Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet
by Ariel Dorfman
Pluto Press £7.99, pp224
This book is a small bomb. Its 224 pages explode in readers' hands and wound many in their deepest convictions. In his slim volume, the principal conviction lacerated by Ariel Dorfman, the distinguished Jewish author and playwright from Chile, concerns the 'war on terrorism' which our leaders and some of our newspaper editors call us daily to fight.
Though they don't say so in so many words, these leaders and editors let it be known they believe - and want us to believe - that modern terrorists are seldom, if ever, Christians or Jews. Of course, they murmur, if you scratch a terrorist hard enough you will always find a Muslim or a Marxist-Leninist. Naturally, they wink, no terrorists are never allied to Western governments - not the Contras, not Suharto, not the late Jonas Savimbi, friend of apartheid, not the present Algerian military regime...
Dorfman reminds us that General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power on 11 September 1973 and was sustained in power for nearly two decades by the West, certainly was a terrorist. With his celebrated way with words, Dorfman can wring our emotions dry about the victims of this treacherous, terrorist general who grew rich trading in cocaine, selling off state industries to his family cheaply and torturing those who opposed him.
But Dorfman is too clear-sighted to leave us just lamenting. He plays to the strengths of those of us who have sought to have the man brought to book for his crimes. 'We are not the lords of death to decide who lives and who dies,' says Dorfman talking of the tyrant's executions and assassinations. 'But we are the ones who give meaning to that death.' How history will remember Pinochet is in our hands, not in his.
The book ends with the thought that we should be grateful to Pinochet. His arrest and imprisonment in London in 1998 signified that even heads of state could no longer evade the judgment seat. It has meant the arraignment of such as Milosevic in the Hague; it has meant that Kissinger had to decamp from his Paris hotel to avoid arrest; it means that Ariel Sharon is not likely to be visiting Belgium soon, lest he be put on trial.
If there is any disappointment over this book, it is that Dorfman does not dissect in more detail the betrayals of justice and, indeed, of international treaty obligations committed by Jack Straw and the Spanish government as they prevented Pinochet falling to his Spanish prosecutor, Judge Baltasar Garzón, and standing trial in Spain.
We are approaching the thirtieth anniversary of Pinochet's putsch: it comes as the world fights over the way some tyrannies - the ones we like - are indulged and others - the Muslim ones we don't like - are blitzed. Dorfman's book is a handy item to have ready for such a fight.
