, she traveled to England to join the attempt to persuade
British courts to hand him over. Eventually, the British government let
him go home for health reasons, but Gen. Pinochet's detention set a
precedent that galvanized the international justice movement.
Ms. Horman and her lawyers tried again to get the U.S. Government to
release classified documents relating to her husband's disappearance.
Finally, in 2000, it gave them the full results of two internal reviews of
the killing. Neither found any direct U.S. link, but one did uncover
"circumstantial evidence" that the Central Intelligence Agency "may
have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death."
It went on to say that "the government of Chile might have believed this
American could be killed without negative fallout from the U.S.
Government"
The second review said it was hard to believe that the Chilean military
would have killed Mr. Horman unless it had some kind of signal from
Washington.
Although tantalizing, the disclosures were not enough to reopen the
wrongful-death case. So Ms. Horman did some sleuthing on her own.
Supported by money from the Ford Foundation, she traveled to France,
Switzerland, Sweden, Chile and different parts of the United States to
search for people who might have some idea of how and why her
husband was killed.
She gathered enough information to file a criminal complaint in Chile
against Gen. Pinochet and others in his circle. The case found its way
to Juan Guzman, the crusading judge who indicted the general for
human-rights crimes after his return from England and who managed to
have his immunity to prosecution lifted.
The General, now 86, escaped trial after a court found him mentally
unfit, but Judge Guzman is pushing ahead all the same. Last month, he
arranged the reenactment at the National Stadium, and last fall sent 17
questions about the Horman abduction to Mr. Kissinger and other U.S.
Officials So far, no reply.
Joyce Horman believes U.S. Officials tipped off friends in the Chilean
military that her husband had found evidence of U.S. Involvement while
in Vina del Mar. Rafael Gonzalez, a disgruntled Chilean intelligence
agent, told reporters in the 1970s that the army's head of intelligence,
Gen. Augusto Lutz, decided that Mr. Horman "knew too much," and an
American military officer was in the room at the time.
Ms. Horman hopes to track down that man. "I want to find out exactly
what happened to Charlie: who picked him up, why they picked him up,
who questioned him, how they came to decide he had to disappear."
Those questions lead her straight to Mr. Kissinger who, as well as being
national security adviser, led the high-level "40 committee" that helped
to oversee U.S. intelligence efforts.
Even if he played no direct role in her husband's death, she believes he
knew how and why it happened. "Kissinger rolled up his sleeves in
Chile. . . . He went down to talk to Pinochet after the coup. I mean, for
heaven's sake, how obnoxious."
Mr. Kissinger, now 79, denies everything. He refused to return calls for
this article, but has said he knows nothing about the Horman case. "If it
were brought to my attention, I would have done something," he told
The New York Times.
He also denies any role in the coup. In his books, he admits he took a
dim view of Mr. Allende and joined a U.S. effort to have him overthrown,
but aborted it as a lost cause. He met Gen. Pinochet, he says, to tell
him to pay attention to calls from the U.S. Congress for an end to
political repression.
But Mr. Kissinger also has others on his trail. Last May, a French judge
sent the police to his Paris hotel to ask him to appear at the Justice
Ministry the next day and answer questions about five French citizens
who disappeared after the Chilean coup. Instead, Mr. Kissinger
promptly left town.
That same month, an Argentine judge said he wanted Mr. Kissinger to
testify about American involvement in Operation Condor, the scheme by
South American dictatorships, including Argentina and Chile, to abduct
or kill opponents living in exile.
In April, a British human-rights campaigner asked a London judge to
arrest Mr. Kissinger under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957 for the
"killing, injury and displacement" of three million people in Indochina
during the Vietnam War years. The judge rejected the application, but
not before Mr. Kissinger had to endure a protest by 200 activists calling
him an "evil war criminal." Plans for a similar protest apparently led him
to cancel a planned trip to Brazil as well.
Finally, in Washington, Mr. Kissinger faces a $3-million (U.S.) lawsuit
by the family of Ren� Schneider, a Chilean general assassinated in
1970 for opposing plans for a coup against Mr. Allende.
This quickening pace of the pursuit raises a touchy issue for
international justice: Whose justice is it?
Until now, those brought to trial largely have come from poor or
defeated countries such as Serbia and Rwanda. But activists say that
must change. To have any force, international law must apply to the
rich and powerful too.
