by Ann Williams
As it was the US government chopped off the head of the Black liberation movement and left the body there armed. That’s why all these young bloods are out there now, they’ve got the rhetoric but are without the political direction . . . and they’ve got the guns.
A band of people formed in Dallas in 1989, calling themselves the New Black Panther Party. It became an offshoot of the former Nation of Islam members and members of the original Black Panther Party say that it is not a legitimate organization and have denied any connection with the newly formed party.
El Salvador Death Squads
Much of the violence there – whether from the extreme right or left – is beyond the control of the government.
Ronald Reagan
A ‘death squad’ differs from a regular terrorist group by the fact that violence is used to maintain the existing state of affairs rather than as a means to cause disruption. They are an armed group that will assassinate activists, dissidents, politicians or anyone in a position that would be a threat to the general political status quo.
El Salvador, a republic on the Pacific coast of Central America, has a reputation of violence that is carried out by neither the government nor the regular type of criminal. Violence has become a part of everyday life where land is limited but the population is ever expanding. It is a country fraught with political tensions, having a fractured society and an extremely weak system of justice.
The roots of the El Salvador death squads run deep and can be traced back to 1910 when the National Guard was formed to protect the interests of landowners. They became known as a ‘local instrument of terror’ and in 1932, with the support of the army and paramilitary groups, the National Guard carried out La Matanza massacre. Desperate to ensure their survival, the farmer-peasants started to organize anti-government groups. The government responded by rounding up the peasants, lining them up against a wall and shooting them down. This massacre, which took part in the western part of the country, is estimated to have killed over 30,000 peasants, with the sole purpose of quelling rural insurgence. The perpetrator of the ‘Great Killing’, or la Matanza, was General Martinez, and he defended his actions on religious grounds, saying:
It is more of a crime to kill an ant than a man because a man is born again at death, whereas an ant dies forever.
In 1963 the United States government offered to help General José Alberto Medrano by sending ten Special Forces personnel to set up a paramilitary death squad, which became known as the Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista. In co-ordination with the El Salvador military, this squad obtained privileged information and carried out political assassinations, and there is now proof that these type of activities have been going on for over 30 years.
Death squads have been known to massacre entire villages if they were suspected of hiding guerrillas, and this was especially prominent in Guatemala. Even today, death squads openly operate in Central America, going under the name of Sombra Negra. They consist of vigilantes who seek out suspected criminals and rival gang members.
MAJOR F’AUBUISSON
In 1979 Major Roberto D’Aubuisson formed a faction group because he felt that the Government Junta in El Salvador was ‘infiltrated by Marxist officers’. He worried that if they failed to act then it could be fatal for the independence and freedom of El Salvador. He managed to obtain considerable support from wealthy businessmen who feared that their welfare could be at risk if the reforms intended by the Government Junta were not quashed. The richest landowners offered their homes, estates, cars and even bodyguards to help the death squads’ cause. Before long they became a powerful source with enough finances to build up an arsenal of weapons. The attacks on civilians and any individual suspected of collaborating with the guerrilla movement began. With his contacts, D’Aubuisson was able to obtain important information that enabled him to infiltrate both the armed and political forces.
In March 1980 D’Aubuisson’s squads assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero because of his socialist activities, and in December of the same year, three American nuns and a lay worker were sexually assaulted and killed. The Major’s influence and prestige grew until he was a powerful political force not to be messed with. Even though the Armed Forces were aware that information was being leaked out, nothing was ever done to control it, and this
is possibly because there were several members of the Armed Forces who were active within D’Aubuisson’s group.
DEATH SQUADS WORLDWIDE
Of course, looking further afield, death squads did not just exist in Central America. For example, in Vietnam, death squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA, murdered up to 50,000 people in ‘Operation Phoenix’. In Indonesia in the 1960s, officers of the CIA put together ‘death lists’ for General Suharto during his seizure of power. In Brazil it is known that they have used death squads to kill poor, or homeless, people simply to get rid of ‘undesirables’ that did not contribute to society.
In 1993 in Haiti, death squads terrorized any person who was sympathetic to the cause of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest and the President of Haiti. They used terror in the form of murder, massacres, public beatings, arson, even resorting to the removal of limbs with machetes, all in the aim of destroying support for the president. Aristide was very popular with the lower classes of Haiti, but although he had been elected by a landslide victory, his reign was short and after eight months was deposed in a military coup.
In Nicaragua a band of counter-revolutionaries known as the Contras could be described as death squads. They were armed opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Junta, and many of their attacks were targeted at civilians. The Contras received both financial and military support from the Argentine government and also the CIA in the United States. Their main targets were coffee plantations and farming co-operatives, and their methods were both brutal and indiscriminate.
