September 11, half a century on

On the 11th of September, thoughts obviously go to those in the US marking with sorrow the terrible attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington. Twenty-two years later, I naturally feel great sympathy for them when I think how, driving along a road in Britain a friend of mine and I received a call from a colleague who asked, “have you heard about the plane flying into one of the Twin Towers?”, and the feeling of sickness that came when I realised this wasn’t the first line of a joke with a punchline behind it.

Of course, the sense of sickness deepened when I realised another plane had flown into the second tower. To say nothing of the three more planes converted into terrorist weapons.

Still, it’s important to remember that this isn’t the only act of appalling violence associated with 11 September. Indeed, this year marks an important anniversary, the half century, of another. Fifty years ago, on the 11th of September 1973, a group of Chilean officers led by Augusto Pinochet, rose in revolt against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

Pinochet and his fellow mutineers had decided that they knew best what was good for their country and were better qualified than any civilian to achieve it. Their insurrection opened a seventeen-year period of dictatorship that cost at least 3000 opponents their lives. The bodies of 1000 have never been discovered.

It was an event that casts credit on no one. Obviously, there’s nothing but shame for the brutal dictators themselves, not just for their cruelty, but also because they seized power in a military coup, an act that denies a fundamental principle of military life, respect for the chain of command, which should have left them subordinate to the President. He was killed in the presidential palace when it was bombarded by units of his own air force.

La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential Palace
under attack from ground and air on 11 September 1973

There’s plenty of shame for plenty of others too. Three years earlier, soon after Allende was elected, the then commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, René Schneider, was assassinated. He had championed what came to be known as the ‘Schneider doctrine’ that you could choose a military career or a political one, but you couldn’t combine the two.

While the US for a time denied all involvement in overthrowing Allende’s government, documents made public since make it clear that the death of Schneider had been orchestrated by the American CIA. Then CIA chief at the time, Richard Helms, convened a top-level meeting after Schneider’s death. The Agency chiefs sent a congratulatory cable to the CIA station in Chile, stating that, “a maximum effort has been achieved,” and that “the station has done excellent job of guiding Chileans to point today where a military solution is at least an option for them”. 

It took another three years, but in time with vital support from the CIA, the coup imposes a ‘military solution’ and launched the seventeen years of repression Chile then suffered.

Nor did Britain cover itself with honour. In 1998, after the end of his dictatorship, a human rights violation case was opened against Pinochet by a Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. The case turned on an interesting principle, of universal jurisdiction, which said that for this kind of charge, action could be taken anywhere in the world against a former head of state, even if an amnesty had been granted in his home country. Pinochet was held under house arrest for eighteen months in the UK, in the course of which former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, always an admirer of the bloodstained dictator, spoke out in his favour, as did former US President George H W Bush. But the most deplorable act was that of a centre-left, Labour government, when the Home Secretary Jack Straw released Pinochet on health grounds. 

Pinochet left in a wheelchair but stood up from it as soon as he was back on the ground in Chile and greeting his well-wishers. 

With such a depressing trail of cowardly and unethical acts all along the way, it’s no surprise that in the US and Britain we prefer to focus on 11 September 2001 than 11 September 1973. We ought, however, to pay more attention to what happened in Chile. That’s particularly the case given that its wounds have still not wholly healed.

Here's what Beatrice Ávalos, a Chilean educator interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País, suggests for this anniversary:

Perhaps the harshest effect in the years that followed the military coup was establishing a rift between Chileans and Chileans, raising some up and attacking the humanity of others. My proposal would be that we might use the rest of the year to heal that rupture by reaffirming our commitment to both political and social democracy, recognising the legitimacy of many of our differences. I would propose that opponents in the National Congress issue a joint statement expressing a vigilant commitment to democracy and to human rights; and that in every place where we work and live we offer each other our hands on the 11th of September, looking at each other and making a powerful pledge of ‘never again’. 

Now, isn’t that an excellent proposal?