Death squad

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A death squad is an armed squad that kills civilians, terrorists or guerillas. These groups tend to commit extrajudicial assassinations / extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances of persons. These killings are often conducted in ways meant to ensure the secrecy of the killers' identities, so as to avoid accountability and ensure deniability.^[1][2]

Death squads are often, but not exclusively, associated with the violent political repression under dictatorships, totalitarian states and similar regimes. They typically have the tacit or express support of the state, as a whole or in part (see state terrorism). Death squads may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary group or official government units with members drawn from the military or the police. They may also be organized as vigilante groups.

Death squads differ from terrorist groups in that their violent actions are often used to maintain the power of a local or national elite, rather than intending to disrupt their existing authority per se. Foreign powers may aid states where death squads are active, usually without the international criticism that would be involved when supporting states that support terrorism. Some death squads, including those with links with corrupt elites, have been classified as terrorist organizations.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Recent use 2 By country 2.1 Argentina 2.2 Cambodia 2.3 Chile 2.4 China 2.5 Colombia 2.6 El Salvador 2.7 France 2.8 Germany 2.9 Guatemala 2.10 Honduras 2.11 Iran 2.12 Iraq 2.13 Ireland 2.14 Ivory Coast 2.15 South Korea 2.16 Lebanon 2.17 Mexico 2.18 Nicaragua 2.19 Peru 2.20 Russia 2.21 Spain 2.22 United States of America 2.23 Yugoslavia 2.24 Venezuela 2.25 Vietnam 3 See also 4 References

[edit] History

Although the term "death squad" did not rise to notoriety until the activities of such groups in Central and South America during the 1970s and 1980s became widely known, death squads have been employed under different guises throughout history. The term was first used during the Battle of Algiers by Paul Aussaresses ^[3].

[edit] Recent use

As of 2006, death squads have continued to be active in several locations. They were on the rise through the 1960s and 1970s. However, they now appear to have been on the decline since about 1981 . Some known recent centers of activity include Chechnya^[4], Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, Iraq, and Sudan, among others.

[edit] By country

[edit] Argentina

Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, a far-right death squad mainly active during the "Dirty War". Amnesty International reports that “the security forces in Argentina first started using “death squads” in late 1973. By the time military rule ended in 1983 some 1,500 people had been killed directly by “death squads”, and over 9,000 named people and many more undocumented victims had been “disappeared”—kidnapped and murdered secretly—according to the officially appointed National Commission on Disappeared People (CONADEP). ^[5]

[edit] Cambodia

Assassinations and mass killings of Vietnamese in the late 1970s. The Khmer Rouge began employing death squads to purge Cambodia of non-communists after taking over the country in 1975 . They rounded up their victims, questioned them and then took them out to killing fields.^[6][7]

[edit] Chile

The Caravan of Death was a Chilean Army death squad that, following the Chilean coup of 1973, flew by helicopter from south to north of Chile between September 30 and October 22, 1973. During this foray, members of the squad ordered or personally carried out the execution of at least 75 individuals held in Army custody in these garrisons ^[8]. According to the NGO Memoria y Justicia, the squad killed 26 in the South and 71 in the North, making a total of 97 victims ^[9]. Augusto Pinochet was indicted in December 2002 in this case, but he died four years later without having being judged. The trial, however, is on-going as of September 2007, other militaries and a former military chaplain having been indicted in this case. On 28 November, 2006, Víctor Montiglio, charged of this case, ordered Pinochet's house arrest ^[10]

More than 3,000 people are believed to have been killed in the operations of Pinochet's regime. In June 1999, judge Juan Guzmán Tapia ordered the arrest of five retired generals.

