Genocide, War Crimes and the West

Atrocity and Its Discontents: US Double-mindedness about Massacre, from the Plains Wars to Indonesia

Peter Dale Scott

One of the great needs of the twentieth century is a scientific study of atrocity and of the moral issues involved.

What we’re really doing in Vietnam is killing the cause of ‘wars of liberation.’ It’s a testing ground – like Germany in Spain. It’s an example to Central America and other guerrilla prone areas.

Bernard Fall²

Atrocities, seminal and responsive

As any newspaper reader knows, we live in an age not just of atrocities, but of atrocities exploited to achieve political ends. This fact tends to be both underreported and underregistered in our minds. The whole topic of atrocity is so distasteful that we prefer to avert our eyes. And we comfort ourselves with the consolation that what cannot be helped – uncontrollable irrationality – need not really concern us.

Unfortunately, my research into atrocities has persuaded me that this consolation is not only false; it is part of the problem to be addressed. The most massive atrocities of this century have not arisen primarily from the spontaneous behavior of humans out of control. They have been managed atrocities, outrages provoked and exploited by state powers within the so-called civilized world. Our personal psychological denial of this basic fact facilitates and reinforces the large-scale political denial that allows the phenomenon of managed atrocity to continue.

The atrocities I address in this chapter are those committed on a personal level: mass rapes, mass murders, and torture. I do not mean to imply that we should be less concerned about impersonal atrocities, such as the indiscriminate slaughter inflicted by saturation bombings or nuclear weapons (see Langenbacher’s discussion in this volume). The two phenomena are sometimes related, as when in Cambodia anti-Western killings on the ground followed years of American carpet-bombing from the air.

In the case of ground-level, hand-to-hand massacres, American media are quick to expose the personal atrocities of others – when they happen (not coincidentally) to be our enemies. We have heard much about the outrages committed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II; by Stalin; and by China through to the Cultural Revolution and Tienanmen Square. The massacres in Cambodia, with their pyramids of skulls, have been replaced in our media by the killing fields of East Africa, Bosnia, and Algeria. The massacres we do not hear about, at least at the time they are taking place, are those for which the United States itself is in large measure responsible. This ongoing, systematic suppression – from the Plains Wars of the nineteenth century to El Salvador in the 1980s – falsifies our understanding not just of our own history, but of all managed atrocities throughout the world.

For managed atrocities do not ‘just happen’; they are not an inevitable consequence of human frailty and hatefulness. The more they are studied, the more they emerge as part of a single coherent narrative. Most of the bloody massacres today can be seen as part of the ongoing legacy of colonialism: a single narrative, whether the colonialism we speak of is capitalist, socialist, or Islamic. In many parts of the world the seminal acts of atrocity were connected to Western expansion, such as that of the British into India, the French into Indochina, the Spanish into Latin America, the Belgians into Central Africa, the Dutch into Indonesia. Indeed, one can reasonably wonder if the exertion of power over alien populations has ever been achieved without the use of atrocities to intimidate the colonized into submission. Though many attempts have been made to link the commission of atrocities to the ethos of particular expansionist nations, my studies suggest rather that atrocities are a feature of expansionist power itself.

These planned, state-sponsored atrocities may be declining in number, but they tend to be the largest in scale. And they continue to be significant: they are the atrocities that help most to explain the rest. For example, the atrocities of recent times in North Africa, Yugoslavia, and the Near East have gone on since before the imperial conquests of these areas, and are rooted ultimately in religious persecutions of a millennium or more ago. Nevertheless, the French scorched-earth campaign of the 1830s in Algeria and the ensuing repression can be considered seminal atrocities – quantum escalations in brutality whose consequences are seen in the responsive atrocities there today. Likewise, the history of Indonesia – the principal focus of this chapter – is a succession of invasions and atrocities. Nevertheless, the carefully planned and executed massacre of 1965, in which perhaps a million people were killed, can be called a seminal escalation, and one whose consequences are still being suffered.