"If the drive to put Kissinger in the witness box, let alone the dock,
should succeed, then it would rebut the taunt about 'victor's justice' in
war-crimes trials," writes British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who
asserts in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger there are grounds for
an indictment. "It would demonstrate that no person, and no society or
state, is above the law. Conversely, if the initiative should fail, then it
would seem to be true that we have woven a net for the catching of
small fish only."
But Mr. Kissinger is one fish the United States does not want on
anyone's hook. The attempts to arrest or even question him touch off
Washington's worst fears about the evolving movement for international
justice.
Just last month, the administration of President George W. Bush
declared it would have nothing to do with the world's first permanent
war-crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court. If foreign judges
could second-guess their every decision, U.S. officials argue, it would
be open season on the United States.
The man making that argument most forcefully perhaps has the most to
lose: Mr. Kissinger himself.
"Nobody can say that I served in an administration that did not make
mistakes," he said in London in April. "It is quite possible that mistakes
were made, but that is not the issue. The issue is, 30 years after the
event, whether the courts are the appropriate means by which this
determination is made."
In his book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, he holds that, in
theory, any court anywhere can try a person accused of crimes
against humanity.
"When discretion on what crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction
and whom to prosecute is left to national prosecutors, the scope for
arbitrariness is wide indeed," he argues.
None of this cuts much ice with Joyce Horman.
She argues that the officials of a democratic nation like the United
States must be accountable for their actions. If that takes a foreign
prosecutor, so be it.
"The American military and the American government have an
incredible amount of power and the abuse of that power was typified by
the Chilean coup," she says. "For Americans to be bumping off
Americans in foreign lands is not what American citizens want their
government to be doing."
� 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc
http://www.etherzone.com/cgi-bin/ez/jump.cgi/www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4431760,00.html
Kissinger may face extradition to Chile
Judge investigating US role in 1973 coup considers forcing former secretary of state to give evidence
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago and Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Wednesday June 12, 2002
The Guardian
Henry Kissinger may face extradition proceedings in connection with the role of the United States in the 1973 military coup in Chile.
The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning as a witness in the investigation into the events surrounding the overthrow
of the socialist president, Salvador Allende, by General Augusto Pinochet.
It focuses on CIA involvement in the coup, whether US officials passed lists of leftwing Americans in Chile to the military and whether
the US embassy failed to assist Americans deemed sympathetic to the deposed government.
Chile's Judge Juan Guzman is so frustrated by the lack of cooperation by Mr Kissinger that he is now considering an extradition
request to force him to come to Chile and testify in connection with the death of the American film-maker and journalist Charles
Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup.
Horman's story was told in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.
Judge Guzman is investigating whether US officials passed the names of suspected leftwing Americans to Chilean military
authorities. Declassified documents have now revealed that such a list existed. Sergio Corvalan, a Chilean lawyer, said that he could
not divulge the "dozens" of names on the list.
At the time of his death, Horman was investigating the murder of Rene Schneider, the chief of staff in the Chilean army whose
support for Allende and the constitution was seen as an obstacle to the coup.
The CIA had been involved with groups plotting Schneider's murder, providing them with weapons and advice, according to a CIA
internal inquiry in 2000. It found that the agency had withdrawn its support for the plotters before the murder but had paid them
$35,000 afterwards "to maintain the goodwill of the group".
At the time of his murder, Schneider had five young children, who filed suit in a Washington DC court last year against Mr Kissinger
and other top officials in the Nixon administration. They are seeking$3m (�2.15m) in damages.
Horman's wife, Joyce, suspects that he was targeted because he unwittingly stumbled upon a gathering of US military personnel in
Chile in the days before the coup.
The American journalist Marc Cooper and the British journalist Christopher Hitchens have been in Santiago during the past month to
give evidence in the investigation of America's role.
Cooper, who was Allende's translator at the time of the coup and now writes for the Nation and LA Weekly, knew Horman and gave
sworn testimony last month.
Cooper said: "Guzman says that if the US doesn't act soon on his request to gather testimony from Kissinger and other US officials,
he'll have no choice but to file for their extradition to Chile."
Cooper, who wrote the book Pinochet and Me about his time in Chile, said that the Nixon government had been more interested in
supporting General Pinochet than in investigating the deaths of its citizens at the hands of the Chilean military.
This is not the first attempt to interview Mr Kissinger about the turbulent period in Latin America.
During a visit to London in April, judges in Spain and France unsuccessfully tried to question him about America's role in Operation
Condor, which has been described as a coordinated hit squad organised from Chile and including six South American nations aimed
at dealing with leftwing opposition groups.
