Kissinger: Mistakes May Have Been Made
Staff
and agencies Wednesday April 24, 2002
As human rights campaigners demonstrated outside the Royal Albert Hall in London, the target of their protest, Henry Kissinger, today admitted inside it was possible that "mistakes were made" by the US administrations he served in.
But the former secretary of state questioned whether a court was the right place to examine them, saying it would be impossible to recall every one of thousands of cases.
The protesters, human rights activists joined by anti-globalisation demonstrators, accuse him of war crimes for his role in US actions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Some banged drums while others chanted "war criminal" and "this is what democracy looks like".
"No one can say that he served in an administration that did not make mistakes," Mr Kissinger told the annual Institute of Directors conference.
"The decisions made in high office are usually 51-49 decisions so it is quite possible that mistakes were made.
"The issue is whether 30 years after the event courts are the appropriate means by which determination is made."
The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell this morning lost a court battle to have Henry Kissinger arrested for the "killing, injuring and displacement" of 3 million Vietnamese and Cambodian people.
During the 10-minute hearing Mr Tatchell was told that an arrest warrant could only be issued by the director of public prosecutions, and that, without his consent, no arrest could be made.
His bid was the second request concerning the former US secretary of state to be turned down this week.
Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who tried to prosecute General Pinochet for crimes against humanity, was told by the Home Office on Monday that he could not question Mr Kissinger as a witness in connection with the Condor Plan, under which Latin America's military regimes agreed to eradicate their opponents in the late 1970s.
Both attempts had hoped to catch Mr Kissinger at the Royal Albert Hall.
Despite today's decision, Mr Tatchell insisted that he would fight on to bring the allegations against Mr Kissinger to court.
"This is not the end of the line. I will continue to seek Mr Kissinger's arrest on charges that, while he was US national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, he was the chief architect of a US war policy which resulted in the killing, injuring and displacement of 3 million Vietnamese and Cambodian people," he said.
"The victims of his crimes demand justice."
Mr Kissinger was Richard Nixon's national security adviser from 1969 to 1973 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Mr Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,689870,00.html
xoxox
Henry Kissinger
Derek Brown profiles the man who invented shuttle diplomacy and defines power as the ultimate aphrodisiac
Wednesday April 24, 2002
A generation ago, the Monty Python team recorded a feeble little ditty lampooning one of the most famous statesmen of their day.
"Henry Kissinger," they warbled, "How I'm missing yer You're the doctor of my dreams With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare And your Machiavellian schemes I know they say that you are very vain And short and fat and pushy But at least you're not insane ..."
The song came out on the Contractual Obligations album in 1980, when Henry Kissinger had already retreated from the centre stage of world politics. Twenty-two years on he remains immensely influential, through his public appearances, broadcasting, writing and consultancy to the rich and powerful.
He is also still hugely controversial, as the fuss over his appearance today at the Albert Hall testifies. He may be a hard man to ridicule, but for many he is a very easy man to hate.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger - he adopted the more Anglo-Saxon Henry after moving to the USA - was born in the German town of Fuerth on May 27 1923. In 1938 his family fled the Nazi persecution of the Jews, settling in New York.
The young Henry became a naturalised American citizen in 1943, and immediately enlisted in the US army, serving in Europe as an interpreter and intelligence analyst.
After the war he quickly made his mark as a scholar, winning the equivalent of first-class honours at Harvard, and following up with MA and PhD degrees from the same university. He went on to achieve distinction as a teacher, in Harvard's department of government, and as a member of its prestigious centre for international affairs.
Academic achievement was quickly accompanied by public recognition. In the early 1960s, Kissinger served as a consultant to the department of state, the US arms control and disarmament agency, the national security council, and other defence and diplomatic agencies.
He vaulted from backroom influence to household name in 1969, when President Richard Nixon made him his national security adviser. It was an improbable but potent combination, in which the formidable intellect of Kissinger complemented the compulsive populism of Nixon.
In 1973 Kissinger became the 56th US secretary of state. He was the most powerful diplomat and the world - and the busiest. He invented the concept of "shuttle diplomacy", forever jetting round the globe to mediate in some disputes and - some would say - meddle in others.
Kissinger's greatest achievement, according to his admirers, was in negotiating the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam and securing a stunning though illusory peace agreement. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1973 jointly with his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho.
His critics, who tend to be more vociferous than his admirers, say that securing the peace was rather less significant than promoting the war in the first place. They accuse him of doing more than most men to unleash a storm of destruction and bloodshed in south-east Asia in the 1960s, extending the Vietnam war into Cambodia and Laos and then cynically abandoning the region to dictatorship and even more misery.
The great diplomatic thinker is also charged at the bar of liberal-left opinion with masterminding the destruction of Salvador Allende's elected government in Chile in 1970, and installing the bloody-handed Pinochet junta in its place.
Christopher Hitchens, the US-based British journalist who has made something of a speciality of attacking Kissinger, accused him in a public debate organised by Harper's magazine last year of direct complicity in the pre-coup assassination of General Rene Schneider, the head of the Chilean armed forces.
He said of the murder: "We know who commissioned it, who paid for it, who organised it, who shipped the illegal money, who shipped the dirty weapons to Chile to have this done, and who paid the murderers after the crime had been committed. And the same name and the same face recurs throughout. We charge Henry Kissinger with murder for that, and we say that the society that tolerates it is tolerating murder, too."
Now approaching his 80th year, Kissinger has lost some of his zest for travel, but little of his intellectual drive or acerbity. Twice married, very private, he generally deals with criticism by ignoring it. Peter Tatchell's latest publicity stunt would not have troubled in the slightest the man who has hobnobbed for half a century with the most powerful people in the world.
Indeed, he once came close to defining power, in just two words. It was, he said (and he should know) the "ultimate aphrodisiac".
Christopher Hitchens: The trial of Henry Kissinger http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Trial_Kissinger_Hitchins.html
The Harper's magazine debate http://www.harpers.org/online/kissinger_forum/
Henry Kissinger: a brief biography http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-bio.html
Kissinger's diplomatic shuffling, 1973-77 http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/sectravels/kissinger.html
An academic analysis of Kissinger's diplomacy http://www.ashland.edu/~ashbrook/publicat/onprin/v5n3/garrity.html
Kissinger and China http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/china/peopleevents/pande02.html
Henry Kissinger: the Monty Python lyrics http://www.wilken.freeserve.co.uk/Montypython/Songs/song19.htm
