Pinochet and the White Man's Burden

It's all quite confusing, this business of justice in our newly sensitive world.

On the one hand, we're told that Gen. Augusto Pinochet, former right-wing dictator of Chile, committed crimes against humanity so serious that they apparently outweigh not only international rule of law, but democratic principles as well.

On the other, we're also told, with equal fervor, that any attempt to hold left-wing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro responsible for his depravities – comparable to Pinochet's in all but rhetoric – would be a gross miscarriage of justice, an example of the worst kind of Western imperialism.

This despite the fact that Pinochet has been granted amnesty by the elected government of Chile which replaced his military regime, while Castro has never allowed a free election in his four decades of rule, and shows no sign of turning power over to the people short of his deathbed.

So which is it? Do we respect the democratically decided will of the Chilean people, or do we return to an era of colonial justice, where Europeans impose their system on the native savages?

Pinochet undoubtedly did murder the thousands of Chileans and the handful of extranationals a Spanish judge wants to try him for. (Castro has likewise executed thousands of Cubans for crimes ranging from running illegal businesses in his socialist paradise to trying to organize a democratic opposition.)

But the Chilean people voted for a government that proposed a general amnesty for the Pinochet regime – following the example of nations such as South Africa, El Salvador and Guatemala, whose people also decided that for the sake of the future, there would be neither retribution nor accounting for the past.

Certainly, no one likes to see murderers escape justice. But the ongoing public-relations effort to have Pinochet extradited to Spain for trial – in defiance of all international law, in defiance of not only Chilean law but Chilean political sentiment – can only hurt the cause of human rights, weakening as it does the respect for rule of law which is the foundation of any legal system.

That Chile's former colonial master would be the nation to try to wring justice from Pinochet's cold heart only makes a mockery of the entire episode. Throughout Latin America and the Philippines, Pinochet and his political brethren have succeeded in establishing their dictatorships precisely because of the earlier exploitations the Spanish had visited upon those nations' peoples.

The Spanish never cultivated any tradition of democracy or human rights in their colonial holdings. They treated the Indians and Filipinos as subhuman – defying the pope and slaughtering the Jesuits who tried to baptize them.

This is the nation that will bring Pinochet to justice?

Unlike the British, the Spanish never trained the locals in their colonies to be government clerks, doctors or tradesmen. There was no representative government in the Spanish Americas, only governors appointed by the Crown.

Just where do the Spanish think Pinochet and his fellow fascists (Castro, for instance) got their ideas on governance, anyway?

Surely the complicity of the Spanish nation in the suffering of the Chilean people is great – nearly as great as that of Pinochet himself.

For the Spanish – the nation that enslaved the indigenous peoples of Chile, stole their natural resources, plundered their land, raped their women and murdered or enslaved their men – to now take upon themselves the role of dispensing justice to a Chilean leader is nothing more than a reimposition of European colonialism on a sovereign people. A people who have rejected that move and said whatever is to happen to Pinochet, we will decide. Ourselves. As a politically mature, self-aware society fully capable of determining its own future without permission from our former and would-be masters.

Compared to the conquistadors who so effectively destroyed the Inca civilization and replaced it with a system that would eventually give rise to tin-pot dictators up and down the Pacific coast of South America, well, Pinochet was a piker. He murdered what, a couple thousand? Out of a population of tens of millions? Hell, the Spanish killed far more out of a much smaller population. Pinochet may have been inspired by his Spanish forebearers, but he was certainly never in their league when it came to efficiency.

Nor does Spain's complicity in Pinochet's violent rule end in the distant past. After all, it was none other than Spain's own fascist dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who was one of Pinochet's most ardent supporters and backers.

Frankly, the Spanish are unlikely to enjoy the testimony of a Pinochet trial. For Pinochet is unlikely to cooperate in his own hanging the way Klaus Barbie did. Before Barbie's trial in France, there was widespread consternation among the French that he would testify as to the Nazis' surprise at the enthusiasm the French showed in collaborating with the extermination of the Jews, of how the SS would show up in French villages ready to order the Jews turned over only to find them already rounded up. Quite a difference from the Germans' experience with the difficult Danes, Dutch and Belgians, who treated their Jewish neighbors as, well, people.

