On or about this date in 1974, French journalist Marc Filloux was killed in Khmer Rouge captivity along with his Laotian translator and girlfriend Manivanh.
Before resuming native soil, Filloux took a trip to Cambodia seeking interviews with the leadership of the Khmer Rouge — at this point still a Maoist guerrilla insurgency, although a growing one that now stood within a year of seizing power.
A Khmer Rouge patrol seized Filloux and Manivanh almost immediately upon their entry into Cambodia, apparently taking them as spies. They would never emerge from custody.
Italian correspondent Tiziano Terzani reported hearing rumors that the Khmer Rouge had executed them as spies, but specifics on their fate have never been confirmed.
Cambodia in 2013 unveiled a monument in Phnom Penh to the journalists killed and disappeared during the Cambodian Civil War. Both Marc Filloux and Manivanh are on it.
Walkiria (or Walquiria) Afonso Costa was summarily executed on this date in 1974.
Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the two-year campaign of the Brazilian dictatorship to suppress the Communist insurgency in Araguaia — or at least she was the last who was taken into custody.
A pedagogy student at the University of Minas Gerais, she had learned to shoot on forest rambles with her father and so perhaps came better prepared for the wilderness life than some comrades.
According to her sister, the sociology professor Valéria Costa Couto, the military had all but wiped out the guerrillas in a Christmas 1973 ambush, with only Walkiria and a couple of others managing to escape and hold out a few months longer.
There is a street named for her in her home city of Belo Horizonte, and an epigraph from her deceased father awaits if her remains are ever located for proper burial: “Do you think they killed me? They raised an ideal. Do you think they buried me? They planted a seed.”
On this date in 1974, Kurdish activist Leyla Qasim was hanged by the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad.
A middle daughter among four brothers from the heavily Kurdish Khanaqin district, Qasim joined the Kurdish Student Union as a student at Baghdad University in the early 1970s.
Visible Kurdish activists living right in the capital became a natural target.
Qasim and four male companions were arrested in late April, accused of plotting against Iraq (various accounts have this down to a hijacking scheme or cogitating the murder of Saddam Hussein). They were tortured, condemned in a televised trial, and executed together.
She purportedly gave her family the last words of a proper martyr: “I am going to be [the] Bride of Kurdistan and embrace it.”
She’s still regarded as a Kurdish heroine and many families confer her name on their daughters.
Death is our most modest gift to the people. Each death is a small window closing on nihilism. And each death is a panel of mystery closing on lies, corruption, poverty, and hunger. Thus, a window will open that lets in the light of life. Let us sacrifice our life for this light — this light.
[Signed,]
People’s Fadaee, Keramat Daneshian
February 8, 1974
Khosrow Gol(e)sorkhi* and Keramat Daneshian, poets and revolutionaries, were shot on this date in 1974 by the Shah of Iran.
Stock of a provincial family with ties to the Communist Tudeh party, Golsorkhi — much the more famous of the two — became a noted writer of radical prose and poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Their defiance — Golsorkhi’s especially — of a military court trying them on a trumped-up charge of attempting to kidnap Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi‘s son made them Che Guevara-like figures for young Iranian leftists of the time.**
Badly misreading the direction of the wind, the Shah televised their prosecution as a show trial — and the poets used the platform to completely upstage not only their judges but the rotting monarchy they were there to uphold. Farsi speakers can enjoy Golsorkhi on video —
— while this version has English subtitles:
“Equality”
by Khosrow Golsorkhi
(translated by Sherry Laici)
The teacher was shouting at the board.
He flushed angrily
and his hands were covered with chalk dust.
The students in the last row of seats were eating fruits and making noises;
on the other side of the class a student was flipping through a magazine.
None of the students were paying attention
because the teacher was shouting and pointing to the algebraic equations.
The teacher wrote on the blackboard, which reminded us of darkness and cruelty,
1=1
one is equal to one.
One of the students rose
(always one must rise)
and said softly,
“The equation is a blunder.”
The teacher was shocked
and the student asked,
“If one human being was one unit
Does one equal one, still?”
It was a difficult question and the students were silent.
The teacher shouted,
“Yes, it is equal!”
The student laughed,
“If one human being was one unit,
the one who had power and money would be greater than the poor one
who had nothing but a kind heart.
If one human being was one unit,
the one who was white would be greater than the one who was black.
