Remembering 9/11, anniversary of two terrorist atrocities

On 11 September, my first instinct is, of course, to offer sympathy to my US friends for the terrible and bloodthirsty terror attack on their country in 2001. It was an act that was cruel and senseless. It has led to nearly two decades of war from which there have been no winners, but huge numbers of losers.

Today, however, I’m going to focus on my second instinct. That’s to remind us all that it wasn’t only in 2001 that a terror campaign was launched on 11 September. The previous time, as I pointed out once before, far from being a victim, the United States was backing the perpetrators.

Terror twice over: the first 9/11 and the second

Partly my reason for focusing on that occasion is that I’ve recently finished Isabel Allende’s latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea. It’s outstanding. With a cast of characters as engaging as in all her works, she builds a compelling tale of two harrowing experiences of defeat, terror and exile.

The first is at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when half a million people trekked across the Pyrenees, seeking refuge in France from the brutal retaliation the Franco forces handed out to its defeated enemies at home. Chillingly, she tells how even surrender couldn’t save you: men or women who laid down their arms were still liable to be tortured and shot.

And what the refugees found in France was concentration camps.

The second experience follows the coup d’état in Allende’s native Chile. And, just as chillingly, there too surrender was no safe option, as she also described in her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Men and women who give themselves up, unarmed ad hands raised, are killed or tortured all the same, by a brutalised army that’s just seized power.

In both books, she describes the bombing of the presidential palace, in which the left-wing President, her cousin Salvador Allende, and his entourage were killed. And she doesn’t mince her words. That military uprising, as illegal as Franco’s, unleashed on Chile a campaign of terror. Both Pinochet and Franco were convinced that the only way to overcome their opponents conclusively was to terrorise them into silence. It was never enough to defeat their enemies. They wanted to exterminate them.

That’s the nature of terror. It isn’t about convincing people. It’s about crushing them. Franco did it in Spain. Pinochet did it in Chile. And the 9/11 terrorists tried to do it in the US, though they fortunately failed. Franco and Pinochet were far more successful. They remained in power for nearly forty and nearly twenty years respectively.

Eleven September 1973. That was the date of the Army coup that unleashed its terror on Chile. Twenty-eight years to the day before the attack on the twin towers in New York. The 1973 event is the other 9/11, and it deserves to be remembered with the same respect, though it sadly isn’t.

Why the difference? Because far from being targeted, the US, or at least Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, actively and with great energy supported the destabilisation of the Allende government, and backed the military leaders when they seized power.

It denounces terrorism, but the US backed the terrorists of that 9/11.

That’s not that unusual, incidentally. One of the aspects I most resented of the terror campaign I lived through in 1980s London was the knowledge that it had only been made possible by support from the US. Money flowed in, and the American judicial system tended to back the IRA when the British government tried to take action against its members in America. The US seemed not to oppose terrorism in general, only the terrorism that attacked its interests.

The Chilean tragedy lasted well beyond that first bleak day, of course. In the end, maybe as many as 3200 were killed, while 80,000 were detained, with a high proportion being tortured (including a future President, Michelle Bachelet, whose father died of his torture).

Years later, after the reintroduction of democracy, Pinochet was indicted for his crimes by a Spanish examining magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. That it should be a Spaniard is interesting, since it was the first time anyone had applied the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’, allowing prosecution anywhere for crimes of heads of state, even if amnesty has been granted in the country in which they were committed (as had happened in this case).

Pinochet was in Britain at the time. He was arrested and spent a year and a half under house arrest while his case was being heard. Maggie Thatcher, who’d been out of office for eight years, many of whose continued admirers see her as something of a saint, and who had regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, sent Pinochet a bottle of whisky with the charming message, “Scotch is one British institution that will never let you down”.

Who’s a terrorist and what constitutes terrorism is clearly not the same thing for everybody. Which is worth bearing in mind when we remember two terrible attacks on 9/11. And offer our sorrow to the victims of both.