This operation in 1984 aimed to corral the Sikh independence movement that proposed to carve out a state called Khalistan in Punjab — specifically by capturing (or as happened in the event, killing) the Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In a notable pre-Blue Star outrage, Bhindanwale had a top policeman murdered, and his body remained on the steps of the Golden Temple for hours because other Punjab police were afraid to remove it until Bhindranwale consented.
In the first week of June 1984 the Indian army besieged Bhindranwale, and supporters, in that same temple, eventually assaulting the premises despite a heavy civilian presence, hundreds of whom were killed in the resulting firefight. The Indian state emerged with a firmer hold on regional sovereignty, and the renewed enmity of a lot of aggrieved Sikhs.
It was these outrages that led to Indira Gandhi’s assassination* later in 1984 … and at slightly greater remove, it led to the murder of the Army Chief of Staff who had implemented the operation, General Arunkumar Shridhar Vaidya. Vaidya well knew that this role might be his own death warrant and took the risk in stride; “If a bullet is destined to get me,” he said, “it will come with my name written on it.”
That bullet arrived in August 1986, a few months after Vaidya’s retirement when motorcycle gunmen assassinated the former chief of staff as he drove back from the Pune marketplace.
Sukhdev Singh Sukha and Harjinder Singh Jinda — both seasoned Khaistani assassins — got clean away at that moment, but Sukha was caught several weeks later when he got into a traffic accident riding the same black motorbike he’d used to ice the general. Both men admitted their involvement but pleaded not guilty, arguing that Vaidya had incurred the “death sentence” that they executed.
They were hanged together at Yerwada Central Jail on the morning of October 9, 1992 amid Sikh protests throughout Punjab. They’re often honored by protests and Sikh nationalist events on this anniversary of their execution.
* Indira Gandhi’s killing triggered anti-Sikh pogroms in India with somewhere around 3,000 killed, which was in turn answered by Sikh extremists bombing an Air India flight in 1985.
On this date in 1957, Algerian revolutionary Larbi Ben M’Hidi — more familiarly referred to as Si Larbi or Ben M’Hidi — was extrajudicially executed in French custody.
He was one of the founders of the militant nationalist National Liberation Front (FLN) and was a critical commander in the guerrilla war against French occupation, the Battle of Algiers. Small wonder he also features prominently in the cinematic masterpiece of the same name, where he and his opposite number, the French Col. Mathieu, are bracingly clear-eyed as to their respective sides’ necessary forms of terror.
In this scene,* for instance, the captured Ben M’Hidi is asked by a journalist whether it is not cowardly to have women kill people with bombs hidden in their baskets.
“Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more?” the shackled M’Hidi replies. “Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.”
Bigeard respected Ben M’Hidi too much to torture him but the French brass was not so sanguine — perceiving that the Algerian would present a great danger to the occupation as a political prisoner. This was a dirty war, and men like Ben M’Hidi met dirty fates.
Ben M’Hidi didn’t want to cooperate and Bigeard knew full well what the consequences of such a refusal would be … would he have talked under torture? We knew that Ben M’Hidi was responsible for most of the attacks and that he deserved the gallows ten times over, yet it wasn’t absolutely certain that he would be found guilty in court.
On March 3, 1957, [General Jacques] Massu and I discussed the problem in the presence of [Massu’s second-in-command Roger] Trinquier. We agreed that a trial of Ben M’Hidi was not a good idea. There would have been international repercussions …
“So what do you think?” asked Massu.
“I don’t know why Ben M’Hidi should get preferential treatment compared to the other rebels. When it comes down to terrorism the leaders don’t impress me any more favorably than their underlings. We’ve already executed many poor devils who were carrying out this guy’s orders and here we are hesitating for three weeks just to find out what we’re going to do about him!”
“I agree with you completely, but Ben M’Hidi is not just some cipher who will be quickly forgotten. We can’t just make him simply disappear into thin air.”