Several declassified documents which have emerged over the past two years have shown an increasingly visible American hand in
Operation Condor.
Hitchens gave evidence on the Operation Condor case which he researched for his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, published last
year.
In Santiago, Hitchens said: "Today Henry Kissinger is a frightened man. He is very afraid of the exposure that awaits him."
Mr Kissinger's lawyer William Rodgers, said that such questions should properly be directed to the US state department and not to
Mr Kissinger.
Common Dreams News Center
Featured Views
Published on Tuesday, June 11, 2002 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
Is Henry Kissinger a War Criminal?
Thirty years after the death of Charles Horman inspired
a bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie, his widow still
pursues those she believes are really to blame --
including the former U.S. secretary of state. It's one
reason the quest for international justice makes the
United States so nervous.
by Marcus Gee
THE ACCUSED
Henry Alfred Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of state, national
security adviser and Nobel laureate
THE ACCUSATIONS
Complicity in coup against Chilean government plus the "killing, injury
and displacement" of three million people during Vietnam War.
CURRENT WHEREABOUTS
Head of Kissinger Associates, Inc., international consulting firm in
Washington.
It was a rainy day in spring when they brought Charles Horman home.
The U.S. journalist and filmmaker had been
abducted and killed after the Chilean military
overthrew president Salvador Allende in
September, 1973. Six months later, his body
arrived by plane in a crude wooden crate with
"Charles Horman from Santiago" scrawled on the
side.
As the makeshift coffin was unloaded at
Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., the
driving rain washed the words away, sending trails
of black ink down the box. It was April 13, 1974.
Even before Mr. Horman's widow, Joyce, found
herself standing in the rain that day, she had
vowed that no one would ever erase the memory
of what had been done to her husband.
She has been true to her word.
In the chaos that followed General Augusto
Pinochet's decision to depose Mr. Allende on
Sept. 11, 1973, hundreds of the leftist president's
supporters were taken away to be tortured, beaten
or killed. Mr. Horman, an Allende sympathizer
living in Santiago, was one of them.
In the month that followed, Ms. Horman, then 29,
and her father-in-law, Ed, searched frantically for
Mr. Horman -- an ordeal dramatized in the
Oscar-winning 1982 film Missing, starring Sissy
Spacek and Jack Lemmon.
The movie ends when Joyce and Ed discover that Charles is dead,
killed by the military and his body hidden in a wall at a Santiago
cemetery. But Joyce Horman's search continues. For 28 years, she
has struggled to track down those who killed the man she loved. And the
person at the center of her quest is none other than Henry Alfred
Kissinger.
A leading citizen of the world's most powerful nation, Mr. Kissinger
served as U.S. Secretary of state and was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in the same year as the coup in Chile. He was also national
security adviser to president Richard Nixon, and Ms. Horman believes
that he and other U.S. officials were deeply involved in the events that
cost her husband his life.
It has been almost 30 years, and she doesn't seem bitter. At 57, she is
pleasant and straightforward, in her stylish glasses with owlish frames,
and has friends, a career and a social life. Nor does she seem
obsessed with her dead husband. No photographs of him are to be
seen in her bright apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Even so, the events of 1973 still cast a dark shadow. Asked what she
misses most about Charles, she dissolves into tears and then explains:
"He was intelligent, friendly, interesting -- he just loved life, and that's
why his friends loved him."
Of course, nothing can replace the life she and her husband might have
had. All that she wants now, she says, is the simple truth -- and that
leads to Mr. Kissinger.
"There's no way around him," she says. "He is the most responsible
person for the behavior of the U.S. government in Chile at that time. He
needs to be put on trial."
A few years ago, that would have seemed wildly improbable. The armor
of sovereign immunity protected all officials from the acts they
committed on government service, no matter how unsavory.
But the 1998 arrest of the man behind the coup, Gen. Pinochet, has
knocked a gaping hole in that armor Since then, a posse of victims,
human-rights activists and crusading prosecutors has tried to apply this
"Pinochet precedent" to others accused of mass killing, torture,
abduction and war crimes.
Mr. Kissinger is their biggest quarry yet, and they are getting closer all
the time. Now, prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain and France want
him to testify about what happened in Chile. Last month, a Chilean
judge staged a re-enactment of the Horman killing at Santiago's National
Stadium, and now wants Mr. Kissinger at least to answer written
questions about U.S. involvement in the coup.