[edit] China

Mao Zedong made use of the Red Guards to assassinate, imprison, and terrorise millions of suspected political opponents during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.^[11]

[edit] Colombia

In Colombia, the terms "death squads", "paramilitaries" or "self-defense groups" have been used interchangeably and otherwise, referring to either a single phenomenon, also known as paramilitarism, or to different but related aspects of the same.^[12]

In 1993, Amnesty International (AI) reported that clandestine military units began covertly operating as death squads in 1978. According to the report, throughout the 1980s political killings rose to a peak of 3,500 in 1988, averaging some 1,500 victims per year since then, and "over 1,500 civilians are also believed to have “disappeared” since 1978."^[5]

[edit] El Salvador

Main articles: Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Oscar Romero.

During the Salvadoran civil war, death squads (known in Spanish by the name of Escuadrón de la Muerte, "Squadron of Death") achieved notoriety when far-right vigilantes assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero for his social activism in March 1980. In December 1980, three American nuns and a lay worker were raped and murdered by a military unit later found to have been acting on specific orders. Death squads were instrumental in killing thousands of peasants and activists. Funding for the squads came primarily from right-wing Salvadoran businessmen and landowners. ^[13]Because the death squads involved were found to have been soldiers of the Salvadoran military, which was receiving U.S. funding and training during the Carter and Reagan administrations, these events prompted some outrage in the U.S, however human rights activists criticized U.S. administrations for denying Salvadoran government links to the death squads. Veteran Human Rights Watch researcher Cynthia J. Arnson writes that "particularly during the years 1980–1983 when the killing was at its height (numbers of killings could reach as far as 35,000), assigning responsibility for the violence and human rights abuses was a product of the intense ideological polarization in the United States. The Reagan administration downplayed the scale of abuse as well as the involvement of state actors. Because of the level of denial as well as the extent of U.S. involvement with the Salvadoran military and security forces, the U.S. role in El Salvador- what was known about death squads, when it was known, and what actions the United States did or did not take to curb their abuses- becomes an important part of El Salvador’s death squad story.” ^[14]. Some death squads, such as Sombra Negra, are still operating in El Salvador.[7]

[edit] France

The French military used death squads during the Algerian War (1954-1962).^[15]

[edit] Germany

Beginning in 1919, the government of the Weimar Republic sanctioned the formation of paramilitary Freikorps units in order to prevent a takeover by Soviet-backed German Communists. Although supposedly under the control of the German Ministry of Defense, the Freikorps tended to be drunken, trigger happy, and loyal only to their own commanders. However, they were instrumental in the defeat of the 1919 Spartacist Uprising and the annexation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The most famous victims of the Freikorps were of Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were captured after the Spartacist Uprising and shot without trial. After the Freikorps units turned against the Republic in the monarchist Kapp Putsch, many of the leaders were forced to flee abroad and the units were largely disbanded.

Some Freikorps veterans drifted into the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul, which regarded the Versailles Treaty as treasonous and targeted politicians associated with it for assassination. The most famous victims of O.C. were Matthias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau, both of whom were cabinet ministers in the Weimar regime.

During the 1930s, the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler made extensive use of death squads, starting with the infamous Night of the Long Knives and reaching a peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 . Following the frontline units, the Nazis brought along four travelling death squads called Einsatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppe-A through D) to hunt down and kill Jews, Communists and other so-called undesirables in the occupied areas. This was the first of the massacres that made up the Holocaust. Typically, the victims, who included many women and children, were forcibly marched from their homes to open graves or ravines before being shot. Many others suffocated in specially designed poison trucks called gas vans. Between 1941 and 1944 , the Einsatzgruppen killed about 1.2 million Soviet Jews, as well as tens of thousands of suspected political dissidents, most of Polish upper class and intelligentsia^[16], POWs, and uncounted numbers of Romany.

During the Cold War, death squads associated with the Libyan embassy in East Berlin plotted murders of West German and American targets. This was done with the full knowledge of the East German secret police or Stasi.

