On ends, means and politics

Aug 12, 2009 Editorial

In this month’s edition of New English Review, the British writer, Theodore Dalrymple, offers an interesting take on the conviction (earlier this year) of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori on charges of human rights violations during his administration. Fujimori was accused of indirectly authorising two sets of killings by a military hit squad but had argued in defiant outbursts during his 16-month-long trial that he was a wartime president fighting to protect his people but that he never ordered the killings perpetrated by a death squad of the Army Intelligence Service.
It was the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited back to his home country, tried and convicted of human rights violations.
However, Fujimori has a huge following in Peru that admire him for defeating the Maoist Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) insurgency and ending the two-decade war that left about 70,000 people dead.
His daughter, Congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, is considered a leading candidate to succeed incumbent President Alan García and has vowed to pardon her father if elected.
The Fujimori case rehearsed many of the themes that our combined opposition are raising here in the wake of revelations coming out of the New York Simels trial. While their hope of replicating the Fujimori dénouement here would be dashed because of our Constitution’s blanket immunity to the President for actions performed during his incumbency, Dalrymple’s commentary is still instructive and thought provoking.
“Does the end justify the means? This question, difficult to answer in the abstract with a categorical negative or affirmative, occurred to me when I read (of) Alberto Fujimori’s (conviction).”
When Fujimori had been elected inflation in Peru had been running in the thousands of percent but the greatest threat to the survival of the state was the “the Maoist insurgency that at the time controlled quite a lot of the national territory.
“I was convinced that if Sendero won, there would be another Cambodia in Peru: a Cambodia on a much larger scale. And it was far from certain at the time that Sendero would not win.
“Indeed, if I had had to put my money on it winning or losing, I think I would have put it on it winning.”
“The combination of millenarian hopes and age-old resentments is an unfortunate one, to say the least; Gonzalo Thought (the philosophy of the Sendero), so called, gave ideological sanction to bestial brutality, and turned sadistic revenge into the fulfilment of a supposedly scientific destiny.
“From what I personally saw in Ayacucho on the eve of the election, which had the atmosphere of a city under siege, waiting for the barbarians to arrive and carry out their long-announced massacre, I was convinced that, if Sendero achieved power, millions would be slaughtered.
“How does one assess (Fujimori’s) moral, as against his legal, guilt? Is it permissible to commit a lesser evil to avoid a greater one? I am not a utilitarian, but it seems to me unrealistic to say that we should never depart from the ideal in order to prevent a much greater departure from the ideal; that, like Kant, we should tell a murderer where his victim is simply so that we do not commit the moral fault of telling a lie.
“On the other hand, the doctrine that the end justifies the means has been responsible for many horrors, large-scale and small.
“If I had been President of Peru at the time when it looked as if Sendero might win, and that Guzman (the leader) might never be found, could I have been persuaded that extra-judicial killings were necessary to defeat it?
“I hope I am not revealing a disgraceful character when I say that I think I could have been so persuaded. I am not at all sure I should have been able to face down commanders in the field who told me they were necessary, or that my high-minded phrases about the end not justifying the means would not have dried in my throat as I uttered them.
“This is not to say that I would have been right; I am only relieved that I have never been put in the way of such temptation and that no such responsibility has ever devolved on to me.”

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