Ms. Horman is thrilled, but she has a different reason for chasing the
great statesman: "My main goal is to find out what happened to
Charles."
As author Thomas Hauser wrote in The Execution of Charles
Horman,the book that inspired the film Missing,both Mr. Horman, the
brilliant son of a New York industrial designer, and Joyce, the lively
daughter of a Minnesota grocer, had absorbed the questing, skeptical
spirit of the Sixties.
Mr. Horman covered the riots at the Democratic National Convention in
1968 for the liberal journal The Nation and made a film about napalm.
The couple had been married less than three years when, in 1971, they
set off in a camper van through Latin America. When they reached
Santiago, they decided to stay.
It was a heady time in Chile. Mr. Allende had come to power in 1970
and brought in radical changes: land reform, wealth redistribution and
the nationalization of key industries. Mr. Horman began writing for a
local magazine that often attacked Mr. Nixon for undermining the
Allende government.
When the military stepped in, he was in the coastal city of Vina del Mar
with friend Terry Simon; they met two U.S. officers who seemed to
know a lot about the coup. Mr. Horman concluded that his country had
plotted with Gen. Pinochet, and made copious notes -- which may have
cost him his life.
Back in Santiago, essentially a war zone, he and his wife decided to
return to the States as soon as possible. But on Sept. 17, a light green
truck pulled up at their house, and a dozen soldiers carried out Mr.
Horman and armloads of papers and books. Ms. Horman wasn't home
at the time, and never saw her husband again.
The truck drove straight to the National Stadium, a clearinghouse for the
thousands of Chileans being rounded up. At least four dozen were killed
there -- a first installment on the more than 3,000 killed during the
Pinochet regime.
Returning home to find the house in a shambles, Ms. Horman contacted
the U.S. Embassy seeking help. She got the run-around. When she
finally asked if the embassy could get her into the stadium, a U.S.
diplomat asked, "What are you going to do, Mrs. Horman, look under all
the bleachers?"
For four weeks, she pounded the pavement, meeting with anyone she
thought might be able to help, while her father-in-law, who had flown in
from New York, visited hospitals and morgues. Finally, they got into the
stadium. A Chilean colonel led Ed Horman to a platform, where he
addressed the roughly 2,000 prisoners under guard in the stands.
"Charles Horman, this is your father," he said. "If you are here, I would
like you to take my word that it is safe and come to me now."
His heart jumped when a young man ran forward, but he realized that it
was not his son. "Right then," he said later, "I knew I'd never see
Charles again."
Five days later, an official of the Ford Foundation, a U.S. philanthropic
agency, told Mr. Horman he had learned from a military contact that his
only child "was executed in the National Stadium on Sept. 20."
The next day, a U.S. official confirmed that Charles's body had been
found in a local morgue. Two days later, Ms. Horman and her
father-in-law flew home, and it was then that her real struggle began.
She and her husband's parents brought a wrongful-death suit against
the U.S. Government and Mr. Kissinger, but it was dismissed for lack of
evidence in 1978. The book followed, along with the Oscar-winning
1982 movie by director Constantin Costa-Gavras.
By then Ms. Horman was struggling with an attack of lymphoma and
she decided she had to get on with her life.
For the next two decades, she worked as a computer and systems
consultant for the United Nations Development Program, the office of
the Mayor of New York, Oracle Corp. and others. She dated other men,
but did not remarry.
Before the coup, she and her husband had planned to return to the
United States to raise a family. He would have turned 60 on May 15 (an
occasion she marked by holding a 20th anniversary party for Missing,
with proceeds going to the Charles Horman Truth Project).
She remained close to the Hormans, moving into the Manhattan building
where her husband grew up and helping to care for them as they aged.
Ed Horman died in 1993, followed last year by his wife, Elizabeth, at the
age of 96.
Ms. Horman never gave up wondering about her husband's death, and
in 1998 an event gave her new hope. On Oct. 16, she turned on the
news to hear that Gen. Pinochet had been arrested in London on an
extradition request from a Spanish judge seeking to prosecute him.
Exhilarated, she traveled to England to join the attempt to persuade
British courts to hand him over. Eventually, the British government let
him go home for health reasons, but Gen. Pinochet's detention set a
precedent that galvanized the international justice movement.
Ms. Horman and her lawyers tried again to get the U.S. Government to
release classified documents relating to her husband's disappearance.
Finally, in 2000, it gave them the full results of two internal reviews of
the killing. Neither found any direct U.S. link, but one did uncover
"circumstantial evidence" that the Central Intelligence Agency "may
have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death."
