The Struggle For International Justice

3
The struggle for international justice

Tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May
For radicals in the 1960s the need for engagement was paramount. Sartre
made the terms clear: ‘we are not priests and it is not a question of
distributing equally the accusations and blame nor of giving the same
number of moral sermons to the East and the West’.1 Two episodes in
1967 demonstrated the mindset of radicals of the tiers-mondiste period,
bent upon opposing an authority that they identified with imperialism
and whose use of violence they rejected: the International War Crimes
Tribunal, which found the US guilty of genocide in the conduct of war
in Southeast Asia; and the incarceration of French philosopher-turned-
guerrilla Régis Debray, arrested by the Bolivian junta after a stay with
Che Guevara. Four years later, a campaign following the arrest of Cuban
poet Heberto Padilla indicated the changes occurring in the perception of
tiers-mondiste models. The humiliation of Padilla, who had been one of
the leading intellectual lights of Castro’s Havana, provoked a watershed
for French supporters of the Cuban government. It marked the first stage
in the severing of what Sirinelli described as ‘a red thread which, since the
start of the 1960s, linked the “121” to the signatories for Vietnam and
the petitioners – those on the left, at least – in favour of Régis Debray,
waiting for May 1968’.2
In the 1950s and especially 1960s, French tiers-mondistes were fasci-
nated by the figure of the guerrilla fighter. Despite the differences in cul-
ture, geography, and history, the Cuban and Vietnamese struggles were
united in the role they played in establishing the figure of the guerrilla in
the imaginary of European third-worldists. (Though Mao’s contribution
to guerrilla warfare was by no means insignificant, his victories in the late
1940s were rather distant for the younger generation who turned to the
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82 Violence and morality
third world for inspiration after Algeria.) Thanks to Guevara’s 1967 call
for the creation of ‘two, three, many Vietnams’, the Vietnamese resistance
was explicitly linked to the world’s most celebrated guerrilla warrior.3
The guerrillero, immortalised in Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of
Che, became ‘the representative of a new politics and of a new relation-
ship between State and masses – individual, mystical, voluntaristic and
unquestionably a model of command’.4
However, as this model of command took on an increasingly authori-
tarian hue, the position of the guerrilla fighter as an embodiment of inter-
national justice came into question. Vietnam had been, in the eyes of tiers-
mondiste militants, ‘our Vercors and our Stalingrad, our Normandy land-
ing and our substitute Resistance’.5 The struggle against the US had been
seen as a just fight because it meant opposing racism and exploitation.
The ideological and intellectual mobilisation that had operated during
the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and the Latin American struggles,
began to falter with the discovery that one of its own could be imprisoned
not only by a right-wing military junta, but by a left-wing revolutionary
government. The figure of the political prisoner took on an increasing
importance as regimes on the far left began to lose the privilege that had
heretofore protected them from the criticism of revolutionary intellectuals
in France.
This chapter thus begins under the sign of tiers-mondisme and ends
with one of the first major turning points that marked the turn against
third-world revolutionary ideology. It argues that a tension within tiers-
mondiste campaigns between radical political goals and rights-based lan-
guage eventually resulted in the strengthening of the latter to the detri-
ment of the former. Despite the importance of militant models of action,
tiers-mondisme in many ways produced movements of intellectuals and
this element is particularly clear in the discussion that follows. It was seen
in the composition of the Russell Tribunal, the importance of Debray’s
writing, and the significance of Padilla’s status as a revolutionary intel-
lectual under threat. Moreover, the campaigning discussed in this chapter
had a manifestly textual, literary nature and often a judicial context. From
the witness statements and written judgements of the International War
Crimes Tribunal, to the powerful trial speeches of Régis Debray (not to
mention those of Fidel Castro in the decade before), to Heberto Padilla’s
distressed confessions, the choice of words and the movement of ideas
was essential.
And ideas certainly did move. In 1965, in spite of the need for a criti-
cal perspective, Sartre insisted ‘one must know which side he is on’.6 This
The struggle for international justice 83
was the logic of the International War Crimes Tribunal, censuring Amer-
ican violence in Vietnam, discussed in the first section of this chapter. It
shows how the Tribunal combined a tiers-mondiste vision of the Vietnam
War with references to international legal precedents. As in the case of
the Tribunal, opposition to imperialism was the motivation for Debray’s
decision to join the guerrilleros in Bolivia in 1967, discussed in section
two. However, the mobilisation on Debray’s behalf appealed to the indi-
vidual’s right to fair trial and freedom of speech. Finally, the third section
demonstrates how fidélistes turned against one of their idols in order to
defend Padilla against the security system of revolutionary Cuba. In the
first major moment of rupture with Cuba – indeed, with tiers-mondisme –
the campaigners for Padilla denounced the gap between their idealised
vision of progressive politics in Cuba and the reality of the state that the
revolution had created. The revolution, it seemed, was no longer synony-
mous with justice.
