All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By VICTORIA BRITTAIN*

Race & Class, Copyright & 2006 Institute of Race Relations Vol. 48(1): 60–74

*Victoria Brittain is a journalist. Her latest work is as co-author with Moazzam Begg of his book Enemy Combatant: a British Muslim’s journey to Guantanamo and back (New York,
Free Press, 2006).

View the article as PDF with references They had to die: assassination against liberation

Abstract:

The use of political assassinations against key leaders of liberation movements has had a major impact on the course of history in Africa and the Middle East. Not only have some of the greatest of Third World leaders been killed but so, too, has the hope for political change they embodied. This survey of assassinations carried out by western states and their agents from the 1960s onwards reveals a bloody legacy of killings of leaders from Algeria, Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Mozambique, Palestine, South Africa, Togo and Zimbabwe – all of which were linked to the interests of western imperialism. Today’s daily diet of suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians by both western militaries and jihadis is one consequence, it is suggested, of the brutalisation effected by the policy of political assassination.

Keywords: Africa, ANC, anti-colonialism, CIA, Palestine, PLO, terrorism

Forty years after the kidnapping in Paris and subsequent assassination of the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi ben Barka, his lawyers, family and former colleagues organised a two-day seminar on his life and work in the Senate in Paris on 29/30 October 2005, with the title ‘From the Tricontinental to anti-globalisation’. At the same time, the mayor of Paris inaugurated a square named after Ben Barka on the Left Bank and a plaque was placed in the wall of the Brasserie Lipp where Ben Barka was seized as he was going to a lunch date. Finally, a section of the French establishment recognised its responsibility in a historic scandal with continuing repercussions across the world. Ben Barka, born in 1920 in Rabat, was the central figure in the organising of the first Tricontinental conference in Havana, which brought together liberation movements and political leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America in January 1966 – three months after his seizure on the Boulevard St Germain by two French police officers. He was driven to a safe house where the Moroccan minister of the interior and other officials met him. American and Israeli collusion in the affair was later charged by his lawyers. Ben Barka’s body was never found. His case remains open.

Selective and systematic political assassination against liberation movements has changed the course of history in a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East and it has profoundly affected regional politics. With those changes have come even more significant ones on the wider canvas of Third World history. More important still, the current power relations between the Third World in general and the dominant western and imperialist powers are, to a considerable extent, a product of the war of attrition that the West has waged and, in particular, the political assassinations that robbed Africa and the Middle East of some of their great leaders and weakened their important political organisations. And there may be another legacy of these political assassinations and the loss of all those leaders over the preceding two generations: today, opposition to the new colonialism has become so fragmented, sectarian, depoliticised, marginalised and leaderless as to give birth to the suicide bomber as a widespread phenomenon – most strikingly in opposition to the US occupation of Iraq, as well as in Palestine. Of course we cannot know just how different the history could have been without these assassinations. The game of ‘what if ?’ yields different answers for different people and for different political persuasions. And there will be many who ask: do individuals really matter so much in history, compared with mass social movements?

For anyone who did not live the hopeful, febrile, political life in and around the African liberation movements of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, it may be hard to imagine their power then over imaginations and political and social aspirations far beyond their own continent – including in Europe and in the US – and the magic of a handful of their leaders. Mehdi ben Barka was one of those. At that time, neoliberalism was not a norm, but the expectation of transformation to a better world was. The end of history had not been declared. There were two rival super-powers.

Two key liberation movements to consider in particular are South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestinians’ Fatah movement and the various Palestinian splinter groups. The different trajectories of the two mainly reflect the difference in their fundamental strategic position in the world: the Palestinians have the great disadvantage of being players in the key area of attempted US dominance of world oil supplies and of being pitted against the US’s most important world ally. Additionally, the Middle East has been the most deeply penetrated area of the world by western imperialist interests – well before the creation of the state of Israel. South Africa’s strategic geographic position is of course very important but it is not in the same unique economic and ideological category for the United States as Israel today.