It went on to say that "the government of Chile might have believed this
American could be killed without negative fallout from the U.S.
Government"
The second review said it was hard to believe that the Chilean military
would have killed Mr. Horman unless it had some kind of signal from
Washington.
Although tantalizing, the disclosures were not enough to reopen the
wrongful-death case. So Ms. Horman did some sleuthing on her own.
Supported by money from the Ford Foundation, she traveled to France,
Switzerland, Sweden, Chile and different parts of the United States to
search for people who might have some idea of how and why her
husband was killed.
She gathered enough information to file a criminal complaint in Chile
against Gen. Pinochet and others in his circle. The case found its way
to Juan Guzman, the crusading judge who indicted the general for
human-rights crimes after his return from England and who managed to
have his immunity to prosecution lifted.
The General, now 86, escaped trial after a court found him mentally
unfit, but Judge Guzman is pushing ahead all the same. Last month, he
arranged the reenactment at the National Stadium, and last fall sent 17
questions about the Horman abduction to Mr. Kissinger and other U.S.
Officials So far, no reply.
Joyce Horman believes U.S. Officials tipped off friends in the Chilean
military that her husband had found evidence of U.S. Involvement while
in Vina del Mar. Rafael Gonzalez, a disgruntled Chilean intelligence
agent, told reporters in the 1970s that the army's head of intelligence,
Gen. Augusto Lutz, decided that Mr. Horman "knew too much," and an
American military officer was in the room at the time.
Ms. Horman hopes to track down that man. "I want to find out exactly
what happened to Charlie: who picked him up, why they picked him up,
who questioned him, how they came to decide he had to disappear."
Those questions lead her straight to Mr. Kissinger who, as well as being
national security adviser, led the high-level "40 committee" that helped
to oversee U.S. intelligence efforts.
Even if he played no direct role in her husband's death, she believes he
knew how and why it happened. "Kissinger rolled up his sleeves in
Chile. . . . He went down to talk to Pinochet after the coup. I mean, for
heaven's sake, how obnoxious."
Mr. Kissinger, now 79, denies everything. He refused to return calls for
this article, but has said he knows nothing about the Horman case. "If it
were brought to my attention, I would have done something," he told
The New York Times.
He also denies any role in the coup. In his books, he admits he took a
dim view of Mr. Allende and joined a U.S. effort to have him overthrown,
but aborted it as a lost cause. He met Gen. Pinochet, he says, to tell
him to pay attention to calls from the U.S. Congress for an end to
political repression.
But Mr. Kissinger also has others on his trail. Last May, a French judge
sent the police to his Paris hotel to ask him to appear at the Justice
Ministry the next day and answer questions about five French citizens
who disappeared after the Chilean coup. Instead, Mr. Kissinger
promptly left town.
That same month, an Argentine judge said he wanted Mr. Kissinger to
testify about American involvement in Operation Condor, the scheme by
South American dictatorships, including Argentina and Chile, to abduct
or kill opponents living in exile.
In April, a British human-rights campaigner asked a London judge to
arrest Mr. Kissinger under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957 for the
"killing, injury and displacement" of three million people in Indochina
during the Vietnam War years. The judge rejected the application, but
not before Mr. Kissinger had to endure a protest by 200 activists calling
him an "evil war criminal." Plans for a similar protest apparently led him
to cancel a planned trip to Brazil as well.
Finally, in Washington, Mr. Kissinger faces a $3-million (U.S.) lawsuit
by the family of Ren� Schneider, a Chilean general assassinated in
1970 for opposing plans for a coup against Mr. Allende.
This quickening pace of the pursuit raises a touchy issue for
international justice: Whose justice is it?
Until now, those brought to trial largely have come from poor or
defeated countries such as Serbia and Rwanda. But activists say that
must change. To have any force, international law must apply to the
rich and powerful too.
"If the drive to put Kissinger in the witness box, let alone the dock,
should succeed, then it would rebut the taunt about 'victor's justice' in
war-crimes trials," writes British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who
asserts in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger there are grounds for
an indictment. "It would demonstrate that no person, and no society or
state, is above the law. Conversely, if the initiative should fail, then it
would seem to be true that we have woven a net for the catching of
small fish only."
But Mr. Kissinger is one fish the United States does not want on
anyone's hook. The attempts to arrest or even question him touch off
Washington's worst fears about the evolving movement for international
justice.
