Content area
Full Text
This essay was written in the early fall of 2000, and since then immense political changes have occurred in Peru and Yugoslavia. In November 2000, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan and, since the summer of 2001, Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of the National Intelligence Service, has been incarcerated; supporters of the mafia, including high political officers, are also in prison. As the result of an exemplary electoral process, democratically elected bodies now govern Peru, and a truth commission has been established to examine the crimes of the past.
In Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic, after a dramatic standoff at his villa in Belgrade, was imprisoned in spring 2001. Transferred to The Hague, he was accused of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in fall 2001. Nevertheless, the Montesinos-Milosevic virus moves freely throughout the world.
I CALL it the Montesinos virus-a newly discovered cancerous disease found most commonly in contemporary democratic states. It is nearly identical to the Milosevic virus, a cancer to which young postcommunist democracies seem particularly vulnerable. Let me try to explain what I mean.
The peaceful dismantling of dictatorship by way of negotiation and compromise is rightly regarded as the finest political invention in recent decades. Thanks to negotiations, Spain avoided a bloody slaughterhouse after Franco's death, and created a practical model for negotiated and evolutionary transformation that was later applied spontaneously in the Philippines, in Chile, and finally, in Poland and Hungary.
Traditional battles against dictatorship took the form of reconquest: a rebellious opposition conquered the Bastille, whereupon, in vengeance, they locked up the people of the ancien regime. On the other hand, peaceful dismantlement took the form of reconciliation and national accord, without revenge and hatred.
One should therefore greet with joy the project of national reconciliation in Peru announced by President Alberto Fujimori. And yet this very project provokes disgust and revulsion. It assumes amnesty for the military and the police despite major human rights abuses. Only if the democratic opposition consents to this amnesty will President Fujimori schedule new elections. If the amnesty is declared, it will even spare Vladimiro Montesinos, head of the secret political police, who is accused of...