Terror on trial: thinking about shining path, and those like them

EVERY so often, the world relearns the difficulty of trying a certain kind of monster in court. Nuremberg stands as the eternal example; some people still think they should have been lined up and shot. In The Hague the other day, Milosevic dropped dead, frustrating his prosecutors, and others. Saddam Hussein, of course, continues his judicial theater. Although the judge in the case--currently Raouf Abdel-Rahman--sometimes gets the upper hand. On March 15, Saddam boasted, "I am the head of state." Judge Abdel-Rahman corrected, "You used to be a head of state. You are a defendant now."

A half a world away, Abimael Guzman is also a defendant. In the roster of 20th-century monsters, he has a place. The difference between Guzman and Saddam Hussein--and the Nazis and Milosevic and the Rwandan butchers and many others--is that Guzman never gained power. But in his country, Peru, he managed to kill at least 40,000 people, depending on how you do the accounting. He also wreaked $30 billion in material damage, and left a legacy of fear. Not bad for twelve years'work, accomplished by a former philosophy professor at a provincial university.

You may have forgotten Guzman and his movement, Shining Path, but I will inflict some reminding. Abimael Guzman Reynoso was born in 1934, and his university was in Ayacucho, high up in the Andes. He was a leader in the China-favoring faction of the Peruvian Communist party. In 1970, he christened his movement the "Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariategui," after the founder of that party.

Guzman thought of himself as the heir to Marx, Lenin, and Mao. He had no use for the contemporary Soviets, viewing them as soft. The Cubans and the Nicaraguans--the Castroites and the Sandinistas--were laughable pipsqueaks to him. He reviled Deng Xiaoping, for his departures from Mao. The Communists he really admired were the Khmer Rouge, and he shared their totalizing philosophy. Guzman was openly genocidalist. At its peak, his movement had 10,000 fighters, and these included adolescents. They killed with particular ease and glee.

Guzman's plan was to control the countryside and then strangle the cities, conquering all of Peru through "a river of blood." The plan was launched in earnest on May 17, 1980, when his forces attacked a polling place in tiny Chuschi. This was deeply significant. Peru was just emerging from more than ten years of dictatorship; democracy was in bud. At Chuschi, Shining Path burned the ballot boxes. They could not tolerate any democratic flowering, because that was not the future they had in mind for Peru.

If you discern a similarity to the current insurgency in Iraq, you are not undiscerning. Indeed, to review the campaign of Shining Path in the 1980s and '90s is to be struck by many similarities to today's Iraq.

Shining Path took care to kill all the politicians it could--and all the government officials, and all the voters, and anyone at all who dared participate in the democracy. People refused to run for office, for fear that they or their families would be killed. Sometimes, when they ran and won, they immediately resigned. In 1988 alone, Shining Path killed 17 provincial mayors.

And they did a great deal more. They kidnapped, they robbed banks, they bombed embassies. They bombed police academies, they bombed churches, they bombed businesses. They killed anyone, foreign or Peruvian, engaged in relief or development work. Europeans felt they had to withdraw from the country. Just about the only thing missing from Shining Path's repertoire was beheading--but they made up for it by hacking to death with machetes. The stories that come out of the Shining Path period are as gruesome as any you have heard.

Testifying before Congress in March 1992, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Bernard Aronson, put it well: "In [Shining Path's] mind, any Peruvian or any foreigner who takes up the democratic cause, tries to ease human suffering, or resists terrorist threats is hampering the development of revolutionary consciousness ..." Abimael Guzman put it even better. Talking to his Central Committee, he said, "Our policy is to raze to the ground, to leave nothing.... In a war, what you cannot use or carry off, you destroy, you burn."

He meant every word. In addition to attacking people, Shining Path attacked infrastructure, which is another way of attacking people. They blew up bridges, irrigation projects, and electrical towers. They caused many blackouts--including one in Lima while the Pope was visiting--and water shortages. Their goal was simply to make life intolerable, to bring Peru to its knees. And they came very close. Peruvians remember this--it was not so long ago--and they shudder.

The similarities to Iraq's insurgents are obvious. And we might consider one more: Shining Path spread lies, preying on the ignorant. For example, they would say, "The American government--in combination with local lackeys--is poisoning your children with herbicides." Iraq's tormenters do no less. But while the similarities are obvious, there are dissimilarities, too. Michael Radu, a Romanian-born scholar in Philadelphia who has studied Shining Path, notes a couple: Shining Path had a clear ideology, and they also had a clear plan. Guzman was nicknamed "President Gonzalo"; his philosophy was "Gonzalo Thought." And his blueprint for taking the country was known to all. The Iraq terrorists are more ragtag and random, deadly as they are.