Just last month, the administration of President George W. Bush
declared it would have nothing to do with the world's first permanent
war-crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court. If foreign judges
could second-guess their every decision, U.S. officials argue, it would
be open season on the United States.
The man making that argument most forcefully perhaps has the most to
lose: Mr. Kissinger himself.
"Nobody can say that I served in an administration that did not make
mistakes," he said in London in April. "It is quite possible that mistakes
were made, but that is not the issue. The issue is, 30 years after the
event, whether the courts are the appropriate means by which this
determination is made."
In his book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, he holds that, in
theory, any court anywhere can try a person accused of crimes
against humanity.
"When discretion on what crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction
and whom to prosecute is left to national prosecutors, the scope for
arbitrariness is wide indeed," he argues.
None of this cuts much ice with Joyce Horman.
She argues that the officials of a democratic nation like the United
States must be accountable for their actions. If that takes a foreign
prosecutor, so be it.
"The American military and the American government have an
incredible amount of power and the abuse of that power was typified by
the Chilean coup," she says. "For Americans to be bumping off
Americans in foreign lands is not what American citizens want their
government to be doing."
� 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc
http://www.etherzone.com/cgi-bin/ez/jump.cgi/www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4431760,00.html
Kissinger may face extradition to Chile
Judge investigating US role in 1973 coup considers forcing former secretary of state to give evidence
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago and Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Wednesday June 12, 2002
The Guardian
Henry Kissinger may face extradition proceedings in connection with the role of the United States in the 1973 military coup in Chile.
The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning as a witness in the investigation into the events surrounding the overthrow
of the socialist president, Salvador Allende, by General Augusto Pinochet.
It focuses on CIA involvement in the coup, whether US officials passed lists of leftwing Americans in Chile to the military and whether
the US embassy failed to assist Americans deemed sympathetic to the deposed government.
Chile's Judge Juan Guzman is so frustrated by the lack of cooperation by Mr Kissinger that he is now considering an extradition
request to force him to come to Chile and testify in connection with the death of the American film-maker and journalist Charles
Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup.
Horman's story was told in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.
Judge Guzman is investigating whether US officials passed the names of suspected leftwing Americans to Chilean military
authorities. Declassified documents have now revealed that such a list existed. Sergio Corvalan, a Chilean lawyer, said that he could
not divulge the "dozens" of names on the list.
At the time of his death, Horman was investigating the murder of Rene Schneider, the chief of staff in the Chilean army whose
support for Allende and the constitution was seen as an obstacle to the coup.
The CIA had been involved with groups plotting Schneider's murder, providing them with weapons and advice, according to a CIA
internal inquiry in 2000. It found that the agency had withdrawn its support for the plotters before the murder but had paid them
$35,000 afterwards "to maintain the goodwill of the group".
At the time of his murder, Schneider had five young children, who filed suit in a Washington DC court last year against Mr Kissinger
and other top officials in the Nixon administration. They are seeking$3m (�2.15m) in damages.
Horman's wife, Joyce, suspects that he was targeted because he unwittingly stumbled upon a gathering of US military personnel in
Chile in the days before the coup.
The American journalist Marc Cooper and the British journalist Christopher Hitchens have been in Santiago during the past month to
give evidence in the investigation of America's role.
Cooper, who was Allende's translator at the time of the coup and now writes for the Nation and LA Weekly, knew Horman and gave
sworn testimony last month.
Cooper said: "Guzman says that if the US doesn't act soon on his request to gather testimony from Kissinger and other US officials,
he'll have no choice but to file for their extradition to Chile."
Cooper, who wrote the book Pinochet and Me about his time in Chile, said that the Nixon government had been more interested in
supporting General Pinochet than in investigating the deaths of its citizens at the hands of the Chilean military.
This is not the first attempt to interview Mr Kissinger about the turbulent period in Latin America.
During a visit to London in April, judges in Spain and France unsuccessfully tried to question him about America's role in Operation
Condor, which has been described as a coordinated hit squad organised from Chile and including six South American nations aimed
at dealing with leftwing opposition groups.
Several declassified documents which have emerged over the past two years have shown an increasingly visible American hand in
Operation Condor.
Hitchens gave evidence on the Operation Condor case which he researched for his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, published last
year.
In Santiago, Hitchens said: "Today Henry Kissinger is a frightened man. He is very afraid of the exposure that awaits him."
Mr Kissinger's lawyer William Rodgers, said that such questions should properly be directed to the US state department and not to
Mr Kissinger.