“There’s no way we can hand him over to the police either. They claim they’ll give him the third degree to make him talk but I’m convinced he won’t say a word. If there were to be a trial and he hasn’t confessed, he could actually walk away free, along with the entire FLN cadre. So let me take care of him before he becomes a fugitive, which is bound to happen if we keep on hesitating.”
“Very well, go ahead and take care of him,” answered Massu with a sigh. “Do the best you can. I’ll cover you.”
I understood that Massu already had the government’s approval to proceed.
I picked up Ben M’Hidi the following night at El-Biar. Bigeard made sure he was somewhere else because he had been told ahead of time that I was coming to take the prisoner away. I came with a few Jeeps and a Dodge pick-up. There were about a dozen men from my first squad, all of them armed to the teeth. Captain Allaire was in charge and had a little combat group lined up and presenting arms. I asked him to go get Ben M’Hidi and hand him over to me.
“Present arms!” ordered Allaire, when Ben M’Hidi, who had just been awakened, was escorted out of the building.
To my amazement the paratroopers of the 3rd RPC gave the defeated FLN leader his final honors. It was Bigeard in effect paying his respects to a man who had become his friend. This spectacular and somewhat useless demonstration didn’t make my job any easier. Obviously at that instant Ben M’Hidi fully understood what was in store for him. I quickly shoved him into the Dodge. We traveled very fast since an ambush to free him was always a possibility. I gave very strict orders to the NCO guard sitting next to the FLN leader:
“If we’re ambushed, you shoot him immediately, even if we come out unharmed. Make sure you knock him off without hesitating!”
We stopped at an isolated farm that was occupied by the commando unit belonging to my regiment and located about twenty kilometers south of Algiers, on the left off the main road. A pied-noir had placed the farm at our disposal. It was a modest building and the living quarters were on the ground floor. My second team was waiting for us there.
The commando unit of the 1st RCP included about twenty men, some of whom were draftees, but all of them were completely reliable. Captain Allard, nicknamed Tatave, who was very much devoted to me, was in charge. I had told him what was going on and he had been briefed. I told him to have his men set up in a corner of the room where Ben M’Hidi would be placed. The farm was messy and they had to move a few bales of hay around and sweep the floor. While this was taking place the prisoner was kept isolated in another room, which had been prepared. One of my men was standing guard at the door.
Then I entered with one of the soldiers and together we grabbed Ben M’Hidi and hanged him by the neck to make it look like suicide. Once I was sure he was dead, I immediately had him taken down and brought the body to the hospital. Following my orders, the NCO who was driving left the engine running while the car was parked, in order to be able to drive off at top speed without volunteering any explanations as soon as the emergency room doctor appeared. It was about midnight.
I immediately phoned Massu.
“General, Ben M’Hidi has just committed suicide. His body is at the hospital. I will bring you my report tomorrow.”
Massu grunted and hung up the phone. He knew full well that my report had been ready since early afternoon, just to make sure. Judge [Jean] Berard was the first one to read it. It described in detail the suicide that was to take place the next night. Berard was impressed:
“Well, this is very good! You know, it does make sense!”
Actually the report didn’t make sense for very long. Massu called me to his office a few days later.
“Aussaresses, I’m in the shit. District Attorney [Jean] Reliquet [a torture foe -ed.] has called me in.”
“What? He dared summon you!”
“Yes, to discuss the suicide of Ben M’Hidi.”
“But that’s an outrageous thing to do! Because of your position you shouldn’t have to answer the summons. I’ll go, since I’m your representative to the legal authorities.”
I therefore paid a visit to the judge’s office.
“Mr. District Attorney, I am here to represent General Massu. Because of my position I can discuss the circumstances of Ben M’Hidi’s death. I’m also the author fo the report that you’ve seen.”
The district attorney was absolutely enraged.
“Yes, of course! Let’s discuss your report! What you state in it is purely circumstantial. And only circumstantial! There’s no proof. Can you military types offer any proof at all?”
“I can offer our good faith.”
I think that had I slapped Reliquet across the face it would have had less of an impact than that answer.