Let me at this point clarify what I mean by managed atrocities. Atrocities can be used politically in different ways. They can be threatened (this practice is widespread). They can actually be committed. Or the commission of atrocity can be managed and exploited psychologically to induce further terror among survivors. This last-mentioned process, which I call managed atrocity, is known and taught at special US military schools as part of psychological warfare, or ‘psywar.’ A fully managed atrocity is one in which the pretext for the exploited atrocity is developed by the managers of the atrocity itself. Not all psywar by any means is managed atrocity. But all managed atrocity is psywar, and psywar is responsible for the seminal managed atrocities of today.³

This chapter began as a study into the theory and practice of US psywar as applied to the Indonesian archipelago. Here the case for US responsibility is more controversial than what has been conceded in Latin America. The scale of atrocity is also immensely larger, leading in the case of East Timor to the death of perhaps one-third of the population. As I proceeded with my research, however, I saw more and more clearly the relevance of US actions in Indonesia to superficially different massacres in Chile (1973), Cambodia (after 1975), and Algeria (in the 1990s). And I have come to appreciate better the difference between Cambodia and Algeria (which I see as responsive to earlier managed atrocities), and Chile (which at the level of massacre was unprovoked, seminal, and thoroughly ‘ours’).

The reader should understand that this narrative, though inevitably nasty, is in the end optimistic. It is difficult to address responsive atrocities, such as that in Bosnia. However, seminal atrocities, precisely because they are planned, can more easily be controlled. For this reason, I consider it imperative to examine the residue of the US’s managed atrocities in the world today. I believe that terminating US management of atrocity is the best formula for ensuring that responsive atrocities diminish. For example, if public protest had deterred the US from its style of training and arming terrorists in Afghanistan after 1979, we might not have had the responsive atrocity of the World Trade Center by one of our own erstwhile terrorists in 1993, or the far more destructive attacks of 11 September 2001.

At least in theory, then, these processes are amenable to human control and amendment. We saw in the 1980s how the US-backed atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua could be limited or terminated by congressional action, especially after the long-denied massacre of hundreds of peasants at El Mozote in 1981 (by a US-trained battalion) was finally acknowledged. The delayed exposure of atrocities in East Timor led belatedly to US pressures on Indonesia, in the form of withholding military aid; and this in turn helped end the bloody Indonesian occupation of the territory.

The holding of a free and open referendum on self-determination for East Timor, and the subsequent ascension of East Timor to the ranks of the world’s independent states, represented a great victory for the people of that small and sorry nation. Hopefully it will also strengthen a more general proposition: that where state authority can only be sustained by the continuous use of terror, that authority is illegitimate, and the international community should contemplate intervention for the restoration of peace. The example of East Timor should encourage us to believe that managed atrocity in this world is unacceptable, and can and should be eliminated.

The two Indonesias and the two Americas

Before 1998, of all the Western nations, the one whose people knew least about the Indonesian army’s record of atrocities was probably the United States. This was no accident. Despite deceptive public protestations about its support for human rights, the United States was also the major power with the greatest responsibility for those conditions of ongoing psychological warfare, which is to say terror.

US press silence about Indonesian atrocities in East Timor gradually lifted with the events leading to the fall of Suharto in late May 1998. In that conflict, two Indonesian traditions were evident, locked in a dramatic struggle to determine that country’s future. One, representing one of the world’s most tolerant Muslim cultures, sought a nonviolent return towards the democratic civil society that prevailed in the early 1950s. The other apparently hoped to maintain the army’s ruthless domination of power, using violence and provocations reminiscent of Indonesia’s violent bloodbath of 1965.

Yet there were also, and continue to be, two ongoing US traditions caught up in this struggle. One is humanitarian, represented by the millions of dollars that the US government has poured into Indonesian human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations. The other tradition, less recognized and trumpeted, believes in and teaches the use of repressive violence, in Indonesia and other parts of the Third World.

The conflicting goals of these two traditions have led to recurring showdowns in the US Congress. In March 1998, Congress learned that, despite its express prohibition in 1992, the Pentagon had continued to supply training to the Indonesian army unit, Kopassus, that had been most involved in massacres and torture over the last thirty-five years. On 8 May 1998, the Pentagon headed off congressional anger by suspending its controversial aid to the Indonesian Army (ABRI). It was, however, clear that Washington would not terminate the US–ABRI connection, which it regarded as its best hope to influence affairs in Indonesia.