genocide and international conscience

The International War Crimes Tribunal, with three sessions across the
second half of 1967, sat in judgement upon American conduct in South-
east Asia. Generally known as the ‘Russell Tribunal’ after its instigator
and honorary president, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, it brought
together left-wing intellectuals from across the globe. Russell himself
expressed the scale of their ambition and the depth of their sense of duty:
‘we speak because silence is complicity, a lie, a crime. We expose in order
to arouse conscience’.7 Their ultimate wish was for the overthrow of the
abusive imperialist system they identified with the object of their investi-
gations: the US.
The Vietnamese liberation struggle, which the Russell Tribunal explic-
itly supported, was central to many tiers-mondiste movements. In 1954
French leftists had celebrated the victory of the Indochinese forces at Dien
Bien Phu as a triumph over colonialism. For the next twenty years, they
would continue to support the Communist government in Hanoi and the
FNL (or Vietcong), its allies in South Vietnam, against the government
in Saigon and the full-scale offensive war waged by the US ostensibly in
Saigon’s defence. The hatred of America was confirmed for many revo-
lutionary tourists during visits to Vietnam during the war: direct expe-
rience of the bombing campaigns provided more than enough evidence
of America’s murderous intent and cemented the visitors’ revulsion. For
this reason – its galvanising effect – radical documentarist Chris Marker
compared the campaign for Vietnamese victory to the international

mobilisation during the Spanish Civil War.8 The paradoxical portrayal of
the Vietnamese as both endangered underdog and inevitable victor was a
feature of tiers-mondiste analyses of the war. In the words of an editorial
in Partisans, which more than once devoted entire issues to it: ‘ours is the
generation of the Vietnam War’.9
The soixante-huitard generation made the North Vietnamese cause its
own. It served frequently as a motif, as when protestors chanted ‘Ho,
Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ or when the Boulevard Saint-Michel was rebaptised
the ‘Boulevard du Vietnam Héroïque’. According to Alain Krivine French
students learned these slogans during German street protests, evidence of
the transnational connections between radical activists travelling within
Europe.10 Solidarity committees were also a common feature of Euro-
pean third-worldism, in this instance represented in the creation of the
Comité Vietnam National (CVN) by Trotskyist groups and the Comités
Vietnam de Base (CVB) by Maoist groups. The journal of the CVB groups
was called Victoire pour le Vietnam and it reported on both the activi-
ties of French campaigners and events in Vietnam. When the Front Sol-
idarité Indochine (FSI) was founded in April 1971 as successor to the
CVN, it paid tribute to the inspirational role the Vietnamese people had
played for the May ’68 movements in France and affirmed that ‘the fate
of all the peoples of the world is decided in large part on the Indochi-
nese battlefields’.11 Historians have indicated how the mobilisation for
Vietnam activated the eruption of May ’68 in Paris – in an immediate
sense, because it was at protests in the wake of the Tet offensive that the
first, contested arrests occurred which began the escalation of clashes.12
But also in a broader sense, because the Vietnamese cause united many
militants in the CVN and CVB, brought them onto the streets, provided
a model of revolutionary combat and, in the case of the CVB, provided
the initial groupings for the ‘action committees’ in May.13 Ironically, then,
the May–June events were no doubt one of the most important reasons
for the drop in protests relating to the Vietnam War that occurred in
France from 1968–71, when the anti-war movement in America was at its
peak.14
Few dissenting voices could be heard.15 Left-wing adversaries of the US
drowned out those on the right who may have supported the American
intervention. The PCF was an opponent of the American offensive,
although tiers-mondistes considered its call for ‘Peace in Vietnam’ a
betrayal of the emancipatory and revolutionary vocation of the Viet-
namese liberation struggle. Obliged by more radical groups to intensify
its stance, from 1967–8 onwards the PCF adopted the tiers-mondiste slo-
gan ‘Victory for the FNL [FNL vaincra]’ and multiplied its campaigning
efforts.16 On the other side of the political spectrum, President Charles
de Gaulle had dramatically criticised American involvement in Vietnam.
