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If anything, Kissinger was but a faithful representative of the criminal U.S. elites whom he served all his life—and who guaranteed him a long life of fame, wealth, and luxury.
Nothing notable distinguished the birth of Heinz Alfred Kissinger on 27 May 1923 to a German Jewish family in Furth, a city in Bavaria, who died on Wednesday at the age of 100.
In 1938, when he was 15, he and his family fled Nazi Germany to New York before Kristallnacht. When the adolescent Heinz became Henry in the US, while retaining his heavy German accent, no one could have predicted that he would order the murder of hundreds of thousands of people as an adult, and become a millionaire as a result.
In 1943, at the age of 20, Kissinger was drafted by the US Army. He became naturalised as a US citizen the same year. He served in the army intelligence division on account of his German fluency and was put in charge of a team in US-occupied Germany in charge of de-Nazification.
After the war, Kissinger attended Harvard, graduating with a BA in political science in 1950 and a PhD in 1954. While still at school in 1952, he worked for the US government’s Psychological Strategy Board, formed by the White House in 1951 to propagandise against communism in support of the US and “democracy”. This was during the US invasion of Korea when US forces killed millions of people.
As US Air Force commander Major-General Emmett O’Donnell put it at a Senate hearing at the time: “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name… there were no more targets in Korea [to bomb].” US psychological warfare still refers to US genocidal crimes in the Korean peninsula as the “Korean War”.
Kissinger insisted that the legitimacy of the international order only required the agreement of the great powers. As for morality, he argued that it was irrelevant
At the Harvard International Seminar, which he helped found as a summer programme that convened young future leaders from around the world, Kissinger volunteered to spy on attendees for the FBI and on his Harvard colleagues.
In his academic work, Kissinger insisted that the legitimacy of the international order only required the agreement of the great powers. As for morality, he argued that it was irrelevant. As Thomas Meaney explains in the New Yorker, for Kissinger, “moral indeterminacy was a condition of human freedom”.
In 1952, Kissinger ran an article in the journal Confluence, which he edited, by Ernst von Salomon, a convicted murderer for his participation in the assassination of the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. German Jewish emigre contributors to the journal, including Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr, were not pleased. Kissinger joked with a friend that the article was considered “a symptom of my totalitarian and even Nazi sympathies”.
He was also study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1955-56, and published his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957, arguing that the US should use tactical nuclear weapons on a regular basis in war to ensure victory. Critics would later parody him as “Dr Henry Killinger”, as the cartoon show Venture Bros did in the 2000s.
His right-wing authorised biographer, Niall Ferguson, states that the argument of Kissinger’s book “might very easily be presented as evidence” that he was “the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove”. Kissinger finally received tenure at Harvard with the support of the dean, McGeorge Bundy, despite faculty objections that his book on nuclear weapons was not scholarly.
He did not limit himself to academe, but became a consultant to politicians and presidential candidates, such as Nelson Rockefeller. When Bundy became President John F Kennedy’s national security adviser in 1961, Kissinger joined him as an adviser, a position he would retain under Lyndon Johnson.
In light of Kissinger’s sympathy for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, he was invited to visit Israel in 1962, and again in 1965, most likely by Israel’s architect of the country’s nuclear program, Shimon Peres.
Recent documents reveal that in his report to the US embassy in Tel Aviv in 1965 based on meetings with Israeli officials and scientists, he already believed that Israel was developing nuclear weapons, a program he looked upon with “great understanding, if not sympathy”. This would lead him in 1969, as Nixon’s national security advisor, to broker the understanding of the Nixon administration for Israel’s already developed nuclear weapons program.
Even though Kissinger believed in the futility of the US war in Vietnam, he conspired with Richard Nixon’s electoral campaign in 1968 by leaking information to it from the Paris Peace Talks to prolong the war, lest the Democrats win the elections. Once Nixon was elected, Kissinger came on board as national security adviser in January 1969, a position he occupied until 1975.