Anti-colonialism in Africa

But before going into those two cases in some detail, I will give just a very few reminders of the immense scope of the use of political assassination against the struggle of liberation movements to end colonialism in Africa. Take first, four related highly professional assassinations, spread over nearly thirty years, mainly unsolved, but all presumed linked to the extreme Right and former intelligence services in France. The last gasps of neocolonialist violence played out here: Ben Barka; Felix Moumie of Cameroon, poisoned in Geneva in 1960 by a French secret service agent; Henri Curiel, the militant anti-imperialist, shot in his apartment building in Paris in May 1978; and Dulcie September, the ANC’s representative in Paris, shot in the back ten years later by a
22 calibre rifle with a silencer. The last two were soft targets with no protection, despite numerous death threats.

Charismatic leaders from countries as different as Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cameroon and Congo, who each had an influence that went far beyond their own countries, were assassinated in the interests of the colonial powers, even if the assassins themselves were sometimes recruited in local groups funded from the West. Amilcar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Felix Moumie and Patrice Lumumba were all murdered by the forces or allies of their current or former colonial power, because they threatened its future influence, not to say continuing control, over the economy and ideology in the country in question. Their brutal disappearances from the African political scene had a much bigger impact than their countries’ mainly modest weight would have intimated.

Amilcar Cabral was the leader of the PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independeˆ ncia da Guine´ e Cabo Verde), the liberation movement fighting for the independence from Portugal of the two small West African territories. The movement’s goal was to fight for the independence of mainland Guinea and the Cape Verde islands, although for logistical reasons the liberation struggle only took place on the mainland. Cabral himself was of Cape Verdean parentage but grew up in Guinea. He was, by far, the best-known and most revered intellectual influence on all African liberation movements.

Cabral was shot, in front of his wife as he arrived by car at his house in Conakry – PAIGC’s headquarters – on 20 January 1973. The assassin was in his own movement, manipulated by the Portuguese as part of the colonial power’s plot to kill or capture the entire PAIGC leadership and present it as an internal power struggle. This was the second attempt by Lisbon to eliminate Cabral and his party leaders. Three years before, the Portuguese fascist generals had organised a sea-borne attack on Conakry. The leaders of the successful plot were Guineans working for the Portuguese security service, PIDE, and they mobilised the actual killers, who were black Guineans, on a racial basis against the mixed Cape Verdeans in the leadership. Such racial and, to some extent too, class manipulation, continually encouraged by imperialism, was a real and recurring problem in all the lusophone ex-colonies. (For example, as late as the 1980s, Chester Crocker, US under-secretary for Africa was supporting the racial politics of UNITA – the Unia˜ o Nacional para a Independeˆ ncia Total de Angola – in Angola.)

Cabral was unarmed and unprotected at the time of his assassination, in line with his philosophy of trust within the organisation, his readiness to rehabilitate dissidents and his refusal to execute conspirators (of whom Lisbon encouraged plenty). Cabral had, characteristically, also formed important links with the Portuguese opposition to the Salazar dictatorship, and was key to the development of the idea that the end of colonialism was the key step to ending fascism in Portugal itself. His original and creative thinking was an essential part of the development of the liberation movements in the other Portuguese colonies, including in Asia.

Cabral’s famous speech at the Tricontinental conference in Havana in 1966 had revealed him to the world as a key theoretician among Third World revolutionaries at that exhilarating, hopeful, moment of history. He was also exceptional in action. It was in Guinea-Bissau that the Portuguese colonial army suffered its most crushing defeats, which later sparked the military revolt and the ‘Carnation revolution’ in Lisbon. As a revolutionary, Cabral appeared at a pivotal moment in the armed struggle for liberation in the colonies and in the revolt against neocolonial regimes in Africa and Latin America. Cabral was the living example of an exemplary revolutionary, whose movement was based as deeply among the peasants and future beneficiaries of the transformation of his society as the Chinese leaders of the Long March. He also reached urban cadres with his example of identifying with the peasants and giving up class privileges. Cabral’s charisma,
intellectual brilliance and influence within Africa have never been even nearly matched on the continent in the thirty-three years since his death.

