Pinochet's Victory
If you missed the most
recent installments of this column, here they are: posted Tuesday, Oct.
27, and Friday, Oct. 23.
The decision by the British
High Court to order Gen. Augusto Pinochet's release on the grounds that, as a
former Chilean head of state, he enjoys immunity from arrest in Britain made
the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe Thursday. In Spain, the country
where judges first requested his extradition from Britain to be tried for the
torture and murder of Spanish citizens, El Mundo ran an
editorial calling the decision "unexpected and dangerous." It said it could
result in Britain becoming a paradise for deposed dictators. Under the court's
ruling, both Hitler and Pol Pot would have been able to live in Britain with
impunity, it said. But the paper exonerated the British government of blame. It
said that the Blair administration behaved with "scrupulous correctness" when
it refused to interfere in the judicial process.
In Paris,
an editorial in Le Monde,
published before the court's decision, said that, whatever the outcome,
Pinochet should be made to confront his past, whether in London, Madrid, or
Santiago. The paper said that many Chileans condemned the Spanish extradition
request because it undermined Chile's national reconciliation efforts. These
same Chileans cited the precedent of Spain's King Juan Carlos, who accorded an
amnesty to supporters of Gen. Franco's dictatorship. But Le Monde said
that to do this was to forget that Franco was already dead at the time and that
the Spanish Civil War was already long over.
In London, the Times, which has opposed Pinochet's arrest, criticized the
British government for rejecting "the best way of settling this calamitous
affair, allowing General Pinochet to fly home on Chile's waiting jet" and,
instead, permitting the court decision in his favor to go to appeal. But it
also said that this decision raised "the difficult point of indefinite immunity
for those who have tyrannised their countries," and asked, "What, for example,
would be the protection for Saddam Hussein and President Milosevic should their
victims attempt to try them in the future?"
The
liberal Guardian,
while reconciled to the likelihood of the general's release, said that "the
best outcome of the past two weeks of living under arrest and uncertainty is
that the general will have to ponder whether he will ever be able to travel
abroad again." The government, it added, should "announce that this man, for
all his diplomatic immunity, is persona non gratissima . Go home,
Augusto, and never return to this country of moderation which you do not
deserve."
The Wye agreement continued to be the subject
of much comment around the world. Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung questioned, in a front-page
editorial, whether the agreement will expedite peace in the Middle East.
La Repubblica of Rome,
under the headline "Israel in Alarm," pointed out that Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has now "embarked substantially on the same path" as his predecessor
Yitzhak Rabin, the third anniversary of whose assassination is imminent. La
Repubblica also said that the threats against Netanyahu's life are real and
that there is "a feeling of déjà vu which is particularly bitter for
people living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv." Recalling that only one member of
Netanyahu's government--former Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky--attended last
year's commemoration of Rabin, it expressed hope that the prime minister would
attend this year's ceremonies. Meanwhile, in Israel, the Jerusalem Post called for
"a rhetorical cease-fire" between the Israeli government and the Labor
opposition in order to promote implementation of the Wye agreement, which it
said was "far from a foregone conclusion."
Asking whether the report of
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission "has deepened the divisions
it was intended to close or whether it will provide a necessary catharsis," the
Financial Times of London
said Thursday that, "at first glance, the omens are inauspicious." It called on
South Africans to "respond to today's report with the pragmatism and good sense
that marked the 1994 election. ... If they can confront the past as well as
they coped with the ending of white rule, they will again be an inspiration for
other countries with a brutal past."
London's
Evening Standard filled its front page Thursday with two
stories--the death of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and the award of libel
damages of more than $160,000 each to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman over
allegations in a British newspaper that their marriage was a "hypocritical
sham" to cover up their homosexuality. Meanwhile, the Times reported
that a 16-year-old British boy obsessed with cleanliness died because of
constantly covering his body with deodorants, which resulted in a fatal cardiac
arrest.
