The Art Of Genocide

I met a mass murderer once, and I came face to face with evil and it unnerved me. This is not a post about the Florida Keys by the way, but a reflection on the arrest of Radovan Karadic in Serbia. He is to be tried for war crimes in the 1990s and inciting genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the International Court in the Hague and not a minute too soon. He has lived out the past decade hiding behind a beard on the streets of Belgrade, but Serbia is desperate to join the EU and they can't get in until the Bosnian war criminals are brought to book, so they turned him in finally.

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My mass murderer died of illness unrepentant, never tried in court, never brought to account for his crimes. His name was Roberto D'Aubisson, and I dare that doesn't mean much in the 21st century. I was a reporter in El Salvador for a few miserable weeks in 1986 and I had the misfortune of attending a press conference where Roberto D'Aubisson took center stage and berated pretty much everyone involved in the Civil War, including the US, for screwing things up, and giving the guerillas a platform to sue for peace.

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We all knew D'Aubisson was the eminence grise behind the death squads that roamed the country putting bullets into people pretty much at random, but we all had to pretend, in the interests of that damnable "objectivity" that this might not be the case. Perhaps D'Aubisson really didn't know who was responsible for the two dead bodies lying outside my hotel that very morning, lying in the gutter with bloody bullet holes in their backs and cardboard signs wired round their necks proclaiming them traitors or collaborators or communists or some other thing.

I was pretty sure he had ordered their murder and i wanted to ask him why.
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I had a deadline and as I was reporting for the radio I needed a soundbite, a quotation, from D'Aubisson, preferably in English to make it easy to incorporate his comments into my story. I asked my final question from the back of the room and asked for a reply in English which got me the most filthy look I have ever suffered under. He walked past my microphone and started screaming insults at the Communist loving US administration etc etc.. in Spanish, and his bodyguard followed up by poking me in the chest with a finger the size and consistency of a nightstick while advising me, in English, that his boss-poke- never-poke- gave-poke- interviews-poke- in English, but if I wanted he would be happy to talk to to me at length somewhere private. Gulp. I had brought attention to myself throughout the press conference by making clear the possibility that I didn't really believe D'Aubisson's claims of innocence in the Death Squad activities, activities that might possibly piss off the US government at some indeterminate point in the not too distant future. "You got out of that one alive," some English speaking cameraman muttered dryly under his breath as we shuffled out of the room. "Not everyone is that lucky." Not everyone was as stupid as I was, or as young, or as sure of his own immortality- up to that moment.

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Unlike Karadic, D'Aubisson wasn't trained as a doctor, he had no bedside manner, he didn't know how to be affable or charming, he was driven by his desire to wipe out the enemy. Subtlety was not his thing. His eyes really did burn with hatred, a thing I had never seen before, nor since, and I was young at the time, idealistic and in my own way a seeker of truth. That encounter put the brakes on my idealism, I felt marked by my impertinent questions at the press conference and I never really did recover my outsider's equanimity for as long as I stayed in El Salvador. I spent a great deal too much time looking over my shoulder and worrying about myself. It's a terrible thing when people feel they can act with impunity, and they are angry to start with and have a cruel and vicious agenda to carry out. They do nasty things to people that piss them off, and I did not feel protected by my status as a US reporter. I took to drink, and decided I needed to go home.

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Tony Plana played D'Aubisson to perfection in Oliver Stone's movie Salvador, a film that captured all the weirdness and fear of the Salvadoran Civil War. Anytime I want to remind myself what visceral fear feels like I watch the movie.

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I have heard the phrase "banality of evil" used to describe cataclysms like the Holocaust and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia or the machete genocide in Ruanda, but there was nothing banal about Roberto D'Aubisson; he creeped me out completely and curiously enough I was totally convinced after I met him that he was entirely responsible for the terrifying death squads roaming the country slaughtering people at will. His dedication to the total misuse of power was also responsible for getting me wondering how it is that a benign God could allow such things to happen. To that conundrum there is but one unpalatable answer in my mind. D'Aubisson has a lot to answer for in my life and he barely grazed me in passing, and I'm still pissed off about him. I dare say there will be a few Bosnians feeling the same way, more profoundly, when Karadic goers on trial and I will be silently cheering them on, from the safety and comfort of my home in the serene Florida Keys.