The Kopassus Red Berets (then known as RPKAD) played a key role in the 1965 bloodbath that brought Suharto to power. The tactics taught Kopassus recently by US Green Berets – in ‘Advanced Sniper Techniques,’ ‘Military Operations in Urban Terrain,’ ‘Psychological Operations,’ and ‘Close Quarters Combat’ – suggest that in the 1990s the Pentagon was still improving the ability of Kopassus to use violence against Indonesian civilians. There were at least 41 such exercises between 1992 and 1997, and 20 more scheduled for 1998.⁴

On repeated occasions in the last four decades, the votes of the congressional majority to limit military aid have been similarly thwarted. (Only in the case of aid to Vietnam in 1974 was the limit respected, but that was because the Saigon regime fell before the limit was reached.) Congressional bans on aid to Contra death squads in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s were secretly and illegally subverted by Oliver North in the Reagan White House, with Pentagon and CIA support, provoking the Iran–Contra confrontation.

Indonesia’s acute crisis in the late 1990s recalled in its details the political uncertainty at the end of the Sukarno era more than thirty years earlier. Political unrest was aggravated by economic disruption and inflation, so that protests mounted throughout Indonesia. Tensions built between the Suharto regime and the international community, above all the United States. They increased also between proponents of a nonviolent transition to a more democratic civil society, and provocations that in some cases appeared to be stage-managed by elements of the Indonesian army.

These same conditions in 1965 led to an army intervention and a change of leadership, accompanied by a military-backed massacre in which perhaps over a million civilians were murdered. That grim memory lends significance to another important similarity between 1965 and 1998 – one that has been generally ignored. Up until March 1998, as in 1965, though for different reasons, most members of the US Congress mistakenly believed that they had terminated US military training for Indonesian troops. In fact, in both periods, US training continued on the sly, and for obvious reasons of realpolitik.

In 1964–65, the US administration wished to maintain contact with the officer corps of the Indonesian army, which it regarded as a more secure ideological ally than the Indonesian head of state. On the other hand, it sought for the sake of appearances to distance itself publicly from the Indonesian army, as the latter prepared to eliminate its opponents by wholesale massacre. The first political motive was spelled out in a secret memo to President Johnson on 17 July 1964 (preceding the coup and massacre by one year):

Our aid to Indonesia … we are satisfied … is not helping Indonesia militarily. It is, however, permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia, which are interested in and capable of resisting Communist takeover. We think this is of vital importance to the entire Free World.⁵

A Defense Department official reiterated in 1998 that the training program was designed to ‘gain influence with successive generations of Indonesia officers.’⁶ Meanwhile, the 1965 bloodbath was accompanied by US instructions to its officials to keep their distance. This appearance of distance was maintained in the 1990s as well.

Covert US aid and training before 1965 mostly took the innocuoussounding form of ‘civic action.’ I have argued that in fact ‘civic action’ provided a cover, in Indonesia as in Vietnam, for psywar, and that psywar in turn had become a euphemism (used without translation by the key Red Beret organizers of the slaughter in Java) for techniques of terror, including massacre (Scott, 1985). I believe that through these links to the Indonesian army, US civilian and military advisors bear an important share of the responsibility for the 1965 killings.

In 1998 there was a risk that history might repeat itself. In February 1998, Admiral Joseph Prueher, US Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), stated in London that trouble lay ahead in Indonesia: ‘There is no economic and political stability. We’re trying to work in an economic, political and military way, to be as supportive as we can to try to bring this back in line.’⁷

A number of prominent US visitors to Indonesia, such as Defense Secretary William Cohen, made a point of visiting Army General Prabowo, a US-trained general who graduated head of his class at Fort Benning, Georgia (Nairn, 1998). Prabowo was quite simply a murderer, having personally given the commands to shoot twenty civilians in East Timor in 1989. He had also headed the elite Kopassus Red Beret command, which was chiefly responsible for killings and torture in East Timor. It was a 1991 massacre in East Timor that led Congress to ban training in 1992, yet Kopassus was one of the chief groups the Pentagon continued to train.