If one human being was one unit,
equality would be ruined.
If one were equal to one
how would it be possible for the rich to get richer?
Or who would build China’s wall?
If one were equal to one,
who would die of poverty?
or who would die of lashing?
If one were equal to one,
who would imprison the liberals?”
The teacher cried:
“Please write in your notebooks
one is not equal to one.”
Abdy Javadzadeh notes in Iranian Irony: Marxists Becoming Muslim that Golsorkhi’s lyrical self-vindication — one could hardly call it a “defense” addressed to the parameters of a court that he openly scorned — “spoke volumes on how Marxism developed within the Iranian opposition,” marrying the language of revolution with that of Islam.
“Life is nothing but a struggle for your belief.”
I will begin my talk with a quotation from Hussein, the great martyr of the people of the Middle East. I, a Marxist-Leninist, have found, for the first time, social justice in the school of Islam and then reached socialism. In this court, I am not bargaining for my life or even my life span. I am but a drop in the great struggle of the Iranian people … I am not bargaining for my life, because I am the child of a fighting people.
The real Islam in Iran has always played its part in liberation movements … When Marx says, in a class society, wealth is accumulated on one side and poverty, hunger, and misery on the other, whilst the producer of wealth is the poor, and Ali says, a castle will not be built unless thousands become poor, we cannot deny that there are great similarities. This is the juncture of history in which we can claim Ali to be the world’s first socialist … and we too approve of such Islam, the Islam of Hussein.
Golsorkhi also scored points by dunking on the military brass sitting in judgment — shooting back at the chief judge when admonished to stay on topic, “Don’t you give me any orders. Go and order your corporals and squadron leaders.”
The more you attack me the more I pride myself, for the further I am from you the closer I am to the people. The more your hatred for my beliefs, the stronger the kindness and support of the people. Even if you bury me — and you certainly will — people will make flags and songs from my corpse.
For his part, Daneshian kept to a more straightforward secular-revolutionary tone.
Millions of people in the armed forces, without having an active role in society or production, are busy in a useless game … such force has no other purpose than the suppression of people’s voice of liberation. The shootings of farmers, peasants, and people’s fighters are their principle duty … Liberated people, social movements on their way to liberation, reverberates the news of shedding poverty, corruption and injustice in the world.
Three others condemned with them were not so eager as our principals to embrace revolutionary martyrdom, and bent the knee to the Shah in exchange for their lives.
On this date in 1974, the deposed Albanian Defence Minister Beqir Balluku was shot … a bit of an occupational hazard for the post considering a like fate for a predecessor 25 years before.
Balluku (English Wikipedia entry | Albanian | German) fought as an anti-Nazi partisan during World War II and ascended to the brass of the postwar communist state by the late 1940s. Thus positioned, he aided the dictator Enver Hoxha in a notable 1956 purge that earned him a derisive namecheck from Nikita Khrushchev.
The Albanians are worse than beasts — they are monsters. Only later did we learn how the Albanian Communist leaders punished and eliminated members of their own Party. They had a sort of troika: Hoxha, Shehu and Balluku. These three used to bring someone to trial, and Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu would sentence the accused to death themselves, without ever putting anything in writing; then they would look for an opportunity to have their victim murdered secretly, and Balluku would personally carry out the execution. It was all very similar to the system used by Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria.
The unrepentant Stalinism of this “troika” would lead Albania to its strange Cold War alliance with China against Moscow and the power of Hoxha et al would long outlast that of Khrushchev.
But such things never last forever, after all. By the 1970s, friction between the party and the military (and between Albania and China, a relationship that closely implicated Balluku) led Hoxha increasingly to fear a coup d’etat. Hoxha struck first in 1974 by suddenly felling the entire top ranks of the armed forces: not only Balluku but also generals Hito Cako and Petrit Dume.* Balluku had been 22 years the trusted Minister of Defence and 26 years a member of the Politburo, a dependable ally of the chief the entire time but it needed mere weeks to “eat him alive”. (Albanian link)
* These generals would be executed one month after Balluku.
On this date in 1974, in the face of an international controversy, Spain executed anarchist Salvador Puig Antich — the very last execution by garrote.
Handsome young Salvador radicalized as a youth in the 1960s under the oppressive semi-fascist Franco dictatorship.