Eduardo Mondlane was leader of the Frente de Libertac¸ a˜o de Moc¸ ambique (FRELIMO) in Mozambique. He was killed by a parcel bomb in Dar es Salaam – FRELIMO’s headquarters – on 3 February 1969, by agents of PIDE, the hated and feared Portuguese political police. Mondlane was a US-educated, highly sophisticated leader who took on the leadership of FRELIMO at its founding in 1964. His commitment to armed struggle against Portugal surprised the westerners who knew him well, many of whom were former teachers in various universities. Mondlane had connections with five universities at different stages of his life: Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he was a young student before being expelled; Portugal for a year, because that was where the Portuguese sent him; then, in the US, Northwestern, Harvard and Syracuse universities. He had also worked for a while at the United Nations. Through him and his contacts and experience, FRELIMO had the real possibility of being a liberation movement and then a government that could transform its backward strip of south-east Africa economically and socially, far beyond the dreams and ambitions of most others in the postcolonial moment.

Mondlane’s assassination started a period of instability among the FRELIMO leadership which only ended with the arrival of Samora Machel as leader. It also contributed to radicalising the political character of FRELIMO and its image in the outside world. Though Mondlane was disillusioned by western support for Portugal and had moved steadily leftwards as the armed struggle developed on the ground, the Portuguese had killed the man who could have found ways to work with the former colonial power and the rest of the West; they got, instead, Samora Machel, a soldier, with a soldier’s more uncompromising vision.

Would Mondlane, if he had been leading the country through the years of unrelenting South African destabilisation, have got to the point where Mozambique agreed to the Nkomati accord, the 1984 agreement that expelled the ANC from Mozambique and one of the strands of history that led the South African liberation movement to negotiate with the apartheid regime from a position of military weakness? Nkomati came just before the opening of negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid regime, at a moment when the ANC was in a position of extreme weakness on the military front, although the revolts in the townships had given its allies a formidable power-base inside the country. In a way, the switch of emphasis to the internal, urban struggle proved unexpectedly to be one of the ANC’s best cards and they played it, in part, because of the virtual collapse of the classic armed struggle after their expulsion from Mozambique.

In 1986 Mondlane’s successor Samora Machel was also killed, with several of his key advisers, by what is believed to have been a South African-engineered plane crash, which brought down his plane inside South Africa as the president was returning to Maputo from Lusaka. South Africa’s intelligence operatives have always been suspected of giving false signals to the presidential plane, luring the Russian pilots from their route. The plane crashed into the hills near Nkomati. It is a tribute to the two assassinated guerrilla leaders in Mozambique that the principle of collective leadership they had built was enough of a reality in their organisations for there to be a successful transfer of power. The hoped-for effects of destabilisation by the authors of their assassinations did not take place and FRELIMO struggled out of its crises.

The subsequent histories of the other two countries which lost their key leaders so prematurely in the 1960s – Cameroon and Congo/Zaire – show more dramatic effects. In both, divided, factional, weak governments came to power open to extreme manipulation by external forces, notably the US and France in the cold war period. Because of the very complex ethnic structures of both Cameroon and Congo, and the size and wealth of the latter, it cannot be certain that either Moumie or Lumumba would necessarily have been successful in holding their countries together or maintaining the independent anti-imperialist policies they espoused. But since their violent deaths, both have carried a mythic status in Africa and the evocation of their names brings nostalgia for a dream of real independence, of hopes, of justice, which never came.