[edit] Guatemala

Guatemala has had death squads active since the 1960s up through the 1990s. Historian Greg Grandin remarks that "Washington, of course, publicly denied its support for paramilitarism, but the practice of political disappearances took a great leap forward in Guatemala in 1966 with the birth of a death squad created, and directly supervised, by U.S. security advisors. Throughout the first two months of 1966, a combined black-ops unit made up of police and military officers working under the name "Operation Clean-Up" -- a term US counterinsurgents would recycle elsewhere in Latin America -- carried out a number of extrajudicial executions... Over the next two and a half decades, U.S.-funded and -trained Central American security forces would disappear tens of thousands of citizens and execute hundreds of thousands more." ^[17]

[edit] Honduras

Honduras had death squads active through the 1980s, the most notorious of which was Battalion 316. Hundreds of people, teachers, politicians, and union bosses were assassinated by government-backed forces. Battalion 316 received substantial support and training from the United States Central Intelligence Agency.^{[18][dubious – discuss]}

[edit] Iran

Under the reign of by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979) the SAVAK security and intelligence service was founded. During the 1960s and 70s it used death squads .^{[citation needed]} After the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah, human rights groups continued to complain of human rights abuses in Iran.^[19] Among them were "death squads" in the form of killings of civilians by government agents that were denied by the government. This was particularly the case during the 1990s when more than 80 writers, translators, poets, political activists, and ordinary citizens who had been critical of the government in some way, disappeared or were found murdered.^[20]

[edit] Iraq

Iraq was formed by the British from three provinces of the Ottoman Empire following the empire's breakup after World War I. Its population is overwhelming Muslims but divided into Shia and Sunni Arabs and with a substantial Kurdish minority in the north. The new state leadership in the capital of Baghdad was composed mostly of the old Sunni Arab elite although this ethnic group was a minority.

This leadership used death squads and committed massacres in Iraq throughout the 20th century, culminating in the dictatorship of Saddam Hussien.^[21]

After Saddam was overthrown by the UK-US invasion in 2003 the secular socialist Baathist leadership were replaced with a provisional and later constitutional government that included leadership roles for the Shia and Kurdish. This paralleled the development of ethnic militias by the Shia, Sunni, and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

During the course of the Iraq War the country has increasingly become divided into three zones: a Kurdish ethnic zone to the north, a Sunni center and the Shia ethnic zone to the south.

While all three groups have operated death squads, ^[22] in the national capital of Baghdad some members of the now Shia police department and army formed unofficial, unsanctioned, but long tolerated death squads.^[23] They possibly have links to the Interior Ministry and are popularly known as the 'black crows'. These groups operated night or day. They usually arrested people, then either tortured^[24] or killed them.^[25]

The victims of these attacks were predominantly young males who had probably been suspected of being members of the Sunni insurgency. Agitators such as Abdul Razaq al-Na’as, Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, and Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi have also been killed. Women and children have also been arrested and or killed. ^[26] Some of these killings have also been simple robberies or other criminal activities.

A feature in a May 2005 issue of the magazine of The New York Times accused the U.S. military of modelling the "Wolf Brigade", the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, on the death squads used in the 1980s to crush the Marxist insurgency in El Salvador.^[27]

Western news organizations such as Time and People disassembled this by focusing on the aspects such as probable militia membership, religious ethnicity, as well as uniforms worn by these squads rather than stating the United States backed Iraqi government had death squads active in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.^[28]

[edit] Ireland

During the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins mounted a violent guerrilla campaign. Using a hand picked crew of gunmen who were dubbed "The Twelve Apostles," Collins killed carefully selected officials of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police and British Intelligence. On Bloody Sunday (1920), Collins' men killed fourteen of the British intelligence officers from the Cairo Gang. IN almost every case, the British officers were shot dead in their beds without a chance to defend themselves. That afternoon, a combined force of British security forces shot into the crowd during a Gaelic football match at Croke Park killing many innocent civilians. The hostilities ended in 1921 when the British Government negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which guaranteed the independence of the Irish Free State.

After independence, the Irish Civil War was fought between those IRA veterans who accepted the Treaty and those who considered it unacceptable. Although fought between men who had recently served together against the British, the fighting was often without quarter and brutal atrocities were committed by both sides. (see Executions during the Irish Civil War).

