The Butcher of Buenos Aires

Jorge Rafaél Videla has died. Mr Videla led a military regime in Argentina from the 1976 coup until he handed over power to one of his army colleagues in 1981. He presided over a bloodbath that saw up to 30,000 people murdered in an episode known as the Dirty War.

Calling something a war, even a "dirty" war implies that it is a struggle with at least two sides. In Argentina that would be a bit misleading. Before Videla and his gang took over Argentina, the country was indeed in a state of near civil war. Leftist guerrillas had embarked on an armed revolutionary struggle and the state security apparatus responded in kind; levels of violence escalated alarmingly. Then in 1976 Videla, the army's commander in chief, overthrew the civilian government of President Isabél Peron and gave his uniformed pals a completely free hand to crush the insurgents.

"As many people as is necessary will die in Argentina to protect the hemisphere from the international communist conspiracy", Mr Videla had said in 1975. Once in power, he proved as good as his word. The armed forces instituted a reign of terror against the actual guerrillas, but they also targeted anyone who might be assisting them or who had dangerous left wing ideas or who just looked funny. The regime moved beyond combating the rebels (who were soon crushed) to trying to exterminate Argentina's left.

To make it harder for friends and relatives of the murdered to bring troubling court cases against the regime, Videla's cronies made their victims disappear. One trick was to drug captives and then throw them out of airplanes into the south Atlantic. On the off-chance that any of the corpses were washed ashore, the drugged victims were stripped naked to remove anything that might identify them.

Videla and his accomplices were amnestied during Argentina's transition to democracy, but gradually the law caught up with him. In 1998 he was forced to stand trial for the "appropriation of minors" - the kidnapping of the children of the disappeared for illegal adoption by army officers and others sympathetic to the military regime. Then in 2007 the general Dirty War amnesty was overthrown by the courts; in 2010 he received a life sentence for the torture and murder of 31 victims of the military regime. He died in prison.

It is easy to focus on sinister figures like Videla and reduce their victims to a faceless mass - with 30,000 people killed by Videla, it can be hard to remember that they all had names, friends, a life, ambitions and dreams that were brutally cut short. El Proyecto Desaparecidos attempts to humanise this victims, posting photographs and brief biographies of the killed.

One of the more heartbreaking parts of El Proyecto Desaparecidos' website is the Wall of Memory - face after face of those killed by Argentina's army, with links to a summary of their life and what is known of their fate.

Some random victims:

Silvia de Raffaelli de Parejo - 28 years old when she was abducted from her home and never seen again.

Alicia Eguren de Cooke - a writer, poet and political activist who was 52 years old when she was thrown from a helicopter into the River Plate.

Juan Carlos Galván - a 24 years old artist who taken from his widowed mother's home and never seen again.

Oscar Luis Hodola & Sirena Acuña - 28 and 26 when they were taken away from their son.


More:

Jorge Rafaél Videla obituary (Guardian)

Argentina ex-military leader Jorge Rafael Videla dies (BBC)

Painful search for Argentina's disappeared (BBC)

Argentina marks 'Night of the Pencils' (BBC) An account of the abduction, torture and murder of left wing secondary school students.

Project Disappeared (in English)

El Proyecto Desaparecidos (in Spanish)

The Wall of Memory

Syria

In 2011, when the civil war there was only starting, I posted a three-part history of Syria. It may still be of interest to those curious as to how that country has reached its current sorry state.

Part 1 - Before the Assads
Part 2 - The Hafez al-Assad years
Part 3 - Bashir al-Assad

By their friends shall ye know them?

I hope to write at some length about Hugo Chavez, but may never get round to it. In the meantime, here is a photograph of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran standing beside his coffin.

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What is going on in Mali?

Mali is a country in Africa. It used not to make the news much. If people heard anything about it, it was usually to do with the surprising number of Malian musicians who have acquired some popularity in the western world - Tinariwen, Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabaté and so on. The country is also known to some as home of the Dogon people, who have strange folk practices some suggest indicate that they have had past contact with extra terrestrial civilisations. And it also has the town of Timbuktu, sometimes seen as the epitome of places that are far away from anywhere (people who live in Timbuktu probably do not see things like this).