As Richard Falk, an international law scholar and later a UN Special
Rapporteur, commented at the time, ‘the fact that it [was] plausible to
contemplate such a proceeding and to obtain for its tribunal several cel-
ebrated individuals bears witness to the general perception of the war’.17
Opposition to the Vietnam War brought together moderates, Commu-
nists, non-communists, and radicals, with the militant vanguard of young
tiers-mondistes leading the charge in the streets.
In this context, Russell – a philosopher, mathematician, Nobel laure-
ate, and anti-nuclear campaigner – could be explicit about the orientation
of the International War Crimes Tribunal. He indicated the scale of his
ambition when he affirmed that ‘a Tribunal such as ours will be necessary
until the last starving man is fed and a way of life is created which ends
exploitation of the many by the few’.18 Russell’s introduction to the col-
lected texts of the Tribunal sessions expressed his hope that ‘the peoples
of the Third World will take heart from the example of the Vietnamese
and join further in dismantling the American empire’. He argued that
the imperial thrust, the ‘attempt to create empires’, inevitably resulted
in war crimes, because ‘once one believes colonial peoples to be unter-
menschen – “gooks” is the American term – one has destroyed the basis
of all civilised codes of conduct’.19 His inflammatory choice of wording
placed Nazi racial politics in parallel with contemporary racism. Tariq Ali,
a British-Pakistani writer, in the 1960s a New Left activist, and one of the
Tribunal’s witnesses, understood that the entire War Crimes Tribunal was
conceived as ‘a moral intervention to expose an immoral war’.20
The Russell Tribunal held three sessions to receive evidence and testi-
mony about the Vietnam War. Two of these sessions, convened in Stock-
holm on 2–10 May and in Roskilde on 20 November–1 December,
were more significant than the other, held in Tokyo on 28–30 August.
The two Scandinavian sessions are the most often cited and the focus
of the texts discussed here.21 Historians have criticised the Tribunal’s
procedural defects: the lack of clear rules of evidence, lack of trans-
parency in the selection of members, the absence of an American defence,
and an unwillingness to apply consistent standards.22 Contemporaries in
France and elsewhere had also expressed concerns, with for instance Falk
labelling the Tribunal a ‘juridical farce’ and Thierry Maulnier, Académi-
cien and columnist for Le Figaro, criticising its flagrant one-sidedness.23
On a personal level, the Tribunal suffered from the rivalries and divisions
between a London faction and a Paris faction, though much friction arose
from the contentious behaviour of Ralph Schoenmann, Russell’s assistant,
whom many regarded as a provocateur and usurper of his employer’s
standing.24 The Paris faction was made up of Sartre; de Beauvoir; Lau-
rent Schwartz, a French mathematician and anti–Algerian war activist;
and Yugoslav dissident Vladimir Dedijer. Although its members and many
of its investigators came from an older generation of intellectuals, the
Tribunal sessions in Stockholm and Roskilde attracted younger radicals
from across Europe and thus facilitated connections amongst these spec-
tators as well as between European radicals and some of the American
participants in the sessions.25
As the Russell Tribunal’s executive president and most effective
spokesman in France, Sartre found himself at the crest of an intellectual
wave which, in its structuralist moment, had threatened to displace him.
This was Sartre’s most active tiers-mondiste period: Noureddine Lam-
ouchi, in a study of his engagements, saw the Vietnam War as Sartre’s
last great engagement and dated the end of his anti-colonialist radicalism
to 1975 when this war finished.26 His biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal,
agreed and also stressed his anti-Americanism in this period.27 For Paige
Arthur, it was ‘Sartre’s global fame and his willingness to use it in the
service of non-Europeans that was important’ in his anti-colonial engage-
ment.28 In 1964, Sartre had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in recognition of his ‘far-reaching influence on our age’, which he refused.
Russell himself had been awarded the same prize in 1950 and his engage-
ment in UK public life, particularly in the pacifist movement and against
totalitarianism and nuclear proliferation, made him a powerful moral
and political figure. However, given Russell’s infirmity and the resulting
impossibility of his attending the sessions, Sartre’s role as executive pres-
ident was even more prominent than it might otherwise have been. With
the Tribunal’s executive president (Sartre) and chairman (Dedijer) among
their number, the French faction effectively dominated the conduct of
proceedings.
The Tribunal’s first session, held in Stockholm, examined three ques-
tions. It considered whether the US had committed aggression in violation
of international law; the extent to which civilian sites were bombed; and
whether Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea could be considered
accomplices of US aggression in Vietnam. The session was attended by,
among others and alongside the Paris