Kopassus is also the successor unit to the RPKAD Red Berets, who were chiefly responsible for organizing the slaughter in 1965. Early in 1998, journalists reported that Prabowo was helping to instigate anti-Chinese rioting of the kind which, in 1965, preceded a more general massacre. In May 1998, Prabowo was demoted and later fired, after an investigation showed that elements of Kopassus had been involved in the torture and ‘disappearances’ of civilians. In 2000, he became the first person to be denied entry to the United States under the provisions of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.⁸

The Pentagon certainly knew the implications of dealing with Prabowo and Kopassus, a unit notorious for terror, murder, rape, and torture. Yet when Congress banned training under the usual Pentagon program of International Military Education and Training (IMET), the Pentagon quietly kept on training Kopassus under a different program, that of Joint Combined Education and Training (J-CET).⁹ A subsequent New York Times editorial specified that the Indonesians were trained under J-CET in ‘riot-suppression,’ and noted that ‘it seems likely that the troops will be used to crush legitimate democratic protests.’¹⁰

The outcome of the Pentagon–Congress tussle over training troops is still a matter of concern, involving far more than the human rights violations in Indonesia. In Latin America and other parts of the world, the Pentagon has persisted, despite congressional concerns, in supplying training and aid to armies that are directly or indirectly involved in psywar massacres. Two recent examples are Colombia and Mexico, where officers accused of involvement in civilian massacres have been trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. Even the Inspector-General of the Pentagon has conceded that execution and torture have been taught there in the past.¹¹ In December 2000 the US Army closed the school, but reopened it a month later under another name.¹²

Developing psywar

The struggle to reduce US backing for state-supported violence will not be an easy one. For over two centuries, this nation has nourished conflicting attitudes towards atrocities. On the one hand is its humanitarian tradition, dating back to nineteenth-century concerns about the mistreatment of Indians and slaves. This has been the tradition most often given voice in Congress. On the other hand, as we shall see, is the tradition of explicitly defending the usefulness of atrocities, most recently in the service of counterinsurgency or ‘low-intensity conflict.’

The result is an official schizophrenia with respect to state-sponsored violence. The two Americas are not in dialogue with each other; each simply proceeds as if the other were not worth taking seriously. Such schizoid divergence can break into violence at home, as we saw recently in the era of the Vietnam War.

East Timor is one victim of US-assisted atrocities that only recently have been addressed. I shall quote at this point from an eyewitness account by a Catholic missionary of a search-and-destroy mission in 1981, three years after the worst killings had ended.

We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones … not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open…. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks…. All this was happening at a time when President Suharto of Indonesia had offered amnesty to all Timorese who surrendered…. The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: ‘We did the same thing in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked.’ That is, terror caused the people to submit. (Quoted in Barbedo de Magalhães, 1990: 52)¹³

Un-American as this conduct might seem, it is part of a counter-insurgency tradition that can be traced back to the US conquest of the Philippines, and before that to the wars against native Americans. Consider this observer’s account of the 1864 massacre of an unsuspecting Indian encampment at Sand Creek, Colorado:

They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.¹⁴

Like other atrocities, the Sand Creek massacre remains a focus of controversy a century and a half later, and has generated two parallel traditions of response, both American. An eastern-dominated Congress investigated and condemned the massacre as ‘unprovoked and unwarranted’ (as have most historians since), and voted substantial indemnities to relatives of the survivors.¹⁵ But many whites in the region agreed with Colonel John Chivington, the commander, that the slaughter was the only way to bring peace.¹⁶ To this day there are military historians who defend what happened at Sand Creek as an early example of pacification.¹⁷

Among those supporting atrocities against the Indian population were US Army Generals Sheridan and Sherman, whose explicit endorsement became a model for a later generation of commanders in the US–Philippine War in the 1900s (Churchill, 1997: 236–40; Miller, 1982: 94–5). We should therefore not be surprised to see much the same terrorist strategies exemplified in this latter conflict. For example, a contemporary news report stated that American soldiers killed ‘men, women, children … from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog.’

Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet riddled corpses.