[edit] Ivory Coast

Death squads are active in this country.^[29]

This has been condemned by the US^[30] but appears to be difficult to stop.^[31]

[edit] South Korea

Any news reports of the use of death squads in Korea originates around the middle of the 20th century such as the Jeju Massacre^[32] and Taejon.^[33] There were also the multiple deaths that made the news 1980 in Gwangju.^[34]

[edit] Lebanon

Death squads were active during the civil war from 1975 to 1990. The number of the disappeared is put around 17,000.^[35][36]

[edit] Mexico

In 1968 the Mexican Army killed hundreds of people in the Tlatelolco massacre. Through the 1970s and 1980s death squads were used against students, leftists, and activists. One of these squads was the Brigada Blanca. In 1997 about forty-five people were killed by a death squad in Chenalho.^[37]

In the state of Chihuahua more than four hundred women have been 'disappeared' since 1994.^[38] While a few perpetrators have been found, the majority of the members of the organization committing these 'disappearances' has remained underground. The disappearances continue as of 2007.

[edit] Nicaragua

Death squads were active in this country throughout the 1970s and '80s.

During the 1980s, the Anti-Communist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua were described as death squads.^[39][40][41] The Contras were considered terrorists by the Sandinista government, which alleged that their attacks targeted civilians. The Contras, who received money, training, and arms from the Argentine junta and then the American CIA, mounted raids which targeted northern Nicaragua, destroying military bases, bridges, schools, clinics and airstrips. They also attempted to weaken and disrupt the Nicaraguan government by frequently kidnapping and assassinating civilians. A CIA training manual instructed the Contras, under the heading "Selective Use of Violence", to "neutralise carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police or state security officials, etc."^[42]

[edit] Peru

Shining Path, the Maoist subversive organization, carried out massacres such as Lucanamarca massacre.^[43]

[edit] Russia

During the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, Vladimir Lenin used the Cheka to murder members of the House of Romanov, the Russian nobility, officers of the White Army, Russian Orthodox priests and laity, and officials of the Russian Provisional Government.

During the late Great Purge, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin used death squads in the secret police force, the NKVD, to hunt down and kill suspected political opponents. Mass graves from this era continue to be excavated by Memorial (society).

The most infamous action of Soviet death squads in the 20th century was the Katyn massacre of 1940. Several thousand Polish Army officers were transferred by the NKVD from the GULAG and shot to death at Goat Hill and buried in mass graves inside the forests of Katyn. The transportation vehicles for this were given the nickname 'Black Ravens' by the local peasantry.^[44] This phrase echoes other nicknames given to other death squads.

In addition, a large number of Anti-Communists in the West were also targeted for assassination. Two of the most notable victims were Lev Rebet and Stefan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalists who were assassinated by the KGB in Munich, West Germany. Both deaths were believed accidental until the 1961 defection of their murderer, Bohdan Stashynsky.

After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army in the late 1970s and through the 1980s they continued to use death squads. The occasional massacre using rifles in a district here,^[45] the use of aerodynamic scatterable land mines (which appeared vaguely toy-like) to kill civilians in another.^{[citation needed]} The use of this strategy to conquer Afghanistan was rendered ineffective through the influence and support of Western Intelligence services such as the Pakistani ISI the French SDECE, MI6, and the American CIA.^{[citation needed]}

The Russian security apparatus continued to exist after the technical dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

The corruption of the Soviet era caused Boris Yeltsin's privatization policies to be manipulated by corrupt Party bosses, black marketeers, and the Russian Mafia. The resulting looting of State businesses and natural resources has created an oligarchy wherein politicians, banks, and corporate officials behaved more like drug cartels than pillars of the community. These conditions allowed criminal gangs to flourish during the 1990s. The new Russian elites are known to use death squads, and many gruesome murders of mobsters and high ranking politicians took place throughout the 1990s. More recently, however, they have become more subtle.

