Our bloody histories show assassination is in our DNA
Political murders, revenge killings and assassinations are eternal shadows that plague humanity and stability. As English historian Michael Burleigh demonstrates in Day of the Assassins – A History of Political Murder, they don’t always change the course
They have always lived among us – the assassins and those who contract them; two particular and unique manifestations in the bloodline of the most dangerous predator on Earth: Homo sapiens.
Throughout human history, the assassin has stalked the shadows of political and quotidian life. From the murder of Julius Caesar to modern-day targeted US military drone strikes as well as the cold-blooded butchering of Washington Post correspondent Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, it is clear we are a consistently genocidal species.
Apart from whether assassinations work or result in a predicted political outcome, there are the ethical and moral dimensions to this violent method of political warfare that endure into the 21st century.
Franco-American philosopher George Steiner often began lectures by asking students what they would do should Adolf Hitler walk into the room and they had the opportunity to kill him, knowing what we do now. Plato and Aristotle argued that tyrannicide – the murder a tyrant – could be justified.
It was British statesman Benjamin Disraeli who, in 1865 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, opined that “assassination has never changed the history of the world”.
English historian Michael Burleigh, who has written extensively on World War 2, has recently published a massively readable tome, Day of the Assassins – A History of Political Murder (Picador), in which he warns: “In many democracies, politics have become so angry and polarised that one wonders why it [assassination] is still a comparatively rare occurrence.”
South Africans are deeply aware that in this neck of the woods assassinations are not a “rare occurrence”; they have featured as a more or less permanent trope in South African politics, including post-apartheid South Africa.
SACP leader Chris Hani’s assassination by right-wing zealot Janusz Waluś in 1993 is one of the most high-profile killings. There have been a reported 450 political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal alone since 1994.
The assassination on 23 August of Gauteng Health Department CFO Babita Deokaran, a key witness in a Special Investigation Unit probe into PPE procurement irregularities in the department, falls in the category of a “political” assassination as it implicates officials deployed to the department by the governing party.
Burleigh’s deep and detailed dive into the world of contract killers, their conspirators and masterminds debunks Disraeli’s quip and shows that assassinations can prompt catastrophic political consequences.
The murder in 1934 in Leningrad of Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s potential rival, by a stranger was used by the Soviet strongman as an excuse to begin the first “great purge” from 1936 to 1938 during which millions were persecuted, tortured and killed.
After going off duty, these [drone] crews return to their families, so that they might be bathing their children within 40 minutes of killing a stranger in a foreign country
In 1994 in Rwanda, the assassination of president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutus, in a plane crash triggered the devastating genocide in which almost a million Tutsis died.
Burleigh sets out how the event did not end with the genocide. Hutus in Zaire launched attacks on Rwanda and, as the US- and French-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s power waned, Angola, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe invaded Zaire. Mobutu was deposed and Laurent Kabila installed.
The historian’s chapter on Putin’s Russia, where assassinations are as commonplace as matryoshka dolls, finds some resonance with contemporary South Africa and its political/organised criminal nexus in relation to organised killings.
As countries go, Putin’s Russia already topped the contract killer stakes with 750 actual or attempted assassinations between 1998 and 1999.
This was just as Putin resigned from the KGB to focus on “public administration” and stimulating the economy in Leningrad. The plan involved building casinos and driving a scheme for the sale of oil, scrap metal and cotton in exchange for food for the starving citizens of Leningrad, who received not a morsel.
Meanwhile, the US, Burleigh suggests, has consistently ignored evidence that “terrorist organisations tend to collapse more quickly by not assassinating their leaders because of internal factionalism and war-weariness”.
The historian laments a CIA that has twice been fashioned into a paramilitary force rather than an intelligence-gathering organisation.
The Cold War resulted in several authorised killings, including that of Patrice Lumumba, the independent Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected president, in 1961.
Lumumba’s assassination was particularly diabolical. After an attempted poisoning, he was shot, buried, exhumed, hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid. Cuban leader Fidel Castro, too, was a frequent target of successive US presidents.