This testimony is the more credible because the correspondent approved of these tactics: ‘It is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality.’¹⁸

This sending of corpses downstream occurred under the command of General J. Franklin Bell, another commander who, like Colonel Chivington, has been remembered differently by civilian and military historians. Recently one of the latter, John Morgan Gates, has singled out General Bell for his ‘excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification’; and noted the consensus of ‘both civil and military officials’ in the Philippines that Bell’s campaign in Batangas ‘represented pacification in its most perfected form’ (Gates, 1973: 258, 288).

Because of this, Gates claims, General Pershing’s campaign against the Moros in 1908 greatly resembled Bell’s, just as ‘the campaign against the HUK movement in the Philippines following World War II greatly resembled the American campaign of almost fifty years earlier…. The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one’ (Gates, 1973: 288, 291). Thus, the motif of corpses dropped in rivers staged a comeback during the US-coordinated counterterrorism campaign in the Philippines in the 1950s:

The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy…. almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano’s Nenita Unit.¹⁹

Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency, and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam.²⁰

Strikingly similar atrocities have been rife in other countries where the United States has played a decisive role in training and supplying troops. The following summarizes a survivor’s account of a Guatemalan army raid on a village in Quiché:

The government troops came in, rounded up the population, and put them in the town building. They took all the men out and decapitated them. Then they raped and killed the women. Then they took the children and killed them by bashing their heads with rocks. (quoted in Peck, 1987: 329)

In nearby El Salvador, a sweep by the US-trained Atlacátl battalion was followed by the murder, one by one, of twenty-four women and children. ‘Counterterror-style, the mutilated corpses were left behind as a warning to leftist guerrillas’ (Valentine, 1990: 423–4). Likewise, a 1997 raid by uniformed paramilitaries in the Colombian village of Mapirapán resulted in dozens of decapitated corpses being thrown in a nearby river.²¹ A recent RAND Corporation study confirms that the paramilitaries there ‘routinely execute alleged guerrilla sympathizers to instill fear and compel support among the local population’ (Rabasa and Chalk, n.d.: 56). Such horrors are intentional, meant to terrorize the rest of the population into submission.

US psywar, Indonesia, and East Timor

There is no question that the US provided military materiel and training for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as well as a virtual green light. What has been long denied in America is the US role in preparing for a massacre by the Indonesian army of its own people in 1965. (It is symptomatic of this psychological denial that my own article on this subject has been published four times in Indonesia as well as in five other countries, but never in the United States.)

The key to US responsibility in 1965, as today, lay in special training for a key political paracommando battalion, the Red Berets. Later renamed Kopassus, this battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its then-chief, Sarwo Edhie, appears to have been a CIA agent or contact.²² It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word ‘psywar.’ We learn from an official Indonesian account of the campaign to crush the Indonesian Communists (‘the G30S/PKI’) that Sarwo Edhie’s meeting to plan this campaign in Surakarta on 26 October 1965 was organized according to the following principle (with the emphasized words not in Bahasa Indonesia but in English):

The G30S/PKI should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psywar, distribution of pamphlets and the spreading of information to achieve the goal of slowing down [G30S/PKI] activities.²³

What followed this meeting is well known from other sources: not leaflet distribution, but the training of youths as death squads for civilian killings (Crouch, 1978: 151).

The psywar character of the 1965 massacres in Indonesia can be plainly seen in one of the first eyewitness accounts of the slaughter. The corpses choking the rivers of East Java were not just dumped there to dispose of them. They had been rigged to float, and thus to terrorize those living downstream:

Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn’t sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew. (Rochijat, 1985: 43–4)

This deliberate impaling on stakes, to ensure that the psychological message reached the maximum number of villages, hardly fits one scholar’s description of it as ‘unplanned brutality,’ ‘compounded by inexpert techniques and a desire to make the bodies unrecognizable’ (Cribb, 1990: 15, 30). Rather, it seems to exemplify the practice of corpse mutilation and display used earlier in the Philippines, and codified in the 1962 US psywar handbook, Counterguerrilla Operations (‘Few weapons have quite the same effect on guerrilla morale’).²⁴

