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Pravda.RU:Main:More in detail 19:03 2001-08-21 ANDREI KRUSHINSKY: TRIAL ON HENRY KISSINGER The Hong Kong weekly Far Eastern Economic Review published an article entitled “Henry Kissinger and Wars in Asia” (marked as August 23). So the East-Asia region also got involved in the campaign to bring former US Secretary to the international tribunal. As it turns out, when Russia’s senior governmental officials were welcoming Kissinger, the trouble was brewing for him in the USA and Europe. This trouble is so thick now that Kissinger would not risk to show up in any country of the West. Christopher Hitchens – an Englishman living in the US, a columnist of the leftist-liberal newspaper The Nation has recently released a book entitled “The Case Against Henry Kissinger”. The book became a bestseller at once and the campaign took another scale. It does not go about the speculation – the readers can find the proofs of the that in the following quotations: Feed (USA): In a series of essays in Harper's entitled "The Case Against Henry Kissinger," he argues that the national security adviser and secretary of state under Nixon and Ford ought to be prosecuted for war crimes for his role in assassinations, occupations, and executions in Indochina, Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, and Cyprus. ..In the course of a recent conversation on these essays and his upcoming book on the same subject, Hitchens described Kissinger as "a murderer, a liar, a pseudo-intellectual, a thief of government property, and a profiteer from said theft." Le Monde(France): Reported earlier this month that when French Judge Roger Le Loire had a summons served on Kissinger on May 31 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger fled Paris. The judge wanted to ask Kissinger about his knowledge of Operation Condor, the scheme evolved by Pinochet and other Latin American proconsuls of the American Empire to kill or "disappear" their opponents. Guardian (Great Britain): A judge in Santiago has drawn up a list of questions for the US statesman and Nobel laureate, Henry Kissinger, about the 1973 killing of the American journalist Charles Horman, whose execution by forces loyal to General Augusto Pinochet was dramatised in the Hollywood film, Missing. The questions, drawn up by the investigating magistrate Juan Guzman and lawyers for the victims of the Pinochet regime, were submitted to Chile's supreme court, which must now decide whether to forward them to the US. Far Eastern Economic Rewue (Hong Kong): In his latest book, Washington gadfly Christopher Hitchens asks whether the United States is living by double standards, condemning other nations for their human-rights records while harbouring one of the 20th century's most deadly war criminals. Salon_com Books: If killing hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants by dropping million of tons of bombs on undefended civilian targets is not a war crime, then there are no war crimes. If Kissinger is not responsible for these crimes, then there are no war criminals. Hitchens proved with documents and facts that Kissinger was personally responsible for the death of 350 thousand Laotians, 600 thousand Cambodians and 600 thousand Vietnamese. Due to his assistance in repression in Pakistan (Bangladesh) Kissinger is guilty in the death of 3 million people more. His role in the events connected with the occupation of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 allows to accuse him of the death of 200 thousand people more. The sum total is almost 5 million lives. Pinochet’s victims in Chile after the coup inspired by Nixon and Kissinger can not be compared with the figures mentioned above. Hitchens believes that Kissinger could be arrested in several countries at once after Pinochet was detained in England in 1998. Hitchens describes the facts which took place at the end of 1998 when Kissinger was coming to power. Nixon was struggling with acting vice-president Hubert Humphrey for the position of the President at that time. It was the time when President Johnson was striving for the regulation of the Vietnamese war in Paris. The agreement seemed to be inevitable: Johnston would stop bombing North Vietnam, the troops from Vietnam’s South would be called off. It goes without saying it would be a perfect trump card for the administration of “democrats” and personally – for Humphrey. So Kissinger and other members of Nixon’s tea started trying to win that trump card over to their side. The sense of their actions was as follows: to make one of the parties of Paris negotiations – South Vietnam junta – reject any variants of the peaceful outcome. Violating the US laws, Kissinger and others assured spokesmen for the junta that they would get something better from the Republican administration. Kissinger himself was silent about that role of his in those intrigues in his memoirs. Nixon let the cat out of the bag. Clark Clifford who was taking the position of the US Defense Minister characterized Kissinger’s actions (and the actions of Nixon’s other followers) as “rough, illegal interference in the national security affairs on the part of natural persons”. The South Vietnamese junta broke the negotiations successfully and Johnson, Humphrey found themselves in the difficult situation. Nixon used that failure rather actively in his pre-election campaign and won. In 4 years Nixon and Kissinger signed peaceful agreement on similar conditions. The “delay” cost 1.5 million human lives but it was Kissinger who was…awarded the Nobel Prize (?!). The American authorities are not likely to deliver Kissinger but this person is already on trial in mass media and among the people. Below are 2 most impressive statements on the matter which may serve a key for understanding the roots of the growing movement against capitalist globalization in the world. Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania: The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists… Henry Kissinger's role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. Boston Phoenix: Hitchens explication of the Nuremberg precedent, and of the legal responsibility established for high government officials who preside over misdeeds, is particularly impressive and disturbing. But what Hitchens fails to deal with adequately is that Kissinger was never close to being alone in his illegal foreign intrigues. John F. Kennedy attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro… Lyndon Johnson used a trumped-up naval incident to trick Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, … Ronald Reagan, who is honored in ways that Nixon will never be, illegally funded wars marked by human-rights abuses against the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador. Clinton used the military for humanitarian purposes… Donald Rumsfeld, who feuded with Kissinger during the Ford years because he thought Kissinger was soft on the Soviets, is back in power, pushing an unworkable missile defense on our uneasy allies…. Hitchens is right to stress Kissinger’s personal responsibility. But as Fallows suggests, the fault lies not just in Kissinger, but also in ourselves. So what are the hopes left to the humankind if the globalization will bring such immoral politicians as Kissinger to supremacy in the world? |
