Political Assassination

WITH A LONG LEGACY throughout history, political assassination has more recently come under the study of crime, and has been delineated between assassinations of a specific individual person or group, or assassinations of persons targeted by chance but with a political agenda. These two main groups may be distinguished by a dozen typologies, which overlap often or describe escalating phases of a conflict.

Assassinations to get rid of a ruling politician and to destabilize the political situation within a country are widely known in democratic and nondemocratic societies. The best known examples are the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States during the 1960s, or the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Although the moral and sometimes political impact of those assassinations is large, in democracies the political system is seldom changed by such events. Though in dictatorial regimes the elimination of a ruling person may change the regime itself, democracies tend to be able to survive such assassinations as they have proper and accepted rules for succession in place. A recent case of an assassination to change (in the view of the assassin) the course of national politics was the Yitzhak Rabin murder during what was believed to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Assassinations to start or complete a military coup may be used to overthrow a weak democratic system or to change one dictatorial regime for another. Sometimes it is done by local military forces[Page 621] alone, but other cases have had heavy involvement from Western intelligence agencies.

Assassinations as a tool of war within a civil war are known in many countries all over the world. After Germany became a republic following its defeat in World War I, a large campaign of political murder was engaged by elements of the extreme right, which claimed the lives of several leading politicians. A starting point for the civil war in El Salvador was the shooting of Archbishop Oscar Romero by a murder squad of the extreme rightwing paramilitary. More recent cases include the shooting of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic as part of the fading Yugoslav civil war (allegedly linked to mafia involvement), or the killing of Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud by a suicide assassin of Taliban or al-Qaeda origin, in a nearly coincident timing with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Assassinations by separatist groups are a common tool to underline their political goals. Some examples include the bombing of Lord Louis Mountbatten by Catholic separatists from Northern Ireland, or the killings of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi by Sikh and Tamil separatists in India.

Assassinations of political opponents or dissidents by totalitarian regimes in the country or abroad became prevalent especially during the fascist period. Although Benito Mussolini made this part of fascist policy, Adolf Hitler epitomized it during the so-called Roehm-Putsch when he personally ordered and supervised the killing of dissidents within the Nazi party in 1934 (Ernst Roehm, a highranking and brutal Nazi official, was killed during this internal purge).

Communist regimes, especially during the Stalinist era employed the same tools; the most famous victim was Leon Trotsky, who was brutally murdered in his Mexican exile. Another example is the killing of opposition leader Benigno Aquino upon his return from exile to the Philippines. An assassination of this type could also happen as a formal death penalty by a court, for example many victims of the Nazi terror were sentenced to death for minor “crimes” by the so-called Volksgerichtshof (Court of the People).

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