The list of US targeted executions is long and Burleigh explores each of these from Osama bin Laden to Al-Qaeda’s military head Muhammad Atef in his chapter Targeted Assassinations.
Since 2010, drones have been used to kill between 7,584 and 10,918 people, including between 751 and 1,555 civilians, the author notes. Burleigh dares to ask who these young Americans are who control these Predator drones and what the impact is on their lives.
“The bureaucratic politics of drone warfare should not distract from the reality of young men and women sitting in trailers steering drones with a joystick and pressing a button to kill people seven or eight thousand miles away,” he writes. Thousands of men and women have flown drones and “a few of them have written or spoken of what they do”.
Burleigh sets out how there are usually three personnel in each drone-flying trailer who are in constant communication with up to 20 people – “Like any bureaucracy involved in killing, responsibility is compartmentalized and dispersed.”
The drone teams, he writes, work 12-hour shifts, “which can be scheduled so that they see the target country in daylight while it is night outside in Nevada”.
“The most common feeling amongst the drone crews is tedium interspersed with brief adrenaline rushes.”
He notes: “After going off duty, these crews return to their families, so that they might be bathing their children within 40 minutes of killing a stranger in a foreign country.”
Israel’s record of assassinations harks back to the killing of Lord Moyne, Churchill’s friend, in Cairo in 1944 and the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946.
Burleigh says Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, holds the world record for “external assassinations”, with about 2,700 victims. It has a “semi-acknowledged” campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists.
When Burleigh does make a quick turn to South Africa, it is to unpack the assassination of apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd inside the House of Assembly by Dimitri Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger and member of the South African Communist Party, in September 1966.
A previous attempt on Verwoerd’s life in 1960 – at the Pretoria Show by millionaire farmer David Pratt – had failed. In both cases, the Pretoria government attempted to paint the assassins as “insane”.
Verwoerd’s death by multiple stab wounds did not, however, lead to the demise of apartheid. Tsafendas’ act served to strengthen the resolve of hardcore racial nationalists, who, like Verwoerd, were prepared to racially, politically, socially and economically rearrange South Africa by force.
Julius Caesar was 56, the same age as Abraham Lincoln was when he died, when more than 20 senators plunged their daggers into him as he sat on his gold and ivory throne on the morning of 15 March 44BCE.
The emperor had been so convinced that he was untouchable that he had dispensed with his Spanish bodyguards.
Personal protection, so beloved of former South African president Jacob Zuma and so many other politicians, was a pretension, warned Aristotle, of “one who is aiming at tyranny”.
In the author’s almost 500-page excavation of political murder, there are scores of individual killers and collective political conspiracies to choose from.
There are many standout assassins, including Fanny Kaplan, the half-blind Socialist Revolutionary member who attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in August 1918 after suffering 11 years of hard labour in Tsarist labour camps.
For her deed, Kaplan was shot in the neck by the Bolsheviks and burned in a barrel.
Then there is Alexander Orlov, the Spanish head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in the 1930s and “a specialist in organising the deaths of ‘those to be liquidated’”.
Orlov, who was alert enough to have noticed that the NKVD officers summoned to Moscow seemed to disappear, slipped away on board a boat to Canada with his wife after embezzling $68,000 from the NKVD.
It was Orlov who first exposed Soviet spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean inside British Intelligence.
Burleigh enlivens the history on the pages, transporting the reader to the Senate in Rome with Caesar’s killers or to Mexico as Trotsky’s killer stealthily plots his way into the heart of the Soviet exile’s home.
As with ancient religious wars, the advent of modern pseudo-religious ideologies, says the author, licensed any number of “symbolic murders” targeting monarchs, prime ministers, judges and police officers as well as such symbols as opera houses and stock exchanges.
“When these ideologies captured powerful states, then the number of assassinations skyrocketed since states have many murderers at their disposal and their rulers sometimes operate with a different morality from that of ordinary men and women.”
The historian’s chapter on Putin’s Russia, where assassinations are as commonplace as matryoshka dolls, finds some resonance with contemporary South Africa and its political/organised criminal nexus in relation to organised killings