Henry Kissinger Visit to Chicago Prompts Protest

The Chicago visit of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tonight has prompted a coalition of more than a dozen organizations to protest his keynoting a “Humanitarian Awards Dinner,” saying that White House tapes and other declassified materials revealing his role in promoting coup d’etats, orchestrating assassinations [2], ordering illegal surveillance [2] , and other human rights abuses deserves scorn, if not arrest – not praise.

The protest will begin at 5:30 PM, Thursday, March 20, in front of the Hyatt Hotel, 151 E. Wacker Drive, Chicago.

Far from being a “humanitarian,” protest organizers charge Kissinger with:

++ Being a key organizer of the bloodiest years of the United States’ war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which killed 3 million people and caused environmental devastation which continues to cause rampant cancers and birth defects a generation later.

++ Organizing U.S. support for the Pol Pot dictatorship in Cambodia, which by any measure carried out a modern-day holocaust, murdering between 21% and 37% of that nation’s 8 million people.  “You should also tell the Cambodians [the Pol Pot government] that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way,” said then-Secretary of State Kissinger in a now-declassified transcript of a November 9, 1975 conversation with the Thai foreign minister. “We are prepared to improve relations with them.”

++ In 1975, Kissinger and President Ford gave the green light for the Indonesian dictatorship to invade newly-independent East Timor, which led to the deaths of over 100,000 people, according to Amnesty International – at least 1/5 of that country’s population.

++ Kissinger and Nixon eagerly supported the Pakistani military dictatorship of Gen. Yahya Khan, who brazenly stole that country’s 1970 elections and then brutally suppressed the opposition Bengali majority.  During Yahya’s subsequent massacre of up to 3 million people, which prompted the Bangladeshi war of independence and made refugees of 10 million more, Kissinger said ““Yahya hasn’t had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre.”

++ When the Indian government opposed U.S. support of the Pakistani dictatorship’s massacre, Nixon and Kissinger had this exchange, as recorded in the secret White House tapes, “What “the Indians need—what they really need—is …a mass famine,” said Nixon. Kissinger replied, “They’re such bastards.”

++ After the 1989 government massacre of thousands of non-violent demonstrators in China’s Tiananmen Square, Kissinger was among the most persistent Westerners excusing the slaughter: “The occupation of the main square of a country’s capital, even when completely peaceful,” he wrote, “is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage.”

++ Britain’s Independent newspaper reported that in the mid-1970s, when Angola was freeing itself from Portuguese colonial rule, Kissinger promoted a policy of CIA intervention in the country and U.S. collaboration with an invading army sent by racist apartheid South Africa.

Especially for the Illinois Holocaust Museum sponsors of Kissinger’s address tonight in Chicago, an exchange he and Nixon had on the subject of holocausts should have given them pause.  As a New York Times columnist put it,

“Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was ‘not an objective of American foreign policy.  And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,’ he added, ‘it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.’”

Tonight’s protest is co-sponsored by the 8th Day Center for Justice, Anti-War Committee – Chicago, Chicago Socialist Party, Chicago Veterans For Peace, Gay Liberation Network, Illinois Coalition Against Torture, International Socialist Organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War- Chicago, Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago, La Voz de los de Abajo, Neighbors for Peace, NW Indiana Vets for Peace, SOA Watch, Third Coast Society, United States Palestinian Community Network, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, World Can’t Wait – Chicago

“It’s not just for the sakes of the direct victims that we should be concerned that the crimes of the powerful go unpunished,” said protest organizer Andy Thayer. “In giving a ‘get out of jail free’ card to Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and other living human rights abusers close at hand, we give aid and comfort to human rights abusers around the world.  It says that America’s alleged opposition to gross injustices is a matter of political expediency, not principle.”