The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.39           November 2, 1998 
 
 
Who Has The Right To Try Pinochet?  
The following statement was issued by the Communist League in the United Kingdom.

The October 17 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by British police, acting on a warrant issued by two judges in Spain, has nothing to do with defending human rights and is an attack on the sovereignty of Chile. It should be condemned by working people, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. Pinochet, the former military dictator of Chile and a faithful servant of its ruling rich and imperialism, deserves to go on trial for his crimes. But only the Chilean people have the right to bring this butcher to justice, not the British or Spanish governments, whose own imperialist hands are bloodstained.

It's no accident Pinochet is arrested by London today. The "human rights" demagogy of the liberal forces arguing for Pinochet's arrest simply echoes the war propaganda that Washington, London, and other imperialist governments are cranking up to justify their military intervention against Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Newspaper editorials on both sides of the Atlantic, Labour Party politicians, and others have openly speculated that Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic should now be arrested on overseas trips. In the name of opposing genocide and war crimes, the imperialist wolves in sheep's clothing seek to deepen their own intervention in the Balkans with the ultimate aim of overturning the workers states there. Bourgeois liberal and social democratic forces have been aggressively pushing for this "humanitarian" war drive.

In September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, under Pinochet's command, overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup. Fearful of the rising struggles of working people in Chile and throughout South America, the U.S. government instigated and aided the military crackdown. Tens of thousands of union militants and other Chileans were tortured, killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile. Pinochet's government then launched fierce attacks on the living standards of workers and farmers, employing policies much admired by the British government of Margaret Thatcher.

As his backers at the right-wing Daily Telegraph unabashedly point out, Pinochet was an "unstinting ally" of the British ruling class. He proved this in 1982 by his assistance during the war London waged against Argentina to enforce its colonial rule over the Malvinas Islands, which belong to Argentina. At that time the British government justified its colonial war by hypocritically claiming it was fighting the Argentine military dictatorship.

Today, with pious hypocrisy, the Labour government of Anthony Blair claims it has an "ethical" foreign policy. Blair however, has his finger on the imperial trigger, ready to participate in an assault on the Yugoslav people, while pretending to provide humanitarian aid to Albanians in Kosova fighting for independence. Last February Blair was also ready to join Washington in an assault on working people in Iraq. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, he and the Labour leadership, the loyal opposition at that time, fully supported the U.S.-led massacre of tens of thousands of Iraqis, in which British troops participated.

Now that Pinochet has already done his dirty work for imperialism, he is expendable to his masters, and his arrest can even be used to further their war goals elsewhere in the world. Class-conscious workers should not fall in the trap - promoted by liberal and radical forces - of thanking the British and Spanish governments for supposedly defending democracy. These imperialist regimes are enemies of working people. We should oppose their effort to assert the "right" to arrest and judge anyone they want to, anywhere in the world.

The only ones who have a right to try and punish Pinochet for his crimes are the working people of Chile. They will eventually have their day.

 
 
 
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