The dispatching of Indonesian corpses downstream was supplemented by the display of decapitated heads and body parts, including male genitals, on highroads and in public places (Cribb, 1990: 140, 172, 175). This was earlier the practice of CT (Counter-Terror) teams in Vietnam, also recruited by the military from civilians. The teams would leave a Viet Cong head on a pole as they left a village, or a mutilated body, or ears nailed to houses (‘The idea was that fear was a good weapon’).²⁵ The CIA advisor who introduced this counter-terror to South Vietnam, Ralph Johnson, ‘formulated his theory in the Philippines in the mid-1950s and as a police advisor in Indonesia in 1957 and 1958, prior to the failed Sukarno [sic!] coup.’²⁶

Corpses and human heads were also displayed in East Timor after the Indonesian invasion of 1975, as part of a campaign of terror supported and supplied by the United States (see, e.g., Taylor, 1991: 102). But the core of the Indonesian pacification program in East Timor was the same as the core of General Bell’s in Batangas: the forced resettlement of the population in villages which could be called concentration camps. (Forced relocation had, of course, earlier been the core of US pacification efforts against native Americans in the American West.)

For most Timorese, the focus of their lives became the strategic camps into which they were herded prior to being transported to new ‘resettlement villages’ in sites created away from their original homes…. As Mgr Costa Lopes, Apostolic Administrator of Dili until his dismissal in May 1983, noted: … ‘the problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside…. This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food.’ … An ICRC delegate, surveying the Hatolia camp where 80 per cent of its 8000 inhabitants were suffering from malnutrition, was reported as concluding that it was ‘as bad as Biafra and potentially as serious as Kampuchea,’ whilst the head of Catholic Relief Services commented that the problem was ‘greater than anything I have seen in fourteen years of relief work in Asia.’ (Taylor, 1991: 92, 93, 97)

Here is how General Bell’s ‘well-conceived’ reconcentration plan was characterized by Professor Gates (writing in 1973, in the brief interval between the failure of such techniques in Vietnam and their introduction in East Timor):

A basic feature of General Bell’s pacification policy was his plan for isolating the guerrillas from those supporting them…. He ordered each garrison commander to establish a plainly marked area. Unless they [the Filipinos] moved into them by December 25 their property would become liable to confiscation or destruction. Within the zones of protection, the Americans encouraged the Filipinos to erect new homes…. Schools were also provided, and all of the benevolent and humane actions that had characterized American operations in the Philippines were evident in the zones of reconcentration…. In the Philippines … the [US governing] commission recognized the success of the army’s approach to pacification, and it passed a reconcentration act in 1903, modeled on General Bell’s techniques. (Gates, 1973: viii, 259–60, 288)

Like Professor Miller’s book, Professor Gates’s is clearly written as part of America’s debate over Vietnam, where relocation was at the heart of the controversial US pacification program. The two books together illustrate an important division in American consciousness, antedating the Civil War. In response to books like those of Chomsky and Miller, Gates announced in his preface that he would concentrate ‘on activities far removed from the already well-publicized and exaggerated atrocities of the Philippine campaign’ (Gates, 1973: viii). Thus he omits aspects of Bell’s ‘perfected’ campaign, which at the time caught the attention of US anti-imperialists, who objected in Congress:

When an American was ‘murdered,’ they were instructed to ‘by lot select a P.O.W. – preferably one from the village in which the assassination took place – and execute him.’… The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps…. Everything outside of the camps was systematically destroyed….Bell’s main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes…. Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes. He compared such tactics to those of General Sherman in Georgia during the War Between the States and theorized that once the better elements were miserable enough they would persuade the others to stop fighting. (Miller, 1982: 207–8)

The same mix of terror, indiscriminate reprisals, and forced relocation shaped the American experiments in psychological warfare and counter-insurgency in Vietnam, culminating in Operation Phoenix. These were imitated in turn by Indonesia in East Timor, and today by paramilitaries in Colombia. Meanwhile, the atrocity business – given more polite titles, such as ‘counterinsurgency’ or ‘low-intensity conflict’ – remains a staple and a rationale for hard-headed Pentagon policymakers.