For just a few days in October 1973, a self-styled army squad named the ‘Caravan of Death’ roamed the provincial cities in northern and southern Chile. They killed dozens of political opponents of Augusto Pinochet’s coup, which had the backing of the CIA. They targeted members of Chile’s Socialist Party, a group that included infantrymen and several army officers. Many of the Caravan’s victims voluntarily turned themselves over to the military authorities, but the death squads travelled from prison to prison, taking the prisoners from their cells and executing them without the knowledge of either military or local authorities. The victims were buried in unmarked graves. It is assessed that more than 72 people died during this period and it will be remembered as one of the worst episodes of human rights abuse in the history of Chile’s military rule.
Another band of militants that could be described as death squads are the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia. It is an organization intended to consolidate the major local and regional paramilitary groups fighting against Colombia’s Marxist guerillas. They claim to protect their sponsors, who are mainly wealthy businessmen and drug traffickers, from the left-wing guerilla groups. However, far from being merely a defensive organization, the AUC, as it is known, is notorious for attacking perceived supporters of the insurgents, often wiping out entire villages. They have gradually bought up large tracts of land in Colombia, possibly as much as 3.5 million hectares of agricultural land, not with the purpose of protecting the local population but solely to benefit their own interests.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, they employed death squads to rid their country of noncommunists. After being rounded up, the victims were questioned and then taken out to killing fields, where they were either shot or beaten to death. More than 1.6 million Cambodians were massacred before the government was overthrown.
Death squads called the Interahamwe committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when they hunted down Tutsis and Hutus in surrounding towns and villages. The squads either shot their victims or chopped them down with machetes, aided very often by the Rwandan Hutu armed forces. The killings did not
stop until the country was taken over by the Patriotic Front in July of that year, but the number of people massacred reached the startling figure of around 800,000.
To this day death squads operate in the cities of Iraq, in fact they are becoming part of everyday life in the Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad. Recently police found the bodies of yet another 19 Iraqi civilians who had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads that plague the capital city. Sunnis are terrorized daily, and the members of the death squads shoot randomly into their houses and back yards. They set fire to their houses giving the inhabitants only seconds to get out. For some reason no one seems to be able to stop the activities of these death squads, least of all the police. Sunnis now claim that they are more frightened of the terror attacks from the ‘men in black’ than they are from the daily air raids.
Part Four: 1970–1989
Avivim School Bus Massacre
Every year it’s like it happened yesterday. I knew everyone, and I still remember them.
Shalom Peretz
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 by Egypt and the Arab League. It is a political and paramilitary group that is regarded as a legitimate representation of the Palestine people. The original aim of the organization was the dissolution of Israel, which it has been carrying out by means of armed forces. More recently, however, the PLO has been seen as a terrorist organization due to its conflict with Israeli military forces, but also because of its brutal attacks on innocent civilians.
Avivim, in Israel, is an agricultural community that was founded in 1963, and it is right on the border with Lebanon. The community was built up by Moroccan immigrants, and the greater part of the community was established by two principle families, the Peretz and the Biton.
Most of the families in the Avivim Moshav (a type of co-operative agricultural community of individual farms) belong to the Mizrachi (Modern Orthodox) form of Judaism, and they either work on the Moshav fruit farms, tend the chickens, or work outside of the community as teachers or members of the security services.
On the morning of May 8, 1970, the school bus arrived at Avivim to pick up the children who were aged between six and nine. As the children left the Moshav, bound for two separate schools, they waved goodbye to their families. About ten minutes after the bus left, shots could be heard in the Moshav and immediately the residents started to run down the road to reach the bus. The bus came from the local council and terrorists had obtained its schedule and were waiting in ambush. They fired on the bus killing all of the adults on board, with the exception of the bus driver himself. In an effort to get away from the terrorists the bus driver continued driving, until he too was shot. The bus crashed, injuring many of the children who were still on the bus. Some of the older children, aware of what was happening, had managed to get out of the coach windows and go into hiding.
By the time the residents of Avivim reached the wreckage of the bus, the majority of the children were already dead. By the time the army and the ambulance services arrived on the scene, even more had died from their injuries. The attack caused the death of nine children, three adults, and 19 others were left with crippling injuries.
One of the survivors, a seven-year-old boy by the name of Shalom Peretz, remembers:
I can still hear the shots. No one knew what was happening, but they knew it wasn’t good. Everyone began to cry and run towards the bus.
One little girl who had asked her mother if she could take flowers to her teacher, was found lying in the wreckage still clutching the posy. The entire community mourned for their lost children, and to this day they hold a memorial service every year for those who died in the attack.
Although the terrorists were never traced, they were believed to be members of the PLO, and members of the same group were responsible for another atrocity involving children which took place on May 15, 1974.
