Tom
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Single Transferable Coup By Mark Steel Guardian (London) Wednesday November 4, 1998
Fred West's lawyers must be kicking themselves. If only they had thought of the head of state loophole whereby you're immune from prosecution if you're an ex-head of state, even if you only attained that position by murdering the previous head of state.
They could have advised West to take time off from burying his neighbours, bump off the Queen and Prime Minister, and announce he was taking over for a while. Furthermore, he'd have been assured of a good pay-out to cover expenses, which would have gone a long way towards building costs.
The Lords, many of whom have spent years screaming about hooligans being let off with light sentences, seem destined to let a mass murderer free with no sentence at all. Not even 40 hours' community service, or a weekend with social workers saying to him: "I see - and when you set up this military dictatorship - how did it make you feel?"
The arguments for allowing Pinochet to go are almost poetic in their lack of logic. One is that he's a "frail old man". This could lead to a change in the law, with fitness replacing the crime as the criteria for the sentence. After a guilty verdict, the convict will do 10 minutes on an exercise bike, and the more you wheeze, the shorter your sentence. Another argument is that Allende's government was as guilty as the generals who overthrew it. Andrew Neil wrote that it was Allende's supporters who had "Chilean blood on their hands". So the murderer and murdered are equally to blame. Presumably if Andrew Neil arrived at the house of a psycho, he could look at the lunatic with a chain saw, then at the head in the fridge and say: "Honestly, you're both as mad as each other".
One of Allende's faults, which Neil, amongst others points out, is that he was elected on only 36 per cent of the vote. So I wonder if they told Roy Jenkins about their own ideas on how to top-up the seats of the minority parties. It's much simpler than Jenkins' proposal: you take the first choice of the greatest number of electors and kill him. It's called "The single transferable coup".
A common line has been that Pinochet is simply a "hate figure" for the left. Typical was the Daily telegraph editorial which complained about Peter Mandelson's "undergraduate ravings". Much better to conduct affairs in a mature manner, by pouring a chap a port and politely whispering: "Must say, that business with the electrodes was a rum old do."
And there's the line that Pinochet helped Britain during the Falklands War, although at the time, part of the justification for the war was that Argentina was a military dictatorship. Besides, your average defendant in a murder trial wouldn't be advised to plead for clemency on the grounds that, apart from the offences he was charged with, he also helped his mate drown 300 people in an afternoon.
The daftest argument of all is that to convict him would upset Chileans. Thousands of marchers defied water canon in Santiago last week, chanting: "It's a carnival - the dictator's in jail". And the families of the victims are unanimous in stating that they could cope better with their loss if the general were brought to justice. Their case is so much more powerful than the one to release him, so how is he on the edge of going home? The answer lies with Pinochet's reasons for his actions in the first place.
Allende's Popular Unity coalition came to power on a wave of strikes and peasant uprisings, his most popular policy being to nationalise the copper mines. The country was brought to chaos, when lorry owners went on strike to undermine the regime, and they were joined by a campaign in which industrialists closed factories, and lawyers and doctors stopped work. To appease them, Allende made the fatal mistake of inviting generals into his cabinet and they seized their chance. A military regime was installed, Allende and thousands of trade unionists were murdered and profits were safe again. The High Court judges, Thatcher, the Lords, the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Neil and the others who defend Pinochet will drink tea with anyone who defends profits. Either that, or the Chileans have just developed an unfortunate coup gene.
Pinochet succeeded when the Popular Unity government played by the rules of legal niceties while he was preparing a whole new game. Now it looks as if another set of legal niceties will allow him to escape again. So Jack Straw should announce that he's being locked up for being an evil bastard and if there's no legal basis for it, so much the better. In fact he's being done for not paying his TV licence as well.
The worst scenario of all would be if he were convicted and sentenced by a British judge. Because they'd say: "There's only one thing that can do you any good my boy - a spell in the army."