Felix Moumie was the successor, in Cameroon, to Reuben Um Nyobe as leader of the radical nationalist Union des Populations Camerounaises (UPC). This had 10,000 peasant fighters in the bush and a movement strong enough to continue fighting for some years against the first independent government, the pro-French neocolonialist regime of Ahmadou Ahidjo. Moumie was murdered by thallium poisoning in Geneva on 15 October 1960. His killer was a French agent, William Bechtel, who posed as a journalist to meet Moumie in a restaurant, where he administered the poison as they lunched together. Bechtel was arrested in Belgium but, unsurprisingly, was soon released. Thirty years later, Jacques Foccart, the French president’s security adviser on Africa, admitted France’s responsibility, in an interview with Pierre Paen.

Patrice Lumumba was the radical nationalist leader of Congo, elected prime minister just before its independence from Belgium. He was killed on 17 January 1961. Lumumba’s assassination had been attempted on several previous occasions by the CIA and it was finally carried out by agents of the Belgian government, including senior serving Belgian officials, acting with his Congolese political rivals and with the support of the Americans.

Lumumba had been crudely and erroneously tagged a communist by the US, which portrayed him as an extraordinarily dangerous individual. (President Eisenhower himself gave permission for his liquidation.) Lumumba’s error – in western eyes – was his ambition of forming a unified state in which Congo’s huge riches would be used for indigenous development, rather than being exported to the West. In addition, he had made overtures for assistance to the USSR. Had Lumumba lived long enough to consolidate the independence of the country, not only would Congo’s bloody and undignified history probably have been utterly different but the history of Angola would too, as Lumumba would never have allowed the use of his country by the US and apartheid South Africa to cripple Angola’s independence – as they did.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a great ally of Lumumba who shared the same political vision, suffered failed assassination attempts and was finally ousted in a coup by his own compatriots in 1966. The plotters were backed, as were Lumumba’s enemies, by the former colonial power (in Nkrumah’s case Britain), looking for a postcolonial regime that did not threaten their interests. In the cases of both Belgium and Britain, there was determined intervention from the US, which had taken over leadership of anti-nationalist and anti-revolutionary interventions in the Third World.

Sylvanus Olympio, who was leader of Togo, was killed in 1963 in a coup led by Colonel Etienne Eyadema, a veteran of the French army in Algeria. He took power four years later and, for the next forty years, headed a neocolonial regime strongly supported by Paris. Eyadema had been encouraged to act by French officers in Togo who did not like Olympio’s tone of independent thinking from France.
During the dramatic period of decolonisation in Africa, with its internal power struggles and their manipulation by the former colonial powers, no country on the continent was more important as a symbol of Third World struggle for independence and dignity than Algeria.

The symbol was all the more potent because of the immense suffering of the Algerian people. Some estimates put the Algerian dead in the war of independence at well over a million. The French targeted commanders and Front de Libe´ ration Nationale (FLN) civilians for assassination in their thousands. This French colonial repression left a legacy of brutalisation, a culture of giving no value to human beings and personal and political score-settling by killing, which has not yet ended. Collective leadership meant that the FLN survived, despite the killing of leaders such as Larbi Ben M’Hidi, one of the nine FLN chefs historique, who died in French hands after being captured during the battle of Algiers, when 3,000 FLN cadres disappeared. But the subsequent rot within the FLN – militarism, corruption and a culture of killings, to put it bluntly – was sown, at least in part, by the extent and the targets of the French killings.

And, looking at Zimbabwe today, the descent into dictatorship there may also be partly attributed to the assassinations of some of the key leaders of the independence movement, mainly at the exile headquarters in the Zambian capital. These were carried out by Rhodesian special forces, supported by South Africa’s apartheid regime. The British had a strong interest in the character of Zimbabwe’s inevitable independence, in part because of its implications for South Africa. In some cases, murky power struggles, encouraged by the British intelligence service, may have played a role in the assassinations. Among those murdered were Herbert Chitepo, loved for his simple purity, idealism and nationalism and killed in Lusaka in 1975; and Jason Moyo, another Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) leader, killed by a parcel bomb in the ANC office in Lusaka in 1977.

