‘I Decided, This Is Not My War’ : Argentine Witnesses Tell of Terrorism by Military

BUENOS AIRES —  Ernesto Urien wanted to be a professional soldier. He found a dirty war in which his fellow officers loyally obeyed orders. They kidnaped thousands of people, tortured them, killed them and tossed their bodies into unmarked graves.

“For many officers, it was a holy war, a crusade against communism,” Urien said recently in an interview. “Torture was the accepted way of obtaining information.”

But 1st Lt. Urien rebelled. “I decided, this is not my war,” he said. “I didn’t want to be an accomplice.” In 1980, he was declared inept by his superiors, who previously had given him high marks for military prowess. And he was cashiered.

Now, at 34, Urien runs a chain of family butcher shops, studies economics at a university and thinks it is time that Argentina and its armed forces came to terms with a dreadful past.

There are many like Urien in today’s democratic Argentina. In a daily recitation of horror, about 500 witnesses have documented, before a panel of six federal court judges, what amounts to an epidemic of state terrorism.

More than 1,000 other survivors are waiting to be called to the witness stand in the trial of nine former military commanders, three of them former presidents, accused of institutionalizing barbarism from 1976 through 1980. The trial is public, but the defendants, who are in comfortable jail cells awaiting its outcome, refuse to attend. It is their right.

From the government’s perspective, the commanders’ trial, ordered personally by President Raul Alfonsin, is an advertisement for the young democracy, a belated but historic victory for the rule of law.

Among vociferous defense lawyers, and privately within the armed forces, the trial is derided as a political exercise. A retired general has denounced it as “a Nuremberg in reverse,” in which the winners of a war they never sought are being punished for winning.

The debate is stark, like the pain and the pathos that the witnesses bring with them to the wood-paneled courtroom.

Last week, witness Marina Kriscautzky recalled the night of Aug. 15, 1978, when armed men in civilian clothing and military boots came for her father, Ruben, a Communist and a dentist. She was 13 at the time. The intruders took everybody in the house, including the dog. Mother, daughter and the dog were freed without mistreatment.

When the women got home, they found that it had been ransacked. “They took the vacuum cleaner, the television, the iron, the hair dryer, the sewing machine, clothes . . . even the dishes and the silverware,” the young woman said.

Ruben Kriscautzky is among the 9,000 victims of what has come to be known as the “dirty war” who are still missing, by count of a blue-ribbon presidential commission.

In a cluttered office with a leaky roof in the federal courthouse downtown, Prosecutor Julio Strassera makes no pretense at dispassion.

‘Evidence Is Overwhelming’

“I am proving the accusations,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming. They even murdered 14-year-olds for demanding reduced bus fares for schoolchildren. We didn’t know of such things then; they were smothered by propaganda. Now we all know.”

The government argues that the military officers conceived and directed a nationwide campaign of repression that made kidnaping, torture, murder, theft and forgery everyday tools of public policy, implemented by all three branches of the armed forces and police forces around the country.

The repression quelled the terror by Marxist guerrillas. But according to human rights groups, as many as 95% of the military’s victims had nothing to do with the guerrillas.

“The war against subversion was a pretext to get rid of those who opposed military rule,” Urien said. “All opposition was subversive.”

Three Ex-Presidents

Accused of offenses that could bring life sentences are former Presidents Jorge R. Videla, Roberto E. Viola and Leopoldo F. Galtieri. Also being tried are Adm. Emilio E. Massera and air force Lt. Gen. Orlando R. Agosti, who served in the junta with Videla from 1976 to 1981; Adm. Armando Lambruschini and Lt. Gen. Omar D. Graffigna, of Viola’s 1981 junta, and Adm. Jorge I. Anaya and Lt. Gen. Basilio Lami Dozo, who were expelled from office with Galtieri by their military peers after the disastrous Falkland Islands war of 1982.

The defense has argued variously that the officers were acting under orders to “annihilate” subversion, that excess was never a matter of policy, that the junta leaders were unaware of any excess, that if there was excess, it was the work of overzealous junior officers.

