Death squad

From Freepedia

A death squad is an extra-judicial group whose members execute or assassinate persons they believe to be politically unreliable or undesirable. They differ from terrorist groups in that they are endorsed by governments, usually in order to eliminate political opponents; some are directly created by such governments, others are supported, protected, or merely not discouraged. Dictatorships, especially totalitarian ones, have used to kill whole groups of people who do not fit their political ideology, religion, or race (see genocide).

The term "death squad" has more recently been extended (especially by journalists) to small groups organized by terrorist organisations such as the IRA. Steven Vincent, an American free-lance journalist recently murdered in Iraq, had previously argued that the anti-government forces there should properly be called death squads rather than "insurgents" or "guerillas."

1 Before World War II
2 Central America and Hispaniola
3 Other
4 See also
5 External links

Before World War II

There have been other death squads throughout history. During the late 1930s, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin used death squads in the secret police force, the NKVD, to hunt down and kill hundreds of thousands of known or suspected political opponents during the Great Purge. Many were innocent bystanders caught by mistake or misidentified. According to some estimates, more than one million victims were killed, mostly by being shot; millions more were sent to gulags.

During the 1930s, the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler made extensive use of death squads, starting with the infamouis 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 thru 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 Soviet leaders, POWs, and Romany.

Central America and Hispaniola

Death squad activity was widespread in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s, where plain-clothes assassins would murder dissidents fingered as "subversives" under the pretext of counterinsurgency. The Guatemalan death squads typically operated in full cooperation with the national military, whereas those in El Salvador drew their support from prominent military figures whose aim was to both eliminate the FMLN and their sympathizers as well as undermine civilian president José Napoleón Duarte. In addition to murdering those labelled guerrilla sympathizers, death squads were also known to massacre whole villages suspected of harboring guerrillas, especially in Guatemala. One well-known death squad that still operates currently in Central America is the Salvadoran-based Sombra Negra ("Black Shadow" in Spanish,) which consists of vigilantes that hunt down suspected criminals and gang members (see MS-13.)

In El Salvador, during the Salvadoran civil war, death squads achieved notoriety when far-right vigilantes assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero for his social activism in March 1980. A similar event occurred in December of the same year, when three American nuns and a lay worker were raped and murdered. Because the death squads involved were found to have been soldiers of the Salvadoran military, which was receiving U.S. funding and training from American advisors, these events prompted great outrage in the U.S., and let to a temporary cutoff in military aid from the Carter administration.

In Brazil, death squads are known to have killed poor people, such as homeless children, in Brazilian cities, simply to get rid of these 'undesirables', or as a form of extrajudicial policing (police are known to have been involved in death squads).

In Haiti, the paramilitary death squad Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH,) organized in mid-1993, terrorized the supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by murder, massacres, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighborhoods, and severing limbs by machete. Its goal was to destroy popular support for Aristide and his Lavalas political movement through indiscriminate terror. Aristide had been elected in a landslide victory in 1991, enjoying great popularity among the Haitian poor, but served only eight months before being deposed in a military coup. The junta that ruled from 1991 to 1994 gave free reign to both military and FRAPH repression. Several thousand Haitians either fled to the Dominican Republic or Florida, where the U.S. was forced to deal with a severe refugee problem. Aristide was later restored to the presidency through U.S. military intervention in 1994.

The U.S.-operated School of the Americas is often cited as having served as a training ground for members of death squads in Latin America by several human rights activists, most prominently SOA Watch (which terms it the "School of the Assassins"). Some graduates have gone on to commit atrocities as key military figures, though the School officially denies that any human rights abuses are taught in the curriculum (which it considers to have improved and modernized since the end of the Cold War) and claims that the majority of its graduates have not demonstrated such behavior.

Other

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 to be shot or beaten to death. More than 1.6 million Cambodians fell victim before the Khmer Rouge were overthrown.

The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was carried out by numerous death squads called the Interahamwe (see History of Rwanda). Members of these killing squads hunted down Tutsis and moderate Hutus in many towns and villages. The Interahamwe typically chopped up their victims with machetes or shot them at close range. The Rwandan Hutu armed forces often helped in these massacres, which killed from 650,000 to 800,000 before the Rwandan Patriotic Front took over the country in July of that year.

In the late 1990s, the use of paramilitary death squads by Serb warlords and President Slobodan Milošević against Albanian separatists in Kosovo caused the Clinton administration to retalitate, with NATO cooperation, by launching a bombing campaign against Serbian forces in the area. As predicted, the bombing campaign, which targeted civilian infrastructure, including bridges, government buildings, and radio stations, caused huge flows of refugees. The administration defended its actions by claiming that the potential chaos resulting from ethnic conflict between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs would have been devastating had NATO not intervened.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials used the term death squad to describe fedayeen paramilitary forces loyal to Saddam Hussein's regime, who used guerrilla tactics to fight U.S. and U.K. troops. Saddam Hussein himself had employed death squads, known as Fedayeen Saddam, to kill tens of thousands of Shiite Arabs and Kurds during rebellions he crushed in 1988 and 1991.

In Northern Ireland, Loyalist and Republican death squads have been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people.