THE MA’ALOT MASSACRE
It was the 26th anniversary of Israeli independence and Palestinian terrorists, dressed as Israeli soldiers, stormed the Netiv Meir elementary school in Ma’alot, a community in northern Israel. Inside the school were a group of about 100 teenagers sleeping on the floor after a trekking outing. On entering the school the terrorists killed a security guard, one student and another adult. On waking and realizing what was happening, some of the students managed to escape out of the windows, but about 90 students and some of their teachers were held hostage.
Armed forces surrounded the school, unable to make a move for fear of anyone else getting hurt. The following morning the terrorists made their demands. They wanted the release of 23 Arab and three other political prisoners from Israeli prisons, and if their demands were not met they would start to kill the student hostages. They told the authorities they had until six o’clock that evening to comply with their demands.
The Knesset, or Israeli parliament, had an emergency meeting, and at around three o’clock they asked the terrorists if they were prepared to make a negotiation. However, the members of the PLO denied them extra time and at 5.45 p.m. a special unit of the elite Sayeret Maktal special forces stormed the school. Although they managed to eventually kill all of the hostage takers, they could not stop them using guns and explosives and 26 Israelies were killed and more than 60 people were wounded.
Since then terrorism has escalated in the hope of causing enough pandemonium to accomplish the PLO’s lifelong goal of establishing a Palestinian state.
Black September
This is your new captain speaking. This flight has been taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Voice of a hijacker
September 1970 has become known as ‘Black September’ due to a number of terror attacks carried out by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In fact the world witnessed a series of serial hijacks that will never be forgotten. It was also the month when there was an attempt to overthrow the monarchy of King Hussein of Jordan, an attack which cost the lives of many Palestinians. The conflict lasted until July 1971 when the PLO and thousands of Palestinians were expelled to Lebanon.
Events started on September 1, 1970, when King Hussein received news that the PFLP were plotting to murder him and take control. Hussein was infuriated and decided to mobilize his forces in an all-out purge against the PFLP.
On September 6, acting on instructions from Dr Wadi’ Haddad, better known as ‘The Master’, the PFLP started a series of hijackings that have become the most memorable in history. Their reason for the hijackings was to force the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Switzerland and West Germany.
Hijacking of aeroplanes was a recent development and airport security was still in its early stages. For example, there were no metal detectors to scan each passenger, and only random pieces of luggage were searched before being loaded onto the planes. In the case of these hijackers, they had managed to board the planes easily while carrying concealed weapons on their persons.
The sequence of events started with El Al Flight 219, a Boeing 707 that had taken off from Tel Aviv, Israel, and was heading for New York. On board were 148 passengers and 10 members of the crew. It stopped in Amsterdam to pick up more passengers, and it was here that two members of the Popular Front – Patrick Argüello, a Nicaraguan American, and Leila Khaled, a Palestinian – boarded the plane. They posed as a married couple and got on the plane, using less suspicious Honduran passports. They sat quietly in their seats until the plane approached the coast of Britain, when they took out their concealed guns and demanded entry into the cockpit. At first the captain refused to open the cockpit door, but a stewardess screamed, ‘She has two hand grendades!’ Captain Uri Bar Lev was determined not to give in to the hijackers and after announcing over the intercom to his passengers and crew that there was a hijacking in progress, he put the plane into a steep nose dive. This immediately threw the two terrorists off balance, but not before Argüello managed to throw one of his hand grenades down the aisle of the plane.
Luckily it failed to explode and one quick-thinking passenger hit him over the head with a bottle of whisky before he managed to pull out his gun. Argüello responded by shooting one of the stewards, but he was shot by one of the sky marshalls before he could do any further damage. Khaled was held captive by both crew and passengers while the plane made an emergency landing at Heathrow Airport. The steward survived but Argüello died in the ambulance on his way to hospital. Khaled was subsequently arrested and held by the British government for questioning.
The original aim was to have had four hijackers on the plane, but two of the terrorists were prevented from boarding by security men at Amsterdam because they were travelling under Sengalese passports that suspiciously had consecutive numbers. Not to be foiled they purchased two first-class tickets for another flight and planned to hijack that plane instead.
The two terrorists were now on board Pan Am Flight 93, a Boeing 747, which carried 153 passengers and 17 crew members. The flight was going from Brussels to New York and the two men were determined to make this hijack work. They forced the plane to stop first in Beirut, where it refuelled and picked up several known associates of the two hijackers already on board. They also managed to smuggle on board enough explosives that would be capable to blowing up the entire plane. Realizing that the plane was too large to land at the arranged destination, Dawson’s Field, they forced the pilot to land at Cairo. On arrival at Cairo the plane was blown up only seconds after the last person had stepped onto the runway.