ON THE RIGHT : Unscrambling Pinochet - Britain releases Augusto Pinochet - Brief Article

NEW YORK, MARCH 7

NOW Chile is, not up in arms, one notes gratefully, but in Chile there is protracted the confusion that has surrounded the Pinochet business for 16 months. Outgoing president Eduardo Frei, the Christian Democratic leader, is, again, not quite up in arms over the reception given to the returning general by the Chilean military. In deference to Mr. Frei's loud objections, the chief commander of the army welcomed Pinochet back to Chile, but did not give a speech of welcome. Thus are diplomatic problems surmounted.

Meanwhile there have been endless references to the springiness of Mr. Pinochet-a wonder, what release from house arrest does for old bones! The insinuation is, of course, clear, namely that the old man escaped from Great Britain by a feigned illness and dispossession of the senses, a practice explicitly condemned, among other places, in the military code. ("Doctor, I'm afraid I can't join tonight in the assault on enemy lines, I have a terrible cough.") Phony illnesses are not too easy to pull off if skeptically examined by medical doctors who are in the service of prosecutors standing by to make history. Granted, we can imagine Britain's Jack Straw whispering to the examiners: For gawdssake, find Pinochet unable to stand trial, the diplomatic hailstorm going on is intolerable.

But the assumption has to be that Gen. Pinochet was indeed too weakened to take resourceful care of himself at court. But that on landing, after l6 months, in his own country, he summoned the strength to walk with the aid of a cane. Gen. Pinochet is renowned for greater exertions than these.

Mrs. Thatcher, in her unique way, expressed what is thought the conservative view of things by twice calling on the detained general, protesting the entire judicial maneuver. And then, upon his departure, sending him a gift on the airplane of a copy of a 400-year-old silver plate celebrating the victory of Sir Francis Drake over the Spanish Armada. He too, Mrs. Thatcher seemed to be saying, was unloved and unappreciated by his countrymen and their court, but we know now what to think about the valiant Drake.

Conservatives have a sticky time with the Pinochet problem, but on one point they are indisputably correct. It is that if Gen. Pinochet had been serving the other side in modern history, he would have been untouched by the British courts. One has only to try to imagine the arrest in London of Fidel Castro or Mikhail Gorbachev or almost any leader of a Near East country to acknowledge the anomaly. Pinochet's prosecutors are primarily those who resent it that he prevailed over Salvador Allende. Allende was in life, their hero; in death, their martyr.

Having said as much, conservatives have a problem automatically dismissing the assertion of justice in an international setting. Always there need to be procedural safeguards, and the United States has consistently declined to uphold the authority of other jurisdictions than our own for political crimes.

Now those with the brief against Pinochet were arguing that the Treaty of Rome of 1998 gave jurisdiction to signatory powers to apprehend and try anyone allegedly guilty of crimes against humanity. A broad term, but applicable to Gen. Pinochet, if the facts are correctly stated, and they are difficult to deny.

The distinction needed, in his case, is always to ask whether his victims were casualties of a revolution, revolutions in most cases being sharply in contrast with the bloodless revolution of Great Britain in 1688. When insurgents assert power there is almost always carnage at an executive level. The question always to ask, when passing judgment on dictators who came to power by the use of force, is: Did their use of force extend beyond the requirements of civil order and security for the revolutionary state?

Here is where Gen. Pinochet, in the judgment of reasonable historians, fails. The coup was in September 1973. There was resistance and it was quelled. But as early as that October, a representative of the International Movement of Catholic Jurists gave evidence of torture. Gen. Pinochet denied this then, and perhaps the evidence was slanted. And as the years went by (he did not resign until 1989), the need to use force to stay in power diminished, to the point that Pinochet himself presided over a return to democratic government.

If the whole of the case rested on tendentious justice, conservatives who stand up for Pinochet would be vindicated. But why should conservatives oppose the very idea of making it difficult for foreign tyrants to travel about nonchalantly from country to country? Mengistu and Idi Amin are offensive enough living freely in Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia, but do we want them to live their lives care free?

-UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

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