Nixon referred to him as “Jew boy”, but it seems right-wing antisemitism never bothered him, as he had been a lifelong conservative Republican. He also served as secretary of state from September 1973 until January 1977.
Determined to defeat the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front and North Vietnam, Kissinger decided to intensify the secret tactical bombing of Cambodia, which had started under Johnson in 1965, into a ruthless campaign of carpet bombing that continued until 1973.
In early March 1969, Kissinger told Nixon: “Hit them!” By 1973, between 150,000 and half a million Cambodians were killed. Kissinger callously described the excessive bombing by saying: “We would rather err on the side of doing too much.”
Kissinger personally supervised the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes from one area to the other. He reportedly loved playing “bombardier”. When he and Nixon started to bomb North Vietnam again, Kissinger was most excited at the “size of the bomb craters”. In keeping with his support for the use of nuclear weapons, he devised a plan to nuke North Vietnam in 1969 as part of an operation called Duck Hook.
While some in his social circles referred to him as “cuddly Kissinger” and he was described in women’s magazines as “always friendly, particularly with women”, his sweet-tongued persona seemed nowhere in sight when he spoke of those women he hated, such as former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whom he called a “bitch” and a "witch", while “the Indians” were “bastards”.
Indeed, Christopher Hitchens asserted, regarding Kissinger’s popularity among the elite, that “Kissinger is not invited and feted because of his exquisite manners or his mordant wit (his manners are in any case rather gross, and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts)”, but rather because he exuded raw power. Kissinger was less like Dr Strangelove and more like the fictional character Dr Evil in the Austin Powers films, though with much less charm.
In 1971, Kissinger backed former Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s genocidal campaign against East Pakistan (Bangladesh), and in 1975, he endorsed the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s genocidal war on the people of East Timor, in which a third of the population was killed. Suharto had come to power through a US-supported coup in 1965 that unleashed massacres against up to one million Indonesians as suspected communists. As for the 200,000 dead in East Timor, Kissinger was unmoved: “I think we’ve heard enough about Timor.”
When, in 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was popularly elected as president of Chile, Kissinger commented: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He pushed Nixon to organise a violent coup against Allende, subjecting the country to fascist rule for the next decade and a half, with thousands killed by the US-supported military junta.
All the imperial murderous policies that Kissinger pursued did not deviate from US foreign policy before or after him
It was also Kissinger who advocated the “tar baby” option of strengthening US ties with the white supremacist settler-colonies in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.
As for the Middle East, aside from strengthening ties with the Zionist settler-colony of Israel, which became a major US ally during the Nixon and Ford years, Kissinger armed Israel to the teeth during the 1973 war in order “to prevent an Arab victory”. His emergency military help to Israel during the war reversed the early victories of the Egyptian and Syrian armies and ensured that Israel won the war. He also ensured that no US relations could be established with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In September 1975, Kissinger signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Israelis committing the US not to recognise or negotiate with the PLO unless it recognised Israel’s “right to exist” as a racist, Jewish-supremacist state. Former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat would finally do so in 1988 in Geneva, and again in 1993 with the signing of Oslo.
In effect, Kissinger ensured the perpetuation of Israeli colonisation of Palestinian lands for decades to come. He was the architect of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s surrender to Israel and selling out of Palestinian rights at Camp David, and designed the so-called American-sponsored “peace process”, which has defined US policy towards Palestinians and Israel and has since brought about the ongoing calamities in much of the Arab world.
Amid all of Kissinger’s war-mongering around the world, helping fascist dictators come to power and supporting white supremacy in settler-colonies in southern Africa and Palestine, he is also credited with pursuing detente with the Soviet Union and opening diplomatic relations with China. He even received the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating “peace” with North Vietnam amid his savage bombing of Cambodia.