“Your good faith!” he answered, choking on the words. “Your good faith as soldiers. Soldiers who are suddenly being candid?”
I put my beret back on, saluted him, clicking my heels, and walked out of the room.
We never heard from the district attorney again after that. The death of Ben M’Hidi was a decisive blow to the FLN in Algiers. The attacks died down and the bulk of the rebels began retreating toward the Atlas Mountains near Blida.
We used the farmhouse again where Ben M’Hidi had been executed. I had the men dig a long ditch and some twenty bodies, including that of a woman, were buried there.
The French military’s success by 1957 in the Battle of Algiers did not clinch its fight to retain Algeria — which attained its independence in 1962, to the horror of the far right. But it did put the army in such a vaunting position vis-a-vis the civilian authorities — one can see it in Aussaresses’s disdainful treatment of Reliquet — that the generals would author a 1958 coup led by Gen. Massu himself which called Charles de Gaulle out of retirement and initiated France’s Fifth (and current) Republic.
Larbi Ben M’Hidi’s name today graces one of the main thoroughfares of Algiers.
* The full film is a must-watch and can often be searched up in the usual places. This press interrogation occurs about 88 minutes in … closely followed by a scene of a spokeman announcing that M’Hidi “hanged himself” and Col. Mathieu allowing that he “appreciated the moral fiber, courage and commitment of Ben M’Hidi to his own ideals. Notwithstanding the great danger he represented, I pay tribute to his memory.” Game recognizes game.
** Eventually, General Paul Aussaresses … although he’d be stripped of this rank (and of his Legion of Honor) for celebrating the use of torture in Algeria in The Battle of the Casbah.
On this date in 2000, Egypt hanged two Islamic militants whom it had been torturing for months. They were signal early victims of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s program — more (in)famous after the September 11 freakout but in fact long predating it — of “extraordinary rendition”.
“Rendering” — chill word — involves kidnapping a target and transferring him to some other country, and it enables the state(s) in question to sidestep strictures at both ends of the pipe. When first authorized by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1993, the proposed kidnapping of a militant was endorsed by Vice President Al Gore in these words:
That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.
Over the course of the 1990s, quibbles about international law would fade from the discussion, and “renderings” became routine, albeit still secretive.
“The fact is,” wrote former National Security Council counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, “President Clinton approved every snatch that he was asked to review. Every snatch CIA, Justice, or Defense proposed during my tenure as [Counterterrorism Security Group] chairman, from 1992 to 2001, was approved.”
Nor did they remain merely tools to make an extra-legal “arrest” for the benefit of American courts — as was the case when Gore purposed to “grab his ass.”
According to Stephen Grey’s history of the rendition program, Ghost Plane, the CIA by by the mid-1990s had a growing presence in Europe, particularly the Balkans as Islamic militants began congregating. With the 1998 onset of the Kosovo War, Langley moved from watching to … rendering.
And in this case, that meant grabbing asses for Egypt, where those asses would certainly be tortured.
Members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, including the two men whose hangings occasion this post, Ahmad Ismail Uthman Saleh and Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Naggar, were kidnapped from Tirana, Albania in June 1998. They were then blindfolded, loaded onto a private plane, and flown to Egypt where they vanished for many months into the rough hands of its state security organ. Naggar, according to a lengthy November 20, 2001 Wall Street Journal story by Andrew Higgins and Christopher Cooper,*
was nabbed in July 1998 by SHIK on a road outside of town. He, too, was blindfolded and spirited home on a CIA plane. In complaints in his confession and to his defense lawyer, Mr. Abu-Saada, Mr. Naggar said his Egyptian interrogators regularly applied electrical shocks to his nipples and penis.
Mr. Naggar’s brother, Mohamed, said in an interview that he and his relatives also were — and continue to be — harassed and tortured by Egyptian police. He said he had suffered broken ribs and fractured cheekbones. “They changed my features,” Mohamed Naggar said, touching his face.