As was the style at the time, the Catalan nationalist’s philosophy soon migrated to anarchism, and he brought his army experience to the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación (MIL), whose direction-action credo entailed bank robberies branded as “expropriation.”
Puig Antich was caught in a police ambush that also claimed the life of a police officer — at least some of the bullets seemingly delivered by police friendly fire.
But his defense that his own gun discharged only as he was beaten senseless by the gendarmes never had a chance, since between arrest and trial, another set of proscribed leftists assassinated Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco.
Blanco’s successor went by the handle “Butcher of Malaga” for his depredations as a nationalist prosecutor during the Spanish Civil War.
So there was no quarter forthcoming from the Spanish regime, notwithstanding domestic general strikes and worldwide gnashing of teeth.
Spain soon did away with the discomfiting garrote; its very last executions were carried out by firing squad.
Salvador Puig Antich was the subject of a 2006 film, Salvador. (Here is a hostile anarchist review.)
The junior partner in the day’s twin killing, Heinz Ches, was himself the subject of a documentary, Nobody’s Death: The Enigma of Heinz Ches, exploring the weird near-total obscurity of the man who shared the headlines with Salvador Puig Antich. (A clip can be viewed here.)
This morning in Seoul, Mun Segwang (various similar transliterations possible) was hanged for an assassination attempt four months earlier.
Mun, a Japanese-reared Korean who needed a translator for his subsequent trial, tried to gun down dictator Park Chung-hee at a Independence Day speech Aug. 15.
Mun missed Park, but he did kill two others: a high school student; and, Park’s wife Yuk Yeong-su, the seated white-clad figure in the middle of the assassination footage who can be seen beginning to crumple on stage as the camera pans away.
South Korea figured him as the agent of a North Korean/Communist plot, which conclusion Japan and the North rejected vehemently. (Trial evidence also indicated that he read The Day of the Jackal.)
Park got lucky this time, but the autocrat was successfully iced five years later by his own intelligence chief. (Guess what happened to him.)
November 23, 1974 was “Bloody Saturday” in Ethiopia for that day’s* surprise purge of some threescore politicians and soldiers by the ruling Derg.
It was barely ten weeks since the Derg — an Amharic word meaning “committee”, in this case a leftist military junta — had formally overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie, so ancient that he was already middle-aged back when he’d been leading Ethiopia’s resistance against Mussolini.
It’s strange to say in retrospect, but having spent the best part of a year systematically supplanting the political authority of the decrepit ancien regime with widespread public support, the Derg had engendered hope that its revolution would be accomplished without slaughter.
“Ityopiya tikdem/yala mimin dem” — “Let Ethiopia progress/Without any bloodshed” — became the popular slogan of that heady time. (pdf source)
Black Saturday turned the leaf on all that, and opened the sanguinary chapter of Ethiopian history today evoked by the name of the Derg.
“The prospect,” concluded the analysis that appeared under this headline in the Nov. 29, 1974 London Times, “is that the mass executions will be followed by further drastic action aimed at consolidating the control of the new military rulers.” The same author, Michael Knipe, had written on Nov. 16 that “the firmness of [the military’s] control appears to be matched by an overall moderation of approach, which holds promise for Ethiopia’s future.”
The Derg long remained a shadowy body, its members largely unknown and its internecine factional politics only guessed-at. The executions this date are generally read as the consolidation of the coup’s “radical” elements as against its “moderates” and the first signal event in Derg member Mengistu Haile Mariam‘s eventual conquest of supreme authority.
The crucial issue that separated radicals from moderates at the revolution’s early stage appears to be their approach to the ongoing struggle of coastal Eritrea — then still a province of Ethiopia.
Ethnically Eritrean officer Aman Michael Andom, the first titular head of the Derg who had been deposed from his position only a week ago, was a noteworthy advocate of negotiating a peacable settlement with Eritrean agitators. He was among the casualties of Black Saturday. (Aman was later reported to have been killed resisting arrest, rather than actually executed; many of the available accounts of this massacre have slightly varying numbers and particulars.) Henceforth, military force would be Addis Ababa’s only approach to the Eritrean problem.