Kissinger would go on to advise subsequent US presidents and support their wars, including Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. In 1982, he established his own consultancy firm, Kissinger Associates, with a highly secretive client list, to advise US and European imperial corporations and banks, Third World western-supported dictators, and white supremacist settler-colonies. His last reported net worth was around $50m.
Kissinger’s horrifying record, however, has endeared him to many US liberal politicians. The Clintons loved him dearly and attended his birthday parties. Hillary Clinton could not stop praising him for the advice he had given her when she served as secretary of state, insisting that “Kissinger is a friend”.
Former President Barack Obama cited Kissinger as supporting his own views on Iran during the 2008 presidential campaign, but Kissinger rebuffed him. In 2010, Obama’s administration used Kissinger’s murderous policies in Cambodia to justify Obama’s own murderous drone killings of American citizens and non-Americans around the world.
In 2016, Obama’s defence secretary gave the accused war criminal an award “honouring Dr Henry A Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service.” In the last few years, he has been invited by several liberal US universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and New York University, which marked the 45th anniversary of his receiving the Nobel prize. It was mostly socialists who protested him.
In April 2018, Kissinger was a guest at Trump’s first state dinner at the White House, alongside Trump’s billionaire friends. He would even weigh in on the war in Ukraine, about which he changed his mind several times.
In his book about Kissinger, Hitchens charged him with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and offences “against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. Hitchens, however, did not seem to realise that Kissinger was no maverick, and each of those crimes should be levelled against the US government more generally.
Indeed, all the imperial murderous policies that Kissinger pursued did not deviate from US foreign policy before or after him. It is that which accounted for his popularity among the American business and intellectual elite, liberals and conservatives alike.
As Meaney put it, blaming one man for the country’s sins serves everyone: “Kissinger’s status as a world-historic figure is assured, and his critics can regard his foreign policy as the exception rather than the rule.”Kissinger’s amoral, genocidal crimes are no more monstrous than the crimes of the US since its establishment. If anything, Kissinger was but a faithful representative of the criminal US elites whom he served all his life—and who guaranteed him a long life of fame, wealth and luxury.
Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on 29 November 2023, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?
Henry Alfred Kissinger turned 100 on May 27 of this year. Once a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, for many decades an adviser to presidents, and an avatar of American realpolitik, he’s managed to reach the century mark while still evidently retaining all his marbles. That those marbles remain hard and cold is no surprise.
A couple of months after that 100th birthday, he traveled to China, as he had first done secretly in 1971 when he was still President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. There—in contrast to the tepid reception recently given to U.S. officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry—Kissinger was welcomed with full honors by Chinese President Xi Jinping and other dignitaries.
“That ‘lovefest,’” as Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy wrote at Politico, “served the interests of both parties.” For China, it was a signal that the United States would be better off pursuing the warm-embrace policy initiated so long ago by Nixon at Kissinger’s behest, rather than the cold shoulder more recent administrations have offered. For Kissinger, as Drezner put it, “the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office: maintain his relevancy and influence.”
It’s fair to say that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam.
Even as a centenarian, his “relevancy” remains intact, and his influence, I’d argue, as malevolent as ever.
It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.
This was certainly the case for Richard Nixon who, after resigning in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1974, worked hard for decades to once again be seen as a wise man of international relations. He published his memoirs (for a cool $2 million), while raking in another $600,000 for interviews with David Frost (during which he infamously said that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”). His diligence was rewarded in 1986 with a Newsweek cover story headlined, “He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.”
Of course, for the mainstream media (and the House of Representatives debating his possible impeachment in 1974), Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors involved just the infamous Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. Among members of the House, only 12, led by the Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, had the courage to suggest that Nixon be charged with the crime that led directly to the death of an estimated 150,000 civilians: the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war.
Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation.
More recently, we’ve seen the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, under whose administration the United States committed repeated war crimes. Those included the launching of an illegal war against Iraq under the pretext of eliminating that country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, attempting to legalize torture and unlawful detentions, and causing the death of almost half a million civilians. No matter. All it took for the mainstream media to welcome him back into the fold of “responsible” Republicans was to spend some years painting portraits of American military veterans and taking an oblique swipe or two at then-President Donald Trump.
Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice—formal or otherwise—to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his 100th birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.
His crimes did come up in the mainstream, only to be dismissed as evidence of his career’s “broad scope.” CNN ran a piece by David Andelman, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and one-time student of Kissinger’s at Harvard. He described watching “in wonder” as demonstrators gathered outside New York City’s 92nd Street YMCA to protest a 2011 talk by the great man himself. How, he asked himself, could they refer to Kissinger as a “renowned war criminal”? A few years later, Andelman added, he found himself wondering again, as a similar set of protesters at the same venue decried Kissinger’s “history concerning Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Angola, and elsewhere.”
The “events they were protesting were decades in the past,” he observed, having happened at a time when most of the protestors “were only barely alive.” In effect, like so many others who seek to exonerate old war criminals, Andelman was implying that the crimes of the past hold no meaning, except perhaps in testifying “to the broad scope of people, places, and events that [Kissinger] has influenced in the course of a remarkable career.” (“Influenced” serves here as a remarkable euphemism for “devastated” or simply “killed.”)
The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger.
Fortunately, other institutions have not been so deferential. In preparation for Kissinger’s 100th, the National Security Archive, a center of investigative journalism, assembled a dossier of some of its most important holdings on his legacy. They provide some insight into the places named by those protestors.
If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or—in the Cold War era—enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence—whether political or economic—or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated—covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.
Richard Nixon’s presidency was, of course, the period of Kissinger’s greatest influence. Between 1969 and 1974, Kissinger served as the architect of U.S. actions in key locales globally. Here are just a few of them:
Papua, East Timor, and Indonesia: In 1969, in an effort to keep Indonesia fully in the American Cold War camp, Kissinger put his imprimatur on a fake plebiscite in Papua, which had been seeking independence from Indonesia. He chose to be there in person during an “election” in which Indonesia counted only the ballots of 1,100 hand-picked “representatives” of the Papuan population. Unsurprisingly, they voted unanimously to remain part of Indonesia.
Why did the United States care about the fate of half of a then strategically unimportant island in the South China Sea? Because holding onto the loyalty of Indonesia’s autocratic anticommunist ruler Suharto was considered crucial to Washington’s Cold War foreign policy in Asia. Suharto himself had come to power on a wave of mass extermination, during which between 500,000 and 1.2 million supposed communists and their “sympathizers” were slaughtered.
In 1975, Kissinger also greenlighted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, during which hundreds of thousands died. In contravention of U.S. law, President Gerald Ford’s administration (in which Kissinger continued to serve as national security adviser and secretary of state after Nixon’s resignation) provided the Indonesian military with weapons and training. Kissinger waved off any legal concerns with a favorite aphorism: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning.
Southeast Asia: Beginning in 1969, Kissinger was also the architect of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an attempt to interdict the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to the revolutionary Viet Cong in South Vietnam. He believed it would force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. In this, the great statesman was sadly mistaken. It’s fair to say, in fact, that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam, from the carpet bombing of North Vietnam to the widespread use of napalm and the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which led to the torturing or killing of more than 20,000 people.
The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger. He was acting as a conduit to North Vietnam for the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, which was working on a peace deal it hoped to announce before the 1968 presidential election. Believing Republican candidate Richard Nixon would be more likely to advance his version of U.S. strategic interests in Vietnam than Democratic candidate and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Kissinger passed information about those negotiations with the North Vietnamese on to the Nixon campaign. Although Nixon had no clout in Hanoi, he had a channel to U.S. ally and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and convinced him to pull out of the peace talks shortly before the election. Thanks to Kissinger, the war would follow its cruel course for another seven years of death and destruction.