Naggar also complained of being hung from his limbs and locked in a cell knee-deep in filthy water. One of four Tirana militants captured in this operation, Naggar’s torture would yield crucial evidence for the 1999 “Returnees from Albania” mass trial,** and indeed his confessions still remain an essential primary text on the movement of Islamic extremists in the 1990s.
As for Saleh,
in August [1998], Albanian security agents grabbed him outside the children’s park. During two months of detention in Egypt, he was suspended from the ceiling of his cell and given electrical shocks, he told his lawyer.
Both these men were executed on February 23, 2000, in connection with terrorism-related death sentences that had been handed down in absentia prior to their kidnappings in Albania. All of the nine death sentences issued by the Returnees from Albania trial were applied to absent defendants, notably including Al Qaeda bigwig Ayman al-Zawahiri — a man who himself perhaps owes a large measure of his radicalization to Egyptian torturers.
CIA Director George Tenet testified in 2002 that his agency “had rendered 70 terrorists to justice” all told prior to September 11, 2001 (source). Most of the known third-country renditions of that period went to Egypt.
* As an index of the historical moment, it’s editorially interesting that this 3,600-word investigation ten weeks after 9/11 chooses to give its last word to an Egyptian state spokesman.
Egyptian presidential spokesman Nabil Osman said of such mass prosecutions: “Justice is swift there, and it provides a better deterrent. The alternative is to have cases of terrorism in this country dangling between heaven and earth for years.”
Mr. Osman brushed off torture claims by members of the Tirana cell, without commenting directly on their validity. Egypt permits alleged torture victims to seek remedies in civil court, he said. Members of the Tirana cell, however, have been held incommunicado with no way to file suit.
“Forget about human rights for a while,” Mr. Osman said. “You have to safeguard the security of the majority.”
This article was published right around the time the CIA captured Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was himself soon rendered into Egyptian hands so that he could be tortured into “confessing” a spurious link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the “safeguarders” then shamelessly cited this absurd product of the rendition program as justification for the approaching Iraq debacle.
** Despite the nickname, not all “returnees” had been captured from Albania; others had been taken from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other countries. There were also 64 people charged in absentia.
On this date in 1880,* Russian revolutionaries Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov were hanged at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress.
Kvyatkovsky (left) and Presnyakov.
Kvyatkovsky, 28, and Presnyakov, 24, had each spent the whole of their brief adulthoods agitating, police ever at their heels. As Russia’s “season of terror” opened in the late 1870s, both immediately cast their lot with the violent Narodnaya Volya movement. They were found by police at their respective arrests to have each had more than a passing interest in Narodnaya Volya’s ongoing project to assassinate Tsar Alexander II — an objective that it would indeed achieve a few months later.
Their fellow-traveler Mikhail Frolenko would remember the mass trial they featured at not for any glorious martyr-making but as a propaganda debacle for his movement.
The Trial of the Sixteen** in October 1880 was a model of judicial procedure — the government had learned, planned carefully and conducted the trial with absolute decorum. The sixteen accused included three of the most important figures in the Movement: Shiraev, who had been arrested in Moscow a year before with two suitcases of dynamite, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky. The last two were old friends of Andrei Zhelyabov. The evidence against the accused was provided by Grigory Goldenberg; the prosecution’s case was unanswerable. The sixteen were allowed to address the court and their speeches were reported. The prosecutors questioned them with a mix of deliberate courtesy and provocation: the sixteen were given enough rope to hang themselves. They followed no clear line and contradicted each other on endless details. They improvised counter-accusations, became mired in irrelevancies, and exploded in fits of petulance. They made a miserable impression, highlighted at every stage by the correctness of the proceedings. In its sentence the court was lenient, another propaganda victory: fourteen were sentenced to hard labor; two, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky, were sentenced to be hanged. We lost sixteen good people, which was bad enough. But worse was our irreparable loss of public esteem. One small sign of this was the fate of the word terror. Hitherto we had freely called ourselves terrorists; it had much the same ring as revolutionary. Terror was simply the first phase of the revolution. Overnight the word became a term of abuse and the exclusive property of the government. That alone might have told us we were following the wrong path. (Excerpted from Saturn’s Daughters: The Birth of Terrorism
Kvyatkovsky’s son, also named Alexander, was a Bolshevik close to Lenin in the early Soviet years.
