By Christopher Hitchens


IN 1850, Londoners were favoured with a visit from Field Marshal Baron von Haynau, an Austrian commandant who had earned the international nickname "The Hyena" for his filthy cruelty in suppressing rebellions in Italy and Hungary.

An appeal from the radical press had gratifying results. On his tour of the South Bank, the Field Marshal was set upon by brewery workers and draymen, who covered him in hay and pelted him with manure while crying: "Down with the Austrian butcher!"




Henry Kissinger

The desperate Haynau hid himself in a dustbin at the George Inn at Bankside, but was soon discovered and had his moustache torn off. He decided that England was not a safe place to continue his holiday, and even Lord Palmerston is said to have been amused at the rough justice the old brute received.

This is the sort of "real" history which testifies to a spirit of liberty, and a nerve of outrage, which we must hope never to lose.

If Henry Kissinger had confined himself to writing defences of the Austrian Count Metternich and his fellow bullies and executioners, he could perhaps now be received unnoticed by some dull academic group and be permitted to bore them into oblivion.

But the man who rises to address the Albert Hall today is a wanted man in several countries, and his presence here is an offence.

His victims were not bored into oblivion. They were set ablaze by napalm and poisoned with "Agent Orange" dioxin chemicals, and crushed by tanks, and hunted down and tortured to death by state-sponsored assassination squads.

Mr Kissinger has since mounted an extraordinary campaign of lies to conceal his role in all this, but the lying has found him out, and so has international law. He is one of a small handful of rogue ex-statesmen who have to be careful where they travel.

Britain betrays its best traditions by being one of the few countries which hosts him.

On April 11, the new International Criminal Court was ratified by gaining the signature of the 60 governments, including the British Government, that it required. From now on, war crimes and crimes against humanity are indictable and prosecutable anywhere in the world, and there will be no hiding place for despots and torturers.

The principle is the same as was established for Messrs Pinochet and Milosevic: universal jurisdiction for atrocities and the abolition of the defence of "sovereign immunity".

Murderers will no longer be able to claim that they were "only obeying orders". And it will be the worse if they turn out to be the ones who gave those orders. There will be nobody above the law of nations.

Quite properly, this new legal system will not be retroactive. But its principles hold. And in the meantime, with infinite labour, our existing laws have been catching up with Henry Kissinger.

Last year, he was visited by the Paris police while staying at the Ritz Hotel and issued a summons to answer questions about the "disappearance" of several French citizens during the Pinochet years in Chile. He chose to leave Paris the next day without replying to the summons.

The courts in Chile itself, and also in Argentina, have requested his testimony about kidnap and murder and he has refused to comply with these international legal requests.

Now he is also the target of a lawsuit in Washington DC, brought by the relatives of Chilean General Rene Schneider, whose assassination - which was supposed to overturn the result of a democratic election - has been laid at Kissinger's door.

The British public cannot view these proceedings as a spectator. There are two British citizens whose unresolved cases are intimately involved.

The first is Dr Sheila Cassidy, a British physician who was detained without trial in Pinochet's Chile, accused of treating injured members of the Chilean opposition, and subjected to a hideous routine of sexual torture.

The second is William Beausire, a British businessman who was grabbed off a plane by the Argentine secret police in the same period and handed over to the Chilean interrogators, who thought he might know where his radical sister was in hiding. Dr Cassidy survived the torture sessions. Mr Beausire did not. Like so many of the relatives of the "vanished" of that period, we do not even know where his body was buried.

The Beausire case resulted from a collaboration between the secret police forces of several dictatorships - Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay - that was known about and overseen by Kissinger himself. The joint effort was known as "Operation Condor".

In that period, democratic politicians from South America were tracked as far as Rome and Washington DC, and blown up with car bombs.

The term for this is "state-supported international terrorism". Our government is very loud in its denunciations of such activity, and quite properly so.

Why, then, is Kissinger allowed to use Heathrow airport either to fly in or to fly out?

We have an agreement on crime and terrorism with the Spanish authorities.

A Spanish judge, Baltazar Garzon, has already approached Interpol to ask whether the questions concerning Operation Condor can be put to Kissinger while he is London.

A FRENCH judge, SophieHelene Chateau, has made a similar approach on behalf of "missing" French citizens.

Yet there is an awkward silence from the Home Secretary, who cannot seem to find a voice in which to speak about all this. Are we to be the European capital of softness on crime? And of softness on the causes of crime, at that?

The scrupulous legal initiatives being brought by the relatives of individuals are a great embarrassment to Kissinger but do not begin to suggest the enormity of his crimes against humanity.

In the past few months, newly declassified papers in Washington have demonstrated conclusively that he sat in the room with General Suharto of Indonesia and helped plan the invasion of East Timor, that he conspired with the apartheid authorities to invade Angola before any Cubans had set foot there, that he gave political encouragement and protection to the bloody dictators in Greece while they were preparing their attack on the British Commonwealth state of Cyprus, and that he lied about all this in his memoirs.

The men with whom he worked, like the sadists who ran Operation Condor, are now mostly overthrown and in jail. Only their senior partner remains unindicted.

This only adds to a record of staggering illegality and bloodshed across the globe, beginning with the secret bombing of Indo-china, extending to the genocide in Bangladesh, continuing through the rape of Chile and winding up, even after he left office, with the support and encouragement he gave to the Chinese Communists in the slaughter of Tienanmen Square.

(The advice he gave to the dictators in that case was perhaps not unconnected to some lucrative consultancies with corporations doing business in Beijing.)

The total number of victims runs into the millions and reminds one of Stalin's statement that one death is a crime, while a million deaths is a statistic.

International law is slow. But the fact remains that local and international law is catching up to Henry Kissinger, on three continents, at long last.

Britain used to be proud of being a haven for the persecuted rather than the persecutors. It also used to maintain that "be you never so high, the law is above you."

If Kissinger has so many friends in high places that he can force us to trample these principles, perhaps at least the example of the popular contempt for Baron Haynau will not be forgotten. As the song of that day had it:

Turn him out, turn him out, from our side of the Thames,

Let him go to great Tories and high-titled dames.

He may walk the West End and parade in his pride,

But he'll not come again near "The George" in Bankside.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His book The Trial Of Henry Kissinger is newly available in paperback.

DOSSIER ON A WANTED MAN

Kissinger's friends in Chile tortured British doctor Sheila Cassidy, 1975

Victims in Indochina were set ablaze with napalm, high explosive and phosphorousHe backed massacre of Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, 1989

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KISSINGER DODGES LONDON PROTEST


By Neil Roberts


Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger today dodged scores of protesters chanting "war criminal" as he arrived at the Royal Albert Hall.

The one-time statesman, who faces mounting international calls for his arrest over alleged war crimes, is in London to address an Institute of Directors convention.

Amid heavy security, demonstrators mounted a sit-down protest in the road outside the building and erected a giant puppet of the 78-year-old.

Dr Kissinger swept past the protests in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar and was ushered in through as side door. He refused to answer questions from waiting reporters.