The culture of low-intensity conflict has spawned its own population of consultants, who defend death squads publicly in the same way that military historians defend Chivington and Gates. Thus, in 1986 death squads were cited as ‘an extremely effective tool’ by Neil Livingstone, who at the time was a counterterrorism consultant to Oliver North and the Reagan administration.²⁷ Four years later Michael Radu, a researcher at a formerly CIA-funded think-tank, justified the Salvadorean death squads for doing what they ‘had to do,’ and faulted the attempts of Congress to condition aid on respect for ‘human rights’ (his quotation marks) as a ‘total misunderstanding of the situation’ (Radu and Tismaneanu, 1990: 69–70). Radu also claimed that it was ‘untenable’ to treat the Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero as a spiritual leader (17), presumably meaning that a death squad was quite right to murder him in 1980. Turning to a more timely topic, Radu attacked ‘the absurd and artificial notion’ in Latin America of university autonomy (15). This was shortly after the US-trained Atlacátl battalion had demonstrated its agreement with the thesis, in 1989, by murdering six Jesuit priests at San Salvador’s principal university.

Congress responded to the Jesuit killings by attempting to terminate aid to the Salvadorean army, but the attempt was vetoed by President Bush in 1991 (Sharpe, 1991). Another split occurred at this time over aid to the Guatemalan army, after a colonel (who was also a CIA agent) was implicated in the murder of an American innkeeper, Michael DeVine. Citing this murder, the State Department ‘cut off about $3 million a year in military aid to Guatemala.’ But the CIA secretly continued ‘liaison’ support for Guatemala’s military intelligence programs (which involved both murder and torture) to the tune of ‘about $5 million to $7 million a year.’²⁸

The Guatemala example showed the military-CIA mentality at odds not just with Congress, but with the civilian administration. Even presidential policies are regularly subverted by the military. The history of the Vietnam War was one of repeated violations of presidential guidelines by US armed forces (see Scott, 1972: esp. 79–107). The problem has continued with US military aid, much of it also under JCET, to Colombia.²⁹

Conclusion

For generations, the United States has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind with respect to atrocities and human rights: that of most of the public, and that of the majority of counterinsurgency specialists and historians. There is nothing in history to suggest that the views of atrocity’s proponents are destined to prevail. On the contrary, Congress should recognize that atrocities have been and continue to be within its power to control, at least in theory.

Vietnam provides an example of this. Congress contributed, however belatedly, to the termination of that fatal experiment. Again, in the 1980s, the US-backed atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua were scaled back by congressional action, especially after the Atlacátl battalion’s long-denied 1981 massacre at El Mozote was finally acknowledged.

Most recently, the atrocities in East Timor were finally acknowledged by the US State Department and the New York Times, who had both worked twenty years earlier to cover up Indonesia’s genocidal campaign in the territory. The breakthrough was soon followed by East Timor’s belated independence. This should serve as a reminder to cynics and faint-hearts that America is capable of rising above the genocidal acts of its defenders and allies.

What remains to be seen is whether Congress, which rebuked Colonel Chivington in 1864 and exposed General Bell in 1901, can become an agent to ensure that US-trained troops act to prevent massacres and other atrocities, instead of (as at present) facilitating them. This will only happen if the humanitarian forces in America rouse themselves yet again in opposition. We must bring the full force of publicity to bear on atrocities that are tolerated only because of their relative obscurity.

Much progress has been made since 1965, when few people outside Indonesia had any means of knowing what transpired there. Today, international organizations closely monitor human rights violations around the world, and their work is supported by local monitors, who are sometimes killed for their vigilance. A global consciousness is emerging that increasingly demands the prosecution and punishment of major human rights violators at the international level. In general, I applaud these developments, including the establishment of international tribunals for accused war criminals. But I think we must proceed very carefully down this path.

To begin with, the prosecution of human rights crimes should not become a pretext for committing them. Many people, including this author, were appalled by the way NATO, in the name of defending human rights, inflicted major civilian casualties on the nation of Yugoslavia (see MacDonald’s chapter in this volume). We have not yet purged ourselves of the crusade mentality that killed in the name of Christianity; then in the name of enlightenment, progress, and development; and most recently in the name of human rights.

I believe that, ultimately, the best guardians of the new humanitarian consciousness are ordinary people, rather than any state apparatus, whether national or international. Just as past atrocities have endured through denial, so today the publicizing of atrocities and those who commit them is the most reliable antidote to their perpetuation. The consolidation of this new consciousness is a task too precious to be turned over to traditional state mechanisms of prosecution and punishment.

References

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