* November 16 by the Gregorian calendar; it was still November 4 by the archaic Julian calendar still then in use in the Russian Empire.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) executed its hostage French national Michel Germaneau on this date in 2010, in the Saharan state of Mauritania.
An engineer who turned 69 years old in captivity, Germaneau was abducted that April while in Niger doing humanitarian aid. AQIM attempted to exchange him for French-held terrorists, including Rachid Ramda, but the militants shot him out of hand when a joint French-Mauritanian raid attempted to free him but stormed the wrong al Qaeda camp.
If her [England’s] empire means ruling the world as Denshawai has been ruled in 1906 — and that, I am afraid, is what the Empire does mean to the main body of our aristocratic-military caste and to our Jingo plutocrats — then there can be no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters.
-George Bernard Shaw
On this date in 1906, four Egyptian villagers were hanged by the British after a UK soldier died in riot begun by a pigeon hunt.
The Denshawai Incident — which is still to this day commemorated by its own museum — as an isolated event was one of those little local indignities that comprise a foreign military occupation. By the intersection of highhandedness on the one side and accumulated anger on the other it would become what George Bernard Shaw dubbed “the Denshawai Horror.”
On June 13, a mere 15 days before the executions in this post, a gaggle of bored Tommies* set out hunting pigeons in the Nile Delta. This was for the locals an irksome pastime inasmuch as the villagers raised these tame birds in brick towers for agrarian use — as Shaw noted:
Try to imagine the feelings of an English village if a party of Chinese officers suddenly appeared and began shooting the ducks, the geese, the hens and the turkeys, and carried them off, asserting that they were wild birds, as everybody in China knew, and that the pretended indignation of the farmers was a cloak for the hatred of the Chinese, and perhaps for a plot to overthrow the religion of Confucius and establish the Church of England in its place!
On this occasion, protesting villagers dared a little more resistance than was usual and before long a gun had discharged in the struggle, injuring several and felling a local woman (she survived, though onlookers took her wound for a mortal one in the moment). As if by metaphor, somewhere in the mayhem, somebody’s wheat caught fire.
Having clumsily escalated the disturbance that their presence had provoked, the Brits at length had to flee a small riot: one of their number died in the flight, the cause never clearly ascertained but attributed by a doctor to “heat apoplexy caused or aggravated by concussion of the brain.”** Several others were collared by the villagers, who abused them but did not kill them.
As Shaw notes, in a domestic English context it might have been the gendarmes who were punished for mismanaging the situation to the detriment of the public peace.
But the English occupation of Egypt disdained the hearts-and-minds approach, preferring bile and spleen. Fifty-two(!) villagers came up on charges of murder(!!) for the heatstroked officer, and the punishments meted out by a British-controlled court† seemingly aimed to maximize rancor with the understanding that cruelty was the only language the native could comprehend.
The husband of the woman shot by the hunting party, Shaw fulminated in an incandescent essay against imperialism,
in consideration of the injury to his wife, was only sentenced to penalty servitude for life … No such sentimentality was shewn to Hassan Mahfouz. An Egyptian pigeon farmer who objects to British sport; threatens British officers and gentlemen when they shoot his pigeons; and actually hits those officers with a substantial stick, is clearly a ruffian to be made an example of.
Penal servitude was not enough for a man of 60 who looked 70, and might not have lived to suffer five years of it. So Hassan was hanged; but as a special mark of consideration for his family, he was hanged in full view of his own house, with his wives and children and grandchildren enjoying the spectacle from the roof. And lest this privilege should excite jealousy in other households, three other Denshavians were hanged with him … ages of the four hanged men respectively, 60, 50, 22 and 20.
