How Wartime Killers Cover Tracks

Outside Granada, Spain, this week, a forensics team, which represents the families of leftist fighters and sympathizers who disappeared in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, dug into a mass grave. Many believe it is the burial place of the renowned poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The story reminds me of reading about the murders committed on both sides of that conflict. It blows my mind that those who chose to kill in cold blood during lulls in the fighting simply threw dirt over the bodies with no fear of getting caught.

By the 1960s, it appeared that many fighting groups coming of age after the lessons of the Second World War tribunals at Nuremburg, particularly groups in Latin America, were not choosing to stop killing, but instead were trying harder at "disappearing" the evidence. Just last month, Spanish authorities arrested Julio Alberto Poch who helped Argentinian nationalists cover their tracks by flying leftist prisoners over the ocean where over time about a thousand of them were, in turn, thrown out of the plane alive, never to be found.

In the 1990s, when the world was mired in debate about whether an international court was necessary, it appeared that even the most sophisticated fighting groups which chose to murder opponents in peacetime (like paramilitaries and soldiers in the Balkans, who after a few attempts to destroy evidence by incinerating bodies in Keraterm, floating them downriver at Visegrad, or in one case allegedly disintegrating them with acid in Kosovo) were now just killing in the open, even on video (Srebrenica), having no belief that any more than a few people would stand trial.

Today, there appears to be a new trend. With the world watching as Lorca and his colleagues are unearthed, as the Dirty War pilot is arrested, and as Bosnia's wartime leaders are in the docket in the Hague, the latest fighting groups which have chosen to kill unarmed detainees are adapting again.

This time, with no hope under the eye of satellite cameras of disappearing evidence or avoiding at least the discussion of a trial, the new generation of wartime killers (Sudan's leadership, for example) focuses their effort instead on turning the world's eyes away by blocking media, blocking witnesses, and then rallying global sympathy to challenge the integrity of the court itself.

[Photo credit: Anthony Joh, Bosnia.]