This Week in History: September 23-29

25 years ago: Extradition hearing of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet opens in London

The extradition hearing for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has begun at Bow Street Magistrates Court in London, 11 months after Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon issued an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity. Pinochet remained under armed police guard at his rented house in Surrey, UK.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), representing Spain, has revealed horrific human rights violations including electric shocks, beatings, burning and torture. The five-page indictment details 35 counts and incidents of torture against named Spanish citizens then resident in Chile, and a single count of conspiracy to torture while Pinochet was president and commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. Alun Jones QC said the indictment reveals “some of the most serious allegations of crime ever brought before the English criminal courts”. These include “inflicting severe electric shocks resulting in the death” of Wilson Fernanado Valdebenito Jucia, repeatedly beating Dolorez Paz Cautivo Ahumada and threatening to rape her sister.

Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is seen in this 1975 photo. (AP Photo)

The purpose of this hearing, as Jones stated, was to “determine whether or not Pinochet is guilty of these charges and we are not here to determine whether or not there is evidence of his guilt. Your limited function under the European Convention on Extradition is to determine whether he is charged with these extraditable crimes.”

Last March, the House of Lords ruled that General Pinochet was not entitled to immunity as a former head of state, but that the charges should be limited to events after 1988, in accordance with a recently ratified law, the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which adopted the UN Convention against Torture. Of the 35 charges, the most notorious crime became known as the “Caravan of Death,” in which 10 senior army officers executed more than 70 political prisoners and then buried their bodies in secret locations in October 1973.

Pinochet’s dictatorship and reign of terror and murder began with the ouster of pseudo-left leader Salvador Allende in a US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, and lasted until 1990. Pinochet’s extradition to Spain never took place. Home Secretary Jack Straw released Pinochet on health grounds, much to the delight of Margaret Thatcher and George H. W. Bush.

American Trotskyists hold rally to demand justice for boy killed by police

On September 28, 1974, the Workers League, the American predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, held a rally in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn to advance the fight against police brutality that had recently claimed the life of 14-year-old Claude Reese. Speakers included Helen Halyard and Terry Delgado, Workers League candidates for Congress in New York State’s 14th and 12th congressional districts.

Claude Reese was murdered on September 15. He was shot in the head by New York City police officer Frank Bosco after Bosco entered a basement where several children were setting up for a birthday party. Bosco claimed he was investigating a robbery before he and his partner, Arnold Tamaroff, broke into the basement.

Protest Against Police Murder of Claude Reese

Surprised and terrified by the attack on their group, the children attempted to flee the basement and climb the stairs. Tamaroff grabbed and held two girls while five boys ran. Bosco chased them into a courtyard where he encountered young Reese and then shot him, hitting him in the head and killing him instantly.

Reese was one of many children killed by the New York police during these years. In August 1972, police murdered 11-year-old Ricky Bodden; in January 1973, 16-year-old Rita Llyud was shot and killed; and in April 1973, police shot and killed Clifford Glover, who was only 10 years old.

Reese’s murder sparked massive opposition from Brownsville residents. Thousands of people participated in a funeral march to protest the police killings. The police responded to the march with open hostility and mobilized a force of 300 officers to attack the crowd.

Reports from the march noted that police used their cars to ram into crowds of young people, attacked protesters with batons, and that officers wore blindfolds over their badges to avoid being identified for their criminal attacks.

In the face of protests, the municipality ignored demands for Bosco’s arrest and indictment. Bosco was not even suspended from his police duties, he was only assigned to a temporary office. No charges were ever brought against him and in December he was reinstated to his regular police duties.

The Workers League rally was organized to advance the fight against police terror and insisted that the working class itself must take action. A Workers League statement released before the rally stated: “An investigation into the murder of Claude Reese cannot be left in the hands of the very police who are responsible for his death.”

At the rally, Helen Halyard responded forcefully to black nationalists like Amiri Baraka, who cited race as the sole issue in the killing and called for an all-black police force in Brooklyn. Halyard said, “We say this is not the struggle of blacks against whites, it’s the working class against the ruling class, and Baraka’s proposals for an all-black police force will just be a pretext for more repression.”

75 years ago: Soviet Union confirms possession of atomic weapons

On September 25, 1949, the Soviet Union confirmed for the first time, through its official news agency TASS, that it possessed atomic weapons. This announcement followed a statement by U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the U.S. government believed that the Soviet regime had tested one of these devices in the recent past.

On August 29, the Soviet Union detonated a 4.6-ton nuclear bomb, dubbed RDS-1, or “rapid flash.” The device, similar in design to the American “Fat Man” bomb, was detonated at a test facility in Kazakhstan and produced an explosive yield equivalent to 22,000 kilotons of TNT.

The Soviet nuclear program had developed at an extraordinary speed. The Stalinist regime had begun intensive research and development in this field only after Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The program had accelerated further at the end of the war, when the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This attack had nothing to do with the military necessities of the war, given Japan’s already defeated state. Rather, it was intended to threaten potential adversaries, primarily the Soviet Union, and to declare the unfettered military dominance of the United States.

First Soviet atomic test

The speed of the Soviet project was partly due to the possession of some of the Manhattan Project documents, American imperialism’s own nuclear weapons plans. The Soviets also called upon the expertise of German scientists, whom they forced to provide assistance after the Nazis were defeated. Thanks to the success of the August 1949 test, the Soviet Union rapidly expanded its production of atomic weapons as well as their testing.

Politically, the Stalinist bureaucracy hoped that atomic weapons would enable it to negotiate and reach a favorable agreement with the imperialist powers, including the United States. In practice, the Truman administration responded to the first test by calling for a review of the United States’ military preparedness, which would have led to a massive expansion of the American military arsenal.

100 years: Assyrian Christians driven out of Türkiye

On September 28, 1924, the Turkish army forced thousands of Assyrian Christians to flee to Iraq, ending a revolt sometimes called the Assyrian Rebellion.

In July, thousands of members of the religious and cultural minority of Christians, from various denominations including the Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean churches, and speaking neo-Aramaic languages, returned from exile in Iraq to their home region of Hakkari in southeastern Turkey, now governed by the new Turkish state founded by the nationalist movement led by Kemal Atatürk.

The Ottoman Empire had begun ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Hakkari region near Lake Van shortly before its entry into World War I in November 1914, fearing that they would support the forces of the Tsarist Russian Empire. This marked the beginning of the Sayfo or Assyrian Genocide, which reached its peak in 1915, alongside the Armenian Genocide, with the massacre of Assyrian civilians by Ottoman irregulars. An estimated 275,000 Assyrians were killed in this genocide.

In 1915, an exodus of 50,000 Assyrians from Hakkari to Urmia in Iran, a region contested by Ottoman and Russian forces, took place, resulting in many deaths from hunger and exposure. Further pogroms against the Assyrians took place in this region, and thousands of them again fled under the most brutal conditions towards the end of the war.

Assyrian refugees fleeing genocide in Türkiye

Others fled to northern Iraq, where, although part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, there was a large local Assyrian population and refugees were not subjected to the same levels of violence. In the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the victorious Allied imperialist powers denied the Assyrians their own state. Many Assyrians volunteered or were conscripted into British forces in Iraq after the country was placed under British mandate by the League of Nations.

In 1922, Assyrians began to return to the Hakkari region without permission from the Turkish authorities, and in July 1924, military clashes broke out between the government and Assyrian militias. The aid promised by the British to the Assyrians was never delivered, and Turkish troops were able to force them to return to Iraq, where the British demanded that they remain.