Hanging, however, is the least sensational form of public execution: it lacks those elements of blood and torture for which the military and bureaucratic imagination lusts. So, as they had room for only one man on the gallows, and had to leave him hanging half an hour to make sure work and give his family plenty of time to watch him swinging (“slowly turning round and round on himself,” as the local papers described it), thus having two hours to kill as well as four men, they kept the entertainment going by flogging eight men with fifty lashes each: eleven more than the utmost permitted by the law of Moses in times which our Army of Occupation no doubt considers barbarous. But they Moses conceived his law as being what he called the law of God, and not simply an instrument for the gratification of his own cruelty and terror.
It is unspeakably reassuring to learn from the British official reports laid before parliament that “due dignity was observed in carrying out the executions,” that “all possible humanity was shewn in carrying them out,” and that “the arrangements were admirable, and reflect great credit on all concerned.” As this last testimonial apparently does not refer to the victims, they are evidently officially considered not to have been concerned in the proceedings at all. Finally, Lord Cromer certifies that the Englishman in charge of the proceedings is “a singularly humane man, and is very popular amongst the natives of Egypt by reason of the great sympathy he has always shewn for them.” It will be seen that Parliamentary Papers, Nos. 3 and 4., Egypt, 1906, are not lacking in unconscious humor. The official walrus pledges himself in every case for the kindliness of the official carpenter.
Edinburgh Evening News, June 29, 1906
Shaw’s determination to humanize the “natives” by analogy to English country squires unsurprisingly stands in stark contrast to the dominant thrust of domestic reportage — which consistently describes the affair as an unprovoked attack or (still better) an outrage. Shaw, however, was far from alone in his sentiment: many British elites were discomfited by the harsh and arbitrary treatment meted out in the imperial hinterlands. Another writer, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, bemoaned the “abominable case” and took up an editorial pen in the Egyptians’ defense — albeit more in hope than expectation, for as he confided to his diary, “English feeling on these matters has become absolutely callous, and I believe if Cromer ordered a dozen of the villagers to be crucified or impaled, no serious objection would be made to it here.” And he was right to despair.
Still, gentlemen of a liberal conscience have the luxury down the decades of forgetting the individual atrocities of empire.‡
Few in the West recognized the allusion when, following 2005 bombings in London by Islamic terrorists, Ayman al-Zawahiri “announced that Britain was one of Islam’s worst enemies; it had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims across the ages, from Palestine to Afghanistan, Delhi to Denshawai.” (Source)
[T]he ballad which affected me most deeply was probably that of Zahran, the hero of Denshway. I recall my mother reciting it to me as I lay stretched out on top of our huge rustic oven, half-asleep while my younger brothers (and our rabbits) had all fallen asleep. It appealed to me afresh every time I listened to it. Denshway was only three miles away and the ballad dealt with a real incident … Zahran was the hero of the battle against the British and the first to be hanged. The ballad dwells on Zahran’s courage and doggedness in the battle, how he walked with his head held high to the scaffold, feeling proud that he had stood up to the aggressors and killed one of them.
I listened to that ballad night after night, half-awake, half-asleep, which perhaps made the story sink into my subconscious. My imagination roamed free. I often saw Zahran and lived his heroism in dream and reverie — I wished I were Zahran.
His wish would come as near to fruition as wishes do. Sadat had the honor of announcing to the world the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 that would expel the British occupation … and thirty years later, of also giving his life for Egypt.
* Not Dickens nor Kubrick could not have bested the names of shooting party participants Captain Bull (the eventual fatality) or Brevet-Major Pine-Coffin.
** That is, running away from a bombardment of stones. It appears to be permanently obscure (and subject to partisan slanting) precisely how these factors weighed together at the moment of Bull’s death. The diagnosis is quoted in the London Times, June 25, 1906.
