Word: pinochets
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Hold that plane to Spain -- Augusto Pinochet is staying put for now. Britain's House of Lords has ordered yet another hearing after overturning a lower court ruling that would have extradited the former Chilean dictator to Spain. Pinochet's lawyers had appealed the lower court's decision because the judge on the five-person panel who cast the deciding vote is affiliated with Amnesty International, one of the prime movers in the push to bring Pinochet to trial...
General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, former dictator of Chile, is arrested in a London clinic on a human-rights warrant. For Americans, a conundrum. Instinctively we think this must be right. If in America you were responsible directly or indirectly for 3,000 deaths, you'd be on death row. But Americans are not arbitrary. All kinds of thugs, both former and current rulers, are running around free. So why Pinochet...
Take Laurent Kabila, dictator of the Congo. He is suspected of involvement in the disappearance of tens of thousands of innocents--far more than the worst of what Pinochet is charged with. His fate? While Pinochet was under house arrest in London, Kabila was in Paris, a guest at a Franco-African summit...
Amid this moral chaos, the arrest of Pinochet is a triumph of arbitrariness. Well, no. There is one rule that emerges from this case. The moralists, so jubilant at Pinochet's comeuppance, might ponder its perversity: rulers with blood on their hands are advised to remain in power. For any tyrant, the best protection from the kind of justice being visited upon Pinochet is to continue to tyrannize...
After all, Pinochet never would have been arrested if he had not done the right thing: giving up power in 1990 to a democratic government, after holding a free election. His reward? Pursuit by moral preeners up and down Europe who think they have established some new international norm of morality...