Fortunately for the preservation of French arrogance, Barbie played the role of noble villain perfectly, keeping quiet even as a nation with blood on its own hands sentenced him.

But Pinochet may take a more defiant role, one that may well spell out the Franco regime's enthusiastic support of Pinochet and other right-wing dictators in Latin America.

Seeing as how Spain has never owned up to the Franco years and the horrors it inflicted, it's not likely the Spanish will enjoy this spectacle.

Or maybe they'll take a page from Japan's approach to World War II: Simply act as if it never happened. It's worked for the past 20 years: Once Franco was dead and King Juan Carlos restored, the entire nation simply acted as if Franco never happened. No Guernica. No Lincoln Brigade. No German Stukas divebombing civilians.

And, really, isn't Chile – in deciding to simply forget the past and move on, to forgive and forget as it were – simply following Spain's example?

Where were the trials of those Spanish officials whose hands were bloodied during Franco's regime? Are we to believe that none of them are still alive, none still waiting to be brought to justice? We can find Nazis from the 1930s, but none of Franco's henchmen from the '50s, '60s or '70s?

The whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.

As Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African President Nelson Mandela said when Pinochet was first arrested, the Europeans have no more right to overrule the will of the Chilean people and try Pinochet in exile than they would to put on trial the South African whites who oversaw that nation's racist apartheid system.

To do so, Mandela argued, is to again step into a period of colonialism when the Europeans arrogantly assumed that theirs was the only path to justice, theirs the only civilization worthy of the name.

As has been made clear in the months since Pinochet was arrested, the Chilean government and people reject that. Or as one Chilean official put it: It's nice that Spain is offering to take care of our problems for us, but we'd really rather have back all the gold they stole from our ancestors.

Of course, even if the Spanish don't get their hands on Pinochet, his legal problems aren't over. Other nations – all European, by the way – are lining up to try him.

But none of them have any more claim to legal righteousness than the Spanish.

The Swiss are still busy evading their responsibility for laundering the Nazis' plundered gold, gold taken from the fillings of dead Jewish children. The French? See the Barbie trial above – they've yet to face up to their own very active role in the Holocaust and keep trying to blame it all on a handful of Vichy officials.

Besides, the larger point is this: If the legal system can be set on its head, if precedent, treaty and Chilean sovereignty can be ignored for the supposedly larger good of bringing Pinochet to heel, then the same can happen to any of us.

The underlying premise of rule of law is that it applies equally to everyone. The fact that Pinochet never recognized rule of law while in power is beside the point here. The Chilean people have decided how to deal with Pinochet, and the matter should be closed.

Ultimately, the fate of human rights rests on respect for rule of law – that all of us, no matter how lowly or high, have the simple right to be treated equally before the law.

Given the stain on the Spanish soul left by the blood of the Chilean people, and given the democratically arrived at decision by the Chilean people to follow South Africa's example of amnesty and forgiveness, the British should refuse Spain's contemptuous and illegal request for extradition and send Pinochet home to his fate – a fate that can only be determined by the Chilean people themselves.

Of course, this is now much more about Britain's domestic politics than it is rule of law or even idealism. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who will ultimately decide whether Pinochet is extradited, is under tremendous political pressure from constituencies that are key to the ruling Labour Party. And the do-gooder Left, which is pushing Pinochet's extradition to colonialist Spain, is every bit as anti-intellectual as the do-nothing Right, and just as willing to undercut the rule of law in order to advance its political agenda.

The losers in all this, besides Pinochet (for whom it is difficult to generate much in the way of sympathy) are first of all, Chile, which not only suffered through having a democratic election overturned by Pinochet's violent coup a quarter-century ago, but now sees its new democratic government undercut by an unelected Spanish judge.

The second, and perhaps larger, loss is in international recognition for the sovereignty of developing nations. Once again, Europe has decided that its former colonies just can't govern themselves and will have to do so for them.

The white man's burden lives on.