Mali is also very poor but for a while anyway had a reputation as being fairly functional. It was something of a poster child for the idea that representative democracy can work in countries that are very poor and also predominantly Muslim. And the combination of its interesting music and desert location (partly combined in the hip Festival In The Desert) meant that it attracted a fair amount of tourism.

But, sadly, things have gone very wrong for Mali. In the north of the country, largely inhabited by the Touareg people, a separatist revolt sprung into being. Then the separatists were joined by a bunch of Muslim extremists allegedly sympathetic to al-Qaeda. The Islamists are led by one Iyad ag-Ghaly, a shady customer who in the past staged several Touareg particularist revolts in the north of Mali (revolts that typically ended with Mr ag-Ghaly being made a member of Mali's government). He seems now to have switched effortlessly from Touareg separatism to Islamic extremism.

The Islamists largely swallowed up their Touareg separatist allies, establishing a zone in the north where they could apply their particular no-fun variety of Islam. Back in Bamako, Mali's capital, members of the Malian army staged a coup. The coup was ostensibly a protest against the government's weak response to the northern revolt, but its main effect was to paralyse the Malian state and lead to the rebels further expanding their area of control.

These days military regimes are very much out of fashion and foreign intervention (by Mali's neighbours) was threatened to crush the putschists in the capital. That was averted when they agreed to hand over power to an interim president, pending elections, but that still left the rebels in control of the north.

The rebels then proceeded to display their badass no-fun credentials by attacking and destroying the shrines and graves of various Muslim saints in their zone of control. Islamists destroying Muslim shrines might seem strange to western readers, but the rebels seem to be inspired by the kind of austere Islam popular in Saudi Arabia, where shrines and saints are seen as unacceptably pagan and contrary to "real Islam". One might see them as Muslim equivalents of those Calvinists in 16th century Europe who went around smashing up stained glass windows and Catholic religious iconography.

This might have chugged along as one of those conflicts you read about in faraway countries were it not for the fear some people have that if the rebels were to take over Mali they would turn the country into a giant al-Qaeda training camp. Or maybe even if they did not take over the whole country, they would turn the huge zone they control into an al-Qaeda camp larger than metropolitan France. There was also the fear that the rebels might spread Islamic extremism to Mali's neighbours. None of this seemed like an appealing prospect. Mali's west African neighbours started gearing up for intervention at some point in the future, as Mali's own military did not seem to be up to the job of crushing the rebels. The French government also gave the impression that it might be interesting in helping to defeat the rebels, albeit also at some indeterminate point in the future.

That was the situation just a week or two back, but now suddenly France is at war in Mali. Its air force is attacking the rebels in the north of the country and French troops have started arriving in Bamako. This sudden intervention seems to have been triggered by a new rebel advance that made it look like they were about to overrun the south of the country. The French intervention looks like it was almost a panicked response to stop that happening.

The situation now is a bit unclear. Although French aeroplanes have been pounding the rebels, they still managed to capture the town of Diabaly, leaving them 250 miles from the Malian capital. That makes it look like they could just possibly overrun the capital before enough French troops arrive to stop them. That is probably unlikely - the combination of air power and the superior training and equipment of French ground troops will block the rebels, but it does leave France stuck in what could be an ongoing conflict with no obvious end in sight.

More:

Hollande’s War Aims Remain Unclear (Irish Times)

Malian rebels overrun garrison town and advance towards capital (Guardian)

Mali Crisis: Who’s Who (BBC)

Iyad Ag Ghaly - Mali's Islamist leader (BBC)

Strange developments in North Korea

The BBC news website has a fascinating piece on North Korea by the German conductor Alexander Liebreich. Mr Liebreich has made a number of cultural trips to North Korea over the years. On his most recent trip, with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, he was astonished by the changes he observed in Pyongyang. There seemed a new openness in the air, with the members of his orchestra being able to walk the streets of the city without the company of official minders. Furthermore, the locals seemed far more relaxed in the presence of foreigners (when previously association with anyone from outside the DPRK would excite the suspicions of the authorities). And the North Koreans he interacted with seemed far less inclined to quote the wise words of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-Il than previously, with current leader Kim Jung-un being conspicuous by his absence. Mr Liebreich also noticed a considerable presence of Chinese tourists and a general smartening up of Pyongyang.

Who knows what these changes signify. Maybe they are merely superficial, but maybe the wind of change is starting to blow through what has long been one of the world's most isolated countries.

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