The FSB^[46] is as of 2006 the primary arm used by the authorities for wetwork in non-war zones.^{[47][48][49][50]} 'Disappearances' are still not unknown in the capital Moscow.^[51][52]

The Russian military continued to use death squads in war zones^[53][54][55] however after the cessation of official hostilities there were be less reports of their activities.^[56][57]

[edit] Spain

Prior to World War II, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union fought a war by proxy during the Spanish Civil War. There were death squads used by both the Falangists and Loyalists during this conflict. Prominent victims of the era's death squad violence include the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and journalist Ramiro Ledesma Ramos.

The Loyalist death squads were heavily staffed by members of Stalin's OGPU and targeted members of the Catholic clergy and the Spanish nobility for assassination (see Red Terror (Spain)). The ranks of the Loyalist assassination squads included Erich Mielke, the future head of the East German Ministry of State Security. Walter Janka, a veteran of the Republican forces who remembers him described Mielke's career as follows,

"While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting Trotskyites and Anarchists^[58]."

In the modern era, G.A.L.(Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación) terrorist group were death squads illegally set up by officials within the Spanish government to fight ETA. They were active from 1983 until 1987, under PSOE's cabinets.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] United States of America

After the American Civil War the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan carried out lynchings of African-Americans. This was often with the unofficial support of some local and state level leaders in the American south. In the introduction to "Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder With Deniability," author Bruce B. Campbell describes the KKK as "one of the first proto-death squads," which "conducted death-squad-like killings and other terrorist acts against recently freed black slaves, “carpetbaggers,” and those thought to collaborate too closely with the agents of the victorious federal government engaged in “reconstructing” the recently rebellious South." Campbell notes the difference with modern death-squads was that the Ku Klux Klan was associated with elements of a defeated state rather than the ruling governmental entity. "Otherwise, in its murderous intent, links to private elite interests, and covert nature, it very closely resembles modern death squads.” ^[59]

A Salon.com post by Greg Grandin accuses United States of being responsible for training and setting up Death Squads in South and Central American countries. [8].^{[dubious – discuss]} The School of the Americas, run by the US Army in Georgia has been accused by various critics of the US of having trained "500 of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere"^[60] The CIA was accused of making extensive use of death squads in the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. It is estimated that as many as 19,000 alleged Viet Cong were killed during this program.^[61]

An "investigative journalist" Seymour Hersh, whose email was posted in minnpost.com, recently made a statement claiming that Dick Cheney ran an 'executive assassination ring' that reported only to him. According to Hersh[9]Template:Reliable source

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

[edit] Yugoslavia

The Srebrenica Massacre, also known as the Srebrenica Genocide,^{[62][63][64][65]} was the July 1995 killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the ethnic cleansing of 25,000-30,000 refugees in the area of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War. In addition to the VRS, a paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions participated in the massacre.^[66][67]

In Potočari, some of the executions were carried out at night under arc lights, and industrial bulldozers then pushed the bodies into mass graves.^[68] According to evidence collected from Bosniaks by French policeman Jean-René Ruez, some were buried alive; he also heard testimony describing Serb forces killing and torturing refugees at will, streets littered with corpses, people committing suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, and adults being forced to watch the soldiers kill their children.^[68]

The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II.^[69] In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the "Prosecutor v. Krstić" case, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) located in The Hague ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide,^[70]

[edit] Venezuela

In its 2003 and 2002 world reports, Human Rights Watch reported the existence of death squads in several Venezuelan states, involving members of the local police, the DISIP and the National Guard. These groups were responsible for the extrajudicial killings of civilians and wanted or alleged criminals, including street criminals, looters and drug users.^[71][72]

[edit] Vietnam

In Dak Son Massacre, over 600 communist Vietcong troops marched in to the village and caused mass chaos. They used flamethrowers to destroy the shelters and kill the men, women, and children who lived there.^[73][74]

[edit] See also

• Star chamber
• Midnight Man

[edit] References