Anti-apartheid

South Africa suffered thousands of deaths – uncounted and often anonymous – of commanders and cadres, assassinated in exile in ANC camps and offices in neighbouring countries or by death squads inside the country. Dozens of individuals were targeted, mainly in the second rank of leaders. The assassination campaign by the apartheid regime aimed to take out the movement’s best brains and to sap the willpower of the rank and file to organise against apartheid. Ironically, the ANC did not lose its top leaders in this dirty war, partly because many of them, like Nelson Mandela, were in prison on Robben Island. And even top leaders in exile, who were certainly targeted frequently, escaped that fate.

In May 1989, David Webster, a university lecturer and known opponent of apartheid, was shot dead outside his house; this marked the first political killing by the regime that was generally accepted as such. But analysis of dozens of previous deaths of known opponents of the regime, such as of the lawyer GriffithsMxenge, who took political cases and was stabbed forty-five times in 1981 and his wife Victoria, killed in 1983, show the death squads were at work much earlier. Those killed included men such as the young anti-apartheid activist Siphiwe Mtimkulu, poisoned by thallium in 1981, and leaders of organisations such as teacherMathew Goniwe, the United Democratic Front (UDF) regional organiser in the eastern Cape, stabbed to death, mutilated and burned with three others, on the way to a meeting in June 1985.

Some plots failed but the targets underline how ruthless and reckless the apartheid-regime killers were prepared to be. In 1989, Reverend Frank Chikane escaped three attempts to poison him by putting pesticides in his clothes; another unsuccessful poison plot was hatched against the lawyer Dullah Omar, who represented Nelson Mandela; and anti-apartheid journalist Gavin Evans was to have been stabbed in a fake robbery.

The confession of a former policeman, Almond Butana Nofemela, in October 1989, that he had been part of a death squad, finally blew the lid off the secret policy and gave some indication of its range. There were at least fifty such assassinations between August 1977 and November 1989. A secret unit of the South African Defence Forces, the extraordinarily named Civil Co-operation Bureau, was finally revealed as responsible for many hundreds of targeted killings inside the country and across the region. For instance, Cassius Make of the ANC’s national executive and Paul Dikeledi, a member of the ANC’s armed wing, were just two of those key people shot dead in Swaziland in 1987 by a squad which brazenly crossed the border for the purpose.

Such assassinations were, of course, also intended by South Africa to send out warnings to host governments of the liberation movements about the high price of the alliance against continued white rule. All the front-line states suffered such assaults. Killings of ANC cadres, including women and children, went on continuously throughout the 1970s and ’80s in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zambia, where the ANC had its headquarters. The regime relentlessly used spies and fostered collaborators to facilitate these killings. In Zimbabwe in August 1981, the ANC representative, Joe Gqabi, who had spent years on Robben Island, was assassinated. He was killed outside his house in Harare, probably by former Selous Scouts (a counter-insurgency squad) who had joined the South African Defence Force (SADF). The New Zealand-born priest and ANC member Father Michael Lapsley lost both hands in a letter bomb attack in Harare, shortly after the ANC had moved him from Lesotho because of direct threats against him.

Mozambique saw many, many such killings of ANC people. South Africa made repeated raids, including by air, into Maputo against the ANC. In January 1981, such raids killed thirteen cadres and, in 1983, they killed six people, though only one was an ANC member. The ANC office was also bombed, wounding five cadres, and one ANC cadre working at the radio was poisoned. The regime went for highprofile South African exiles, too, whose individual deaths might affect the course of the movement. In August 1982, Ruth First, an influential anti-apartheid activist voice and wife of the Communist Party leader and army commander Joe Slovo, was killed by a letter bomb sent to her university office. And in 1987, Albie Sachs, another such internationally known voice and a lawyer, was seriously wounded, though not killed, in a car bombing in which he lost his right arm and one eye. Sachs went on to be an eminent member of the Constitutional Court in post-apartheid South Africa, charged with overseeing the creation of a state which respected the law. Between 1981 and March 1986, thirty-four foreign cooperantes of various nationalities were murdered in Mozambique – warnings to the world far from the front-line of the price of supporting liberation movements in southern Africa.