† The tribunal featured mixed Egyptian and British personnel, notably including Boutros Ghali, future Egyptian Prime Minister and grandfather of the eventual United Nations head Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
On this date in 1996, Saudi Arabia beheaded four Muslim militants for a car bomb attack on the Office of Program Management for the Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM-SANG) military facility at Riyadh, killing five U.S. nationals and two Indians. All four prisoners were Sunni veterans of the Afghan War against the USSR, but they were beheaded in great haste, the Saudis having refused U.S. investigators permission to interview them.
The Kingdom’s Interior Ministry remarked at the time that the executions ought to assure that “such repulsive acts would not be repeated.”
This fanciful aspiration was conclusively nullified 25 days later when a huge truck bomb blew apart an apartment complex being used by the U.S. military, killing 19 U.S. Air Force servicemen along with a Saudi: the Khobar Towers bombing,* a bin Laden operation which might have opened an opportunity to prosecute the terrorist back before 9/11 was a twinkling in his salt-and-pepper beard, had the U.S. FBI not expedientlyattributed Khobar Towers to Iran-backed Shia militants.
* The 1996 truck bombing is not to be confused with the 2004 Khobar massacre.
On (or very near) this date in 1986, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had British hostage Alec Collett hanged in revenge for the previous day’s U.S. bombing of Tripoli.
Collett, a journalist and U.N. aid worker, had been abducted in Beirut more than a year earlier.
Abu Nidal, his captor, was the brand-name terrorist of his era. Indeed, his own name was a brand: Sabri Khalil al-Banna was the name he was born into, in a wealthy Palestinian family driven to dispossession and refugee camps by the Nakba. It was the Abu Nidal organization‘s assassination attempt on Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov that triggered Israel’s counterproductive 1982 invasion of Lebanon, perhaps (for its long-term consequences) the crowning achievement of Abu Nidal’s career.*
Stopped at a militia checkpoint on March 25, 1985 where he might have been taken because of an Israeli-stamped passport, Collett became one of about 100 foreigners seized as hostages by various factions over the long course of the Lebanese conflagration.
Only a few of these hostages died in their captors’ hands; they were in the main prisoners for leverage, and so efficaciously did they lever that it was these very souls that Ronald Reagan‘s U.S. administration proposed to retrieve by purchasing the (officially enemy) influence of Iran in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.
Confusingly shifting factional advantage has tangled Middle East politics for many a year, to be sure, and here the prospect of a negotiated release was aborted by the April 5, 1986 terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. soldiers — two of whom died in the blast.
This outrage proved to be the project of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who then stood in a very tense position vis-a-vis the West. Ten days after the disco attack, Reagan responded with an air raid on Libya clearly intended to assassinate Gaddafi — who fled his compound moments before it was crushed by a fleet of 2,000-pound bombs. (The bombing might or might not have slain the dictator’s infant daughter.)
This attack on Gaddafi was also an attack on that arch-terrorist Abu Nidal, whom Gaddafi had recently taken in after a former patronSaddam Hussein made a bid for respectability by expelling him from Iraq.** And it so happened that Collett’s unoffending person offered Abu Nidal the most immediate vehicle for retaliation.
It’s not completely certain that April 16 was the date of Collett’s murder, though there is no real reason to doubt his executioners’ claim on this point. The matter was confused at the time because three other dead westerners discovered on April 17 were initially reported to include Collett among their number — a claim subsequently debunked. On April 23, Collett’s captors released a grainy video of their masked prisoner being hanged;† however, the identification of the noosed man was still questioned for many years. Collett’s remains — confirmed by DNA testing — were only discovered in 2009.
* Israel withdrew from the bloodymorass three years later, having displaced the Palestinian Liberation Organization for a much more effective new resistance movement in Hezbollah. Decades later, Osama bin Laden would cite Lebanon as the event that “gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors,” including the sight of “demolished towers in Lebanon” to inspire a bit of tower-toppling of his own.
On this date in 1970, Argentine general and former dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu was shot by a band of Peronist student guerrillas.
