Israel’s killing of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is by no means the first act of “targeted killing” (= extra-judicial execution, = assassination) that the Israeli government has carried out in recent years. This is a practice whose sheer barbarism has been recognized by nearly all other governments of the world. Even repressive governments that have in fact carried out similar acts in the past (including Israel, until a couple of years ago) made some effort to “hide” their responsibility for these killings.
The apartheid government in South Africa did, we all know, carry out extrajudicial executions, including of many people known to be in the custody of its security forces. In those cases, the killings were never described as deliberate acts of killing, but excuses were given that the deceased had “slipped on a piece of soap and fallen through the window”, or “had been shot while trying to escape.”
The terror regime in Argentina deliberately killed thousands of opponents in the most heinous way. But it always tried to hide the fact and the details of those deaths: hence the large-scale phenomenon of the “disappeared”.
Israel itself carried out many acts of assassination prior to the current intifada. Most notable were the killings of three PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973 and then the killing of Abu Jihad in Tunis in January 1988. But on all those earlier occasions, the Israeli government was happy to keep the same kind of (translucent) “veil of possible deniability” over its involvement that it has for years wielded with regard to its huge nuclear-weapons program.
Everyone in the international community in those (post-Frank Church) days recognized that it was just not “appropriate” for governments openly to admit to their involvement in extrajudicial killings. Engagement in such acts did, after all, seriously undercut the most basic foundations of any idea of the “rule of law”.
That dissociation of governments from openly admitted involvement in assassinations lasted until the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli PM in 2001. Then, as part of his well-known tendency toward defiance of longheld international norms, he announced that “targeted killings” of accused terrorist leaders would henceforth be an open part of his government’s policy.
Btselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has a good list of the number of openly admitted assassinations the government has carried out since that announcement. I think it is more than 80– but their website is not currently responding, so I can’t check that. The site also notes that a large number of people–far more than the 80-plus actual “targets”, and many of them innocent bystanders– have also been killed as “collateral damage” in these operations.
Many of those earlier assassinations, like Shaikh Yassin’s, were carried out by helicopter gunships. Not exactly known as mechanisms for fine discrimination of targets.
In response to today’s news, European Union foreign ministers have gone on the record to condemn the whole concept of extrajudicial killings:
- “Not only are extra-judicial killings contrary to international law, they undermine the concept of the rule of law, which is a key element in the fight against terrorism,” they said at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels.
Nearly every other other government in the world has also expressed the same view.
Not so the Bush administration.
Condi Rice’s only comments were twofold: (1) to voice a totally milquetoaste and content-less appeal for “calm” in the aftermath of the killing, and (2) to deny vociferously that the Bush administration had known in advance about Sharon’s plans to do this.
Methinks the lady perhaps protested a little too much on the latter score?? Why on earth would anyone even imagine that Sharon might have given his American friends a helpful heads-up before he undertook an act that quite foreseeably escalates tensions worldwide??
The reason for the Bush administration’s non-condemnation of the Yassin assassination is quite clear: Washington itself also these days reserves the right to engage in extrajudicial executions of those accused of involvement with terrorism. We have seen at least one clear episode– that one in Yemen four or five months back– where US forces have done just that.
In asserting the “right” to undertake such actions, the Bushies were following the lead of their master in so many tactical aspects of the “war on terrorism”: Ariel Sharon. That’s why they don’t condemn his use of acts of deliberate, extrajudicial killing today.
Welcome to the Dark Ages of the collapse of the rule of law.