In Angola, besides the full-scale South African invasions and offensives, which started before independence in 1975, there was, for instance, the assassination of 600 Namibian refugees at a camp at Kassinga inMay 1978 by helicopter-borne South African commandos. This was both crude intimidation of Angola, attempting to persuade the government to end its support for the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO, the Namibian independence movement) and to dissuade Namibians from joining SWAPO to express their opposition to an illegal occupation by South Africa. A few years later, in 1984, in the southern Angolan town of Lubango, another South African letter bomb killed Jeanette Curtis and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn. Curtis had been a rare white activist in the trade union movement in Cape Town, that had, at one time, been banned, and had become the wife of an Afrikaner opposition figure, Marius Schoon. He had served twelve years as a political prisoner for an attempt to blow up a police station in Johannesburg. After his release, he went into exile in Botswana but, fearing for his family’s safety in the epidemic of undercover South African killings in Gaberone, he moved to remote Angola where he assumed they were far enough from a South African border to be safe.
Jeanette Curtis’s assassination was both a demonstration of apartheid South Africa’s power in an unexpected place (like Dulcie September’s in Paris) and a settling of old personal scores. The killer was the intelligence agent Craig Williamson, who had been successfully infiltrated into student anti-apartheid politics in the University of Witwatersrand, where he had links to anti-apartheid funding from Scandinavia. Williamson worked, then, with Curtis. He successfully operated as an agent not only inside South Africa but also, for several
years, supposedly in exile in Geneva at the centre of the Scandinavianrun
International University Exchange Fund (IUEF), a key antiapartheid organisation in Europe. IUEF was a prestigious organisation with a credible profile among anti-apartheid support organisations. Williamson won the trust of several senior ANC people – Thabo Mbeki’s wife got a job from him at IUEF in Lusaka – though others always suspected him. Williamson was exposed in 1980 and IUEF collapsed in the scandal. More than a decade later, in his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty programme, Williamson revealed some highlights of his secret career: besides the Curtis letter bomb in Angola, he also sent the one that killed Ruth First and ordered the killing of the UDF’s Mathew Goniwe in East London.

All these political assassinations over the years were undoubtedly successful in weakening the ANC and its allies, the UDF and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), so that the eventual transfer of power was on much more favourable terms to the old regime than had been envisaged during the armed struggle. In addition, the apartheid regime had agents, like Williamson, infiltrated throughout the liberation movements of the ANC and SWAPO, including in senior positions, such as among ANC representatives abroad. The fall-out of mistrust caused great weakening of the ANC in exile, tarnished its image at home and dogs the ANC leadership to this day, despite the Truth and Reconciliation Commission experience. However, only the later assassination of the charismatic Communist Party leader Chris Hani comes into the category of a South African killing of an individual of critical political importance to the subsequent shape of history, alongside the others of an earlier generation previously mentioned. Hani, who was formerly chief of staff of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe and a senior member of the Communist Party, was killed in South Africa as late as April 1993 by two right-wing white supporters of the apartheid regime. Hani had previously escaped several attempts on his life in exile, including a car bomb in Lesotho, where he was the organiser of underground guerrilla units infiltrating South Africa.

Palestine

But all of this bloodshed is eclipsed in scale by the Israeli assassinations of Palestinians – part of the massive bloodletting in the Middle East which has marked the struggle for Greater Israel since the election of Menachem Begin’s Likud coalition in 1977. This was associated with the inevitable balkanisation of the Arab world, which began with the 1956 attempt by Britain, France and Israel to destroy Nasser, the Arab champion of the day. Political assassinations have been, and still are, the backbone of Israeli counter-terrorism policy and, in addition, there have been systematic assassinations of the Palestinian leaders keenest to negotiate with Israel. The highest level of the Israeli political/military establishment has been personally involved in many of the most important strikes.