Pakistan and Bangladesh: In 1971, in a famous “tilt” towards Pakistan, Kissinger gave tacit support to that country’s military dictator General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. In response to a surprise victory by an opposition party in Pakistan’s first democratic election, Yahya then loosed his military on the people of East Pakistan, that party’s geographical base. Three million people died in the ensuing genocidal conflict that eventually led to the creation of the state of Bangladesh. In addition, as many as 10 million members of Bengali ethnic groups fled to India, inflaming tensions between Pakistan and India, which eventually erupted in war. Although the U.S. Congress had forbidden military support for either nation, Kissinger arranged for an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to travel to the Bay of Bengal and provide war materiel to Pakistan. (By then, contempt for congressional restrictions had become a habit for him.)
But why the tilt toward Pakistan? Because that country was helping Kissinger create his all-important opening to China and because he also viewed India as a “Soviet stooge.”
For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning. Only the actions or interests of the great powers could adequately explain events anywhere in the world.
Latin America: There was a time when September 11 called to mind not the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the violent 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected socialist president. That coup, which made General Augusto Pinochet the country’s dictator, was the culmination of a multi-year U.S. campaign of economic and political sabotage, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.
Once again, a genuinely indigenous economic reform movement was (mis)interpreted as evidence of growing Soviet strength in South America. Within the first few days of the coup, 40,000 people would be imprisoned at the National Stadium in the capital, Santiago. Many of them would be tortured and murdered in the first stages of what became a regime characterized for decades by institutionalized torture.
Similarly, Kissinger and the presidents he advised supported Argentina’s “Dirty War” against dissidents and the larger Operation Condor, in which the CIA coordinated coups d’état, repression, torture, and the deaths of tens of thousands of socialists, students, and other activists across Latin America.
So, what should we give a 100-year-old presidential adviser for his birthday? How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?
If you google images for “realpolitik,” the first thing you’ll see is a drawing of Henry Kissinger holding forth to a rapt Richard Nixon. As a political thinker who prides himself on never having been swayed by passion, Kissinger would seem the perfect exemplar of a realpolitik worldview.
He eschews the term, however, probably because, given his background, he recognizes its roots in the19th century German liberal tradition, where it served as a reminder not to be blinded by ideology or aspirational belief when taking in a political situation. Philosophically, realpolitik was a belief that a dispassionate examination of any situation, uninflected by ideology, was the most effective way to grasp the array of forces present in a particular historical moment.
Realpolitik has, however, come to mean something quite different in the United States, being associated not with “what is” (an epistemological stance) but with “what ought to be”—an ethical stance, one that privileges only this country’s imperial advantage. In the realpolitikworld of Henry Kissinger, actions are good only when they sustain and advance American strategic power globally. Any concern for the well-being of human beings, or for the law and the Constitution, not to mention democratic values globally, is, by definition, illegitimate if not, in fact, a moral failing.
The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state.
That is the realpolitikof Henry Alfred Kissinger, an ethical system that rejects ethics as unreal. It should not surprise anyone that such a worldview would engender in a man with his level of influence a history of crimes against law and humanity.
In fact, however, Kissinger’s brand of realpolitikis itself delusional. The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state—a dying empire whose citizens live in ever-increasing insecurity. In fact, choosing America first (as Donald Trump would put it) is not the only choice, but one delusional option among many. Perhaps there is still time, before the planet burns us all to death, to make other, more realistic choices.
Human rights advocates this week sounded the alarm on a meeting scheduled for Friday between American Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, a former U.S.-trained general in an elite army unit implicated in genocidal violence and other atrocities in East Timor, West Papua, Jakarta, and elsewhere in the archipelago nation in the late decades of the last century.
Since 2000, Prabowo has been banned from entering the United States by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. However, Esper last week invited the 68-year-old to Washington as the Trump administration seeks closer relations with the nation of 268 million people in a bid to counter China's growing clout.
"Allowing [Prabowo] to freely travel to the U.S. to meet with senior government officials further may violate the Leahy laws and will be catastrophic for human rights in Indonesia."