Testimony from relatives of desaparecidos (people who disappeared) and from survivors of clandestine detention centers must be discounted, defense lawyers insist, because of their leftist political links or the desire for revenge.

711 Specific Cases

Strassera’s case is based on 711 specific illegal detentions culled from the massive documentation compiled last year by the presidential commission.

Cases are presented in the context of the clandestine centers to which kidnaped prisoners were taken. Witnesses regularly testify that people they saw in custody are among those still missing.

Last week, testimony centered on a clandestine center called El Vesuvio that was run by the army on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. A guard at El Vesuvio was nicknamed “El Paraguayo.” Witness Estrella Iglesias met him after she was kidnaped from her home in 1978.

“He didn’t know how to reason,” she said. “. . . Silence scared him. He resolved the problem by hitting people to make them scream.”

Earlier testimony described a clandestine jail and torture center, controlled by the air force, in an old house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires known to prisoners as the Sere Mansion.

Navy Detention Center

The government’s case will climax, probably next month, with testimony about the navy’s dreaded clandestine detention center at a school for mechanics in Buenos Aires.

“At least 4,000 prisoners went in,” Strassera said. “Very few came out alive. We are demonstrating that the same system of repression functioned exactly the same way all around the country, on orders from above.”

Strassera said he believes that the testimony demonstrates conclusively that the junta leaders not only knew what was happening but also lied systematically to discourage internal and international inquiry.

Urien, in his testimony, told of a fellow lieutenant--he died later, in a training accident--who was ordered to dig up bodies in the interior city of Cordoba lest they be discovered by a visiting human rights team from the Organization of American States.

Testimony by Derian

When Patricia Derian, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Carter Administration, appeared as a prosecution witness, defense lawyers stalked from the courtroom.

“Ask President Reagan what he thinks of that woman,” one of the lawyers told a reporter who asked why he was leaving.

In blunt testimony, Derian joined other international witnesses who said they had expressed concern about human rights abuses directly to Argentine leaders. Videla once told her, she said, that it was “difficult to control the lower rank personnel, particularly those who had seen their comrades die at the hands of the terrorists.” She said she replied, “If you are the commander, you are responsible.”

In 1977, Derian said, Admiral Massera told her: “The navy is not torturing. It is the army and the air force who are doing it.”

Allusion to Pilate

On another occasion that same year, Derian said, she met Massera at the mechanics’ school and told him she thought it possible that people were being tortured in the school even as they spoke. Massera, she said, “smiled, made the gesture of washing his hands and asked me, ‘Do you remember what happened with Pontius Pilate?’ ”

The trial has pleased Argentine human rights groups, but they see it as only a beginning. They insist that all the others who are guilty of human rights abuses must follow the commanders to court.

Strassera agrees. “We keep hearing the same names, about 1,200 of them,” he said.

The Alfonsin government, facing the military’s hostility--particularly that of junior officers who say they were just carrying out orders--has not yet committed itself to a more sweeping search for more defendants.

Limit to Prosecutions

There is lively debate within the government on how far to proceed. The government denies that it is considering an amnesty, but there is persistent speculation that once the current trial is over, Alfonsin may limit further prosecutions, either by the severity of the crimes or by the rank of the personnel alleged to have committed them.

“What I seek is not necessarily a solution, but a conclusion,” Alfonsin is reliably reported to have told friends.

So profound are the issues, so explosive the passions, that whatever conclusion Alfonsin ultimately seeks, he is bound to outrage some important sector of the society.

Ernesto Urien, as a case in point, sees the trial as the last best chance of democratizing the Argentine armed forces.

Urien was the youngest of 33 officers, ranging in rank from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, who were cashiered from the army for opposing the repression. The decree ordering his obligatory retirement charged that Urien was “not imbued with the philosophy and institutional feeling of the army.”

It was not his war, but Urien insists that it is his army. Whatever else the trial is testing, he says, it is demonstrating that the army “must belong to the nation, not to the people who command it.”