Of the four founding fathers of Fatah, only one, Yasser Arafat, escaped assassination. Or did he? The use of sophisticated poison by Israeli assassins was revealed in 1997 when a Hamas leader, Khalid Mash’al, was poisoned in Amman by two Mossad agents (who had travelled on false Canadian passports and who were captured). Mash’al was only saved when a furious King Hussein demanded, and received, the poison antidote from Israel. Others had no such escape from their fate: Muhamed Yusif al Najjar was killed by Israeli commandos in Beirut in 1973 – led by future prime minister Ehud Barak disguised as a woman; Abu Jihad, the PLO’s foreign minister, was killed in his house at the PLO headquarters in Tunis by a sea-borne Israeli military squad led by General Moshe Yaalon, later chief of staff; Abu Iyad, Fatah’s intelligence chief was gunned down in his house in Tunis along with one of his senior intelligence officials, Abu al-Hol, in January 1991 on the eve of the Gulf war by Hamza Abu Zaid, a dissident Fatah member who had been recruited by Abu Nidal.

In his deeply researched book, Abu Nidal: a gun for hire, the British Middle East expert Patrick Seale explored the thesis that Abu Iyad had put to him the previous year: that Abu Nidal was working with the Israelis. Nidal himself admitted penetration of his organisation by Mossad. If Seale is correct, and he makes a very detailed and persuasive case, the Israelis were deploying, with Abu Nidal’s group, a particularly ruthless version of the classic infiltration and manipulation techniques, using double agents, much favoured by the South Africans (see above). The Israelis over the years have penetrated every single Palestinian organisation and the use of collaborators has been a painfully corroding theme throughout Palestinian society.

In southern Lebanon, Hizbullah and Amal both had leaders assassinated by Israel in an extension of the war against the Palestinians. These actions, often co-ordinated by the US and sometimes financed by Saudi Arabia, did not always succeed but they raised the stakes, notably with the massive March 1985 car bomb in Beirut near the apartment block of Hizbullah’s spiritual leader, Sheik Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. The bomb missed him but killed eighty people and wounded 200. Elsewhere in Lebanon, thousands of Palestinians died in the war of the camps and in the Abu Nidal killings of about 600 young men in 1987/88.

The dramatic impact on Palestinian history of political assassination comes not only from the already cited top leadership cases but from the assassinations of five leading Fatah ‘doves’ carried out by Abu Nidal between 1978 and 1983. All five – Said Hammami, the PLO representative in London; Ali Yassin, the ambassador in Kuwait; Naim Khudr, the representative in Brussels; Izz al-Din Qalaq, the representative in Paris and Arafat’s confidant; Dr Issam Sartawi, killed in Lisbon during a conference on Palestine – had publicly spoken in favour of dialogue with Israel and all represented Fatah abroad. All five would certainly have held prominent positions in the Palestinian team which conducted the eventual negotiations with the Israelis. Their murders gave Israel its double goal: ending any chance of such negotiations taking place and ensuring the continuation of the PLO’s international pariah status with the label of a terrorist organisation. Other PLO representatives were also assassinated in Cyprus, Beirut, Rome, Paris (two more) and in Malta. And there were other attempts which failed.

Fatah has not been the only target through these decades. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) lost the writer Ghassan Kanafani in a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 and Dr Basil al-Qubaisi in Paris, while Bassam Abu Sharif was gravely wounded in Beirut during the same period. Islamic Jihad’s founder, Fathi Shiqaqi, was assassinated by Mossad agents in front of his hotel in Malta in 1995. Hamas’s Yahya Ayyash, ‘the engineer’, was killed by a boobytrapped phone handed to him by a collaborator in January 1996. Throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ two intifadas, scores of Palestinians in less prominent local leadership positions were targeted and killed by undercover Israeli hit squads with incalculable impact on the political coherence of the resistance to the Occupation.