-- Amnesty International
Human rights groups say lifting the ban on Prabowo is a grave mistake.
Amnesty International on Tuesday sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, signed by numerous rights groups in the U.S. and Indonesia, urging the Trump administration to rescind Prabowo's invitation, arguing the decision to lift the 20-year ban "may violate the Leahy Law and will be catastrophic for human rights."
The Leahy Law--introduced in 1997 by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)--prohibits the State and Defense Departments from providing military assistance to armed forces that commit atrocities with impunity.
On Tuesday, Leahy issued a statement noting that "Prabowo has been credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights, including kidnapping, torture, and disappearances, and under our law he is ineligible to enter this country."
"By granting him a visa, the president and secretary of state have shown once again that for them 'law and order' is an empty slogan that ignores the imperative of justice," said Leahy. "The State Department should apply the law and deny him a visa, and the Pentagon should reaffirm its commitment to the rule of law."
Prabowo joined the elite Kopassus commando unit in 1976, just months after President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger green-lighted a genocidal Indonesian invasion of newly-independent East Timor that would ultimately claim as many as 200,000 lives--around a quarter of the nation's population.
Allegations against the former general--who was trained at Ft. Benning in Georgia--go back to the 1980s, during the long-running armed insurrection against the Indonesian occupation. He allegedly led the massacre of some 300 civilians, including many women and children, as well as the abduction and torture of 23 pro-democracy activists in 1997 and 1998 as the regime of ruling Gen. Suharto--who rose to power during U.S.-backed genocidal violence in the mid-1960s--collapsed.
\u201cETAN condemns visa to Indonesia's Defense Minister Prabowo, labels him a "serial rights violator" not worthy of U.S. visit\n\n#NoPrabowoVisa #BanPrabowo #Indonesia\n https://t.co/AOoYhLMzXF\u201d— ETAN (@ETAN) 1602526687
Prabowo is also accused of orchestrating the worst atrocity of the period immediately preceding Suharto's fall. Kopassus troops under his command allegedly led the mass rape and murder of at least 160 Chinese-Indonesian women and girls, many of whom were reportedly burned to death after being sexually assaulted, and the murder of hundreds of other Indonesians of Chinese origin.
The Clinton administration cut ties with Kopassus in 1999. However, in 2010 the Obama administration, citing the unit's improved human rights record under a democratic Indonesian government, resumed cooperation. This, despite reports that Kopassus was still committing atrocities, this time against Christians in independence-minded West Papua.
Amnesty International's letter called on Pompeo to "clarify that the visa issued to... Prabowo does not extend any form of immunity to him, and to ensure that if he does travel to the U.S., he is properly and promptly investigated, and if there is sufficient evidence, brought to trial for his alleged responsibility for crimes under international law."
\u201cPrediction:\n-This meeting will lead to termination of most (maybe all) restrictions on US cooperation with KOPASSUS (#Indonesia's Special Forces, long sanctioned, separately from Prabowo, for #HumanRights violations).\n-Due to timing: Nobody in the US will notice.\u201d— Jonah Blank (@Jonah Blank) 1602741021
Experts, however, said it was highly unlikely that the U.S.--which has supported nearly every right-wing dictatorship since the end of World War II as well as genocidal regimes in Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, Iraq, and Rwanda--would take legal action against Prabowo, as required under domestic and international law.
"It's likely that [Prabowo] has diplomatic immunity and therefore can't be charged with a crime or can't be arrested while he's in the U.S.," Ilya Somin, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Virginia, toldVoice of America.
"I think this visit's really been choreographed at the highest levels and the minister is going to be greeted with great respect in Washington," added Brian Harding a former Pentagon official now with the U.S. Institute of Peace.
A 2010 proclamation by President Barack Obama also banned human rights violators from entering the United States, although the order has rarely been enforced and--like other U.S. human rights meausres including the Child Soldiers Prevention Act--allows for "national interest" exceptions.