A few other Aman supporters in the Derg shared his fate in a political wipeout. But more numerous among the 29 civilian and 31 military men announced as casualties the next morning — and there had been no prior warning that executions were imminent — were aristocrats and officials of the Haile Selassie government, including:
Two former Prime Ministers, Endelkachew Makonnen and Aklilu Habte-Wold (or Aklilou Wold), both of whom had been slated for trial for the recent famine in Wollo (London Times, Nov. 14, 1974);**
Solomon Abrahami, the former governor of Wollo;
Selassie’s own grandsom, Rear Adm. Iskender (Alexander) Desta;
16 generals, including Selassie’s son-in-law (and former Defense Minister) Abiye Abebe.
(This Nov. 25, 1974 New York Times article — behind the paper’s pay wall — lists all 60 vicitms.)
These were a selection of some 200 political prisoners held by the Derg; how hard to come down on these officials was another point of contention between radicals and moderates. It emerged later that the Derg had met earlier on the 23rd to vote, name by name, which among its prisoners deserved execution.
So if you look at it right, summarily machine-gunning only 30% of your political prisoners is a moderate policy. Alas: these would hardly be the last.
After the Derg government was itself finally overthrown in 1991 — and the troubled province of Eritrea finally won its independence from Ethiopia — some of the perpetrators of its genocidal atrocities were themselves put on trial.
* It’s obscure — perhaps permanently so — whether the nighttime killings transpired before or after the end of the day, and both the 23rd and 24th are variously cited as the date of death. “Reliable sources said the executions were by machine gun at midnight,” the unhelpfully breezy New York Times reported on Nov. 25. This account (pdf) has the shootings occupying several batches with midnight passing during the process. We give precedence to Saturday the 23rd here because that’s the day that earned the “Bloody” appellation.
On or about this date in 1974, a young American traveler — or perhaps intelligence agent — named Charles Dean and his Australian friend Neal Sharman are believed to have been executed in Laos by the Pathet Lao guerrillas.
The 23-year-old Dean was in the midst of a protracted post-university globetrotting when he was apprehended with his friend traveling down the Mekong River in the war-torn country. They were held in captivity for three months — long enough for the family to learn they were detained, and Dean’s father to fly to Laos to negotiate in vain for his release.
Charles Dean’s older brother Howard, perhaps the most prominent death penalty survivor in the United States, subsequently became governor of Vermont and is now chairman of the Democratic Party’s chief national organ.
Coincidentally, it was also at about this point of the 2003-04 presidential election cycle that Howard Dean, then the frontrunner for his party’s presidential nomination, learned through DNA analysis that remains recovered in Laos were indeed those of his brother. Twenty-nine years after his execution, Charles Dean was repatriated and buried with military honors.
[Charlie] wrote me a letter about what it was like to sit outside his bungalow [in Laos] at night, listening to the thump of distant artillery and the muffled explosions as the shells hit the ground. I almost wrote him back, saying, “What are you thinking? Get out of there — it’s not safe.” Then I reminded myself that he was a twenty-three-year-old who was capable of making these judgments himself. I’ve often wished I had written that letter, although I don’t think he would have changed his mind had he read it.
There was speculation that Charlie was in Laos because he was working for the CIA and I think my parents believed that to be the case. Personally, I don’t think he was employed by the U.S. government in any capacity, but we’ll probably never know the answer to that question.
…
Charlie’s capture and death were the most traumatic events of my life. They have eaten at me ever since. You never get over something like this; all you can do is live with it. It was awful for my two other brothers and me, and it was far worse for our mother and father. It was so painful for my father that he rarely spoke of it afterward.
…
One of the feelings that accompanies survivor’s guilt is anger at the person who was killed. You are angry because your loved one left you with this terrible loss. I had never understood why Charlie had gone to Laos and stayed there so long.
…
I often think about the courses our lives might have taken had Charlie been around. One thing is certain: I’m sure that, had he lived, he’d be the one running for president and not me.
Update: Gov. Dean’s December 2012 tweets on his family’s loss:
@executedtoday It was Dec 14. Charlie was my younger brother. He would have turned 63 on April 5, 2013. view original
@executedtodayHe was likely killed by North Vietnamese operating inside Laos. I have been to the site of his execution thanks to JTFA view original
Australian Neil Sharman was captured with him in September, 1973 and also died with him 38 years ago today view original
The Agence France-Presse Southeast Asia correspondent, Filloux (English Wikipedia entry | this is where it’ll be when French Wikipedia adds it) was a sort of retirony case in that he’d been hired back to the Paris bureau.
Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the 
Balluku (
Handsome young 
The 23-year-old