With the beginning of the twenty-first century, Israeli assassination tactics became more violent, more reckless of the consequences for civilians and heedless of any international censure. The leader of the PFLP was the first victim of the flamboyant style which became the assassins’ new trademark. On 27 August 2001, Secretary-General Abu Ali Mustafa was assassinated by a missile attack on his office in Ramallah after he had returned to the West Bank following thirtytwo years in exile. (This extraordinary event was a turning point in the twenty-first century’s open espousal of assassination as a political tool. The PFLP responded to their chief ’s bombing with the assassination of the Israeli minister, Rahavam Ze’evy. A new Palestinian policy began.)

In July 2002, an Israeli F16 fighter bomber was used for the killing of Saleh Shehada, leader of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza. A massive bomb was dropped on his apartment building in Al-Daraj in Gaza City. Fifteen people were killed, including his wife and daughter and eight other children; 170 people were wounded; hundreds of families had their homes destroyed. Hamas’s spiritual leader, the paralysed Sheik Yassin, was killed with a missile strike outside a mosque in Gaza City in March 2004. Throughout 2005, Israeli air strikes targeted dozens of men like Iyad Qaddas of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades or Mahmoud Arkan of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, both before and after the Israeli strategic withdrawal of settlements from the territory. Leaders of Islamic Jihad and Force 17 (Yasser Arafat’s personal security force) were similarly killed by Israeli Apache helicopters and, in October 2005, Islamic Jihad’s military commander in the West Bank, Luay Saadi, was gunned down by the Israelis in Tulkarem with a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Majed al Askar.

One of the most striking things about this appalling toll of bloodshed, inflicted on all levels of the Palestinian leadership, is the impunity that Israel has enjoyed for these assassinations over the years. The use in some of these operations of North Africans from the CIA/Mossad/Morocco school of intelligence operatives points to the source of that impunity. Without their US protectors, Israel would long since have become the pariah state that apartheid South Africa became.

Conclusion

Since the Tricontinental era, in terms of self-confidence and intellectual freedom, of power relations with the West, of the gap between rich and poor, of optimism for justice, the legacy of the inspirational liberation movements of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s has been deeply disappointing. In addition, all the material indicators are worse in Africa and the Middle East and the situation is compounded by a brain drain which runs directly contrary to the nationalist ideals of the earlier generations.

Some of the political assassinations over the years produced their desired effect in terms of undermining or even destroying a liberation movement: Cameroon, Congo and Palestine, for instance. Or again, sometimes the effect was to reduce possibilities of dialogue, either deliberately, as in the Palestinian case, or by stupidity and misreading, as in Congo and Mozambique, keeping a country in a draining war situation for decades, to the evident advantage of imperialism.

The Arab world is neither united nor free, much of it a series of shattered societies, headed by discredited and contested elites. Nothing illustrates this better than the current situation of the US occupation and destruction of a former regional giant – Iraq. Iraq’s great history and civilisation has come to its lowest ebb as one client government, manipulated from Washington, has succeeded another and a new generation of resistance has been born. The daily diet of suicide bombings, carried out both by Iraqis and by jihadis of other Arab nationalities, has its roots in the depoliticisation imperialism worked so hard to produce in so much of the Third World, most notably by its political assassination policy.

Looking back a generation or two, most of the historic liberation movements operated proudly on common political bases: of not targeting civilians; of mass mobilisation; of national unity; of anti-racist and anti-ethnic ideals; and of ThirdWorld solidarity. But their great leaders were murdered one by one, mainly by paid agents of western governments, and the people lost their focus. Today, targeting civilians seems to be the norm whether for western armies in Falluja, say, or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or for individual suicide bombers in Madrid or London, who do it out of political convictions that western leaders refuse to acknowledge. Meanwhile, the current political assassinations of leaders, such as of Hamas, Hizbullah, the PFLP or Islamic Jihad, carried out by Israel, do not even have to be kept secret any more. They are now considered legitimate – in a political world where military dominance rules and popular movements are ignored by power. The crude ongoing attempt by Israel to kill the Palestinian liberation movement in all its factional manifestations and the West’s effective collusion with that plan is a continuation of the planned death of all those earlier liberation movements.