Aramburu (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was one of the major figures behind the 1955 Revolución Libertadora that sent populist president Juan Peron fleeing to Spain. Peron was initially succeeded in the presidency by another general named Eduardo Lonardi, but before 1955 was out Aramburu had overthrown and replaced him, too; Aramburu ran the ruling junta until elections in 1958, maintaining a sharp ban on any vestige of Peronism — including even the mere mention of the exiled ex-president. He also had General Juan Jose Valle shot for plotting a Peronist coup in 1956.
The next two decades saw Argentina’s political institutions grow ever more painfully brittle, as shaky civilian governments were toppled in turn by equally shaky military rulers, every turn of the wheel eroding the country’s norms of orderly governance without attaining a stable political coalition. The charismatic Aramburu remained throughout a pole of anti-Peronism, which mattered as Peron’s long shadow grew and his return to Argentina began to seem likely.*
The faltering legitimacy of the government in turn spawned leftist guerrilla movements like the Peronist Montoneros, who entered Argentina’s political fray in gobsmacking style by abducting Aramburu in an affair the guerrillas called “Operation Pindapoy”.
On May 29, 1970 — Argentina’s Army Day and also the one-year anniversary of a suppressed popular uprising against the military government — two of the Montoneros terrorists disguised themselves as junior officers and presented themselves at Aramburu’s unguarded Buenos Aires apartment, claiming that the army had assigned them as his escort. The ruse worked like a charm.
With their prey in hand, the “officers” and their confederates stuffed him in a Peugeot and followed clattering dirt roads to evade police checkpoints, arriving that evening to a safehouse they had readied in the hamlet of Timote. There, a trio of young radicals constituted themselves a revolutionary tribunal and put Aramburu on “trial” for the murder of Gen. Valle and his fellow Peronist rebels fourteen years before.
Mario Firmenich, one of the dozen young Montoneros kidnappers, would later describe the three days they spent with their celebrated prisoner for a magazine: “His attitude was calm. If he was nervous, he controlled it.” Firmenich, who is still alive, has always insisted as he said then that their action evinced the popular will. “For the first time the people could sit on the bench and judge and condemn. That is what the Montoneros performed in Timote: to show the populace, that, beyond the pitfalls, legal chicanery and repression, there was a path to true justice, which stems from the will of a people.”
True justice was executed in the basement of their hideout. Having announced the inevitable verdict to Gen. Aramburu half an hour before, the leader of the cell shot him in the chest and then the head. The Montoneros then buried him, still bound and gagged, right there in the cellar — slathered with quicklime in an effort to hide the evidence.
It was a shocking blow to a fragile polity, and would help speed the (probably inevitable) fall of Gen. Juan Carlos Ongania, who was ousted from the presidency just a week after Aramburu’s murder.**
To grasp the profound effect of the kidnapping and murder of Aramburu it is necessary only to consult any Argentine periodical issued after May 29, 1970. Shortly after the kidnapping, Ongania announced in a televised speech that the death penalty would be imposed for crimes against public order. This decree was insufficient, however, to alleviate the feeling that order and authority had collapsed for good. (Source)
During Argentina’s subsequent dictatorship (and its escalating “Dirty War” against, amongst other subversives, the Montoneros), the town square of Timote was named for its unwilling guest Aramburu. That name has been changed in recent years.
** Aramburu was probably involved in a plot to get rid of Ongania, whose credibility had gone to pieces in early 1970 quite independent of the Montoneros. Firmenich suspects this might account for the ex-president’s compliance with the purported junior officers who abducted him.
An engineer who turned 69 years old in captivity, 
Penal servitude was not enough for a man of 60 who looked 70, and might not have lived to suffer five years of it. So Hassan was hanged; but as a special mark of consideration for his family, he was hanged in full view of his own house, with his wives and children and grandchildren enjoying the spectacle from the roof. And lest this privilege should excite jealousy in other households, three other Denshavians were hanged with him … ages of the four hanged men respectively, 60, 50, 22 and 20.
Collett, a journalist and U.N. aid worker, had been 
Aramburu (
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