The dark world of political murder
Syed Badrul Ahsan studies a work on assassinations in history
Assassins have regularly been part of humanity's darker side. And assassinations have throughout history been an insidious part of politics, or a mutation of it into a calling of the lowest of categories in human behaviour. For those of us who inhabit South Asia, assassinations have done a good deal to undermine our perspectives on politics and on life in general. In Bangladesh, the assassinations of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his political associates at the hands of soldiers in 1975 were to leave an entire nation in a tailspin only three years after it had gained freedom from Pakistan in a bloody war of liberation. In Pakistan itself, the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 and then the killing of his daughter Benazir Bhutto in 2007 only demonstrated the degree to which assassinations could go in damaging a country. But, of course, Pakistan first went through assassination in October 1951, when its first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was murdered in Rawalpindi. The story in India has hardly been any different. Indira Gandhi died at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Barely seven years later, it was her son Rajiv Gandhi who was murdered in Sriperumbudur. And then there is the long litany of murder and mayhem in Sri Lanka, beginning with the assassination of Prime Minister SDRD Bandaranaike in the late 1950s. In the tumult caused by the conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government in Colombo, Sri Lanka has seen a number of its prominent figures fall prey to terrorist attacks. Prominent among these figures have been Ranasinghe Premadasa and Lalith Athulathmudali. And then, to be sure, there are the assassinations which have been carried out far from the shores of the subcontinent. The tragic end of the Kennedy brothers in 1963 and 1968, together with that of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, was to have a profound effect on politics in the United States. Or do political murders have any effect on politics other than causing momentary interruptions in the normal conduct of government? In this riveting account of the history of assassinations, Paul Elliott examines some of the more notable murders which have taken place around the world and appears willing to agree that while assassins have by and large had little influence on a shaping of events through their dark deeds, they nevertheless have left behind the big question of how things might have shaped up had they not come into the picture. Elliott refers to that cataclysmic moment in English history in the twelfth century when Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by loyalists of King Henry II. The archbishop tried to save himself, but as he was about to mount the steps leading out of the chapel, the assassins caught up with him. One of them shouted: "Where is the Archbishop?" Becket turned and declared: "Here I am, no traitor but a priest of God, and I marvel that you have entered the church of God in such attire. What do you want with me?" One of the four knight-assassins told him brusquely: "That you should die. You cannot live any longer!" Elliott goes back in time, all the way to the rivalry between Pompey and Caesar in Rome. Both men were brilliant soldiers. Both were desirous of claiming the niche Sulla had earlier occupied in politics. And yet ambition came in the way of both. A better tactician than Pompey, Julius Caesar made it known, once he and his men had crossed the Rubicon, that the time for a negotiated settlement had passed. Pompey fled to Egypt, where treacherous soldiers on his staff, eager to curry favours with the newly powerful Caesar, killed him. Weeks later, when Caesar himself arrived in Egypt, Pompey's head was presented to him by the assassins. He turned his face away in disgust. Only four years later, Caesar himself was assassinated in the senate by politicians unhappy with his dictatorship. Assassinations, as the writer makes fairly obvious, have sometimes been part of politics. To what extent murder could reshape politics, or leave it twisted out of all recognisable shape, was to be seen in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Joseph Stalin was unable to tolerate enemies, real or imagined. And so it was that the purges commenced, with not a little help from the likes of Lavrenti Beria. Stalin was a strong leader; he had an enormity of understanding of world literature. But none of that could explain the ruthlessness which was to characterise his leadership of the Soviet Union. He would not rest till he had archrival Leon Trotsky murdered in faraway Mexico in 1940. The assassin was named Ramon Mercader. Assassinations are sometimes an outcome of individual frustration. The murder of Britain's prime minister Spencer Perceval in 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons is one such instance. The good news for Britons is that except for Perceval, none of their prime ministers have been murdered, though it appears the Nazis did try blowing Winston Churchill to pieces as he flew back to London on his way from the Casablanca conference. Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet went through a real brush with death at a Tory party conference in the late 1980s. Such good fortune has generally eluded the Americans, who have seen four of their presidents murdered. One, Ronald Reagan, survived bullet wounds in 1981. Sweden's Olof Palme was not so lucky. He was killed as he stepped out of a theatre with his wife on a winter evening. His blood littered the fallen snow. An unquestionably fortunate survivor of assassination attempts was General Charles de Gaulle. The number of times his enemies tried to kill him remains unparalleled and yet he survived it all. Altogether thirty one attempts were made to kill the French leader, prompting the writer Frederick Forsyth to weave his tale in The Day of the Jackal around a move to try to kill him. In July 1944, one of Hitler's staff officers tried to blow him up. The attempt failed. It is a good, if sometimes macabre, read you have here. The story of how the ninja came to be employed as assassins in warlord-driven Japan puts a new perspective on how murders can be organised. The work would have been a trifle more substantive if Elliott had cast his net wider, to include in the narrative the many murders which have been committed in Asia and Africa over the years. Mahatma Gandhi and Abubakr Tafawa Balewa, together with the likes of Abdel Karim Kassem, Celal Bayar and King Faisal (in both Iraq and Saudi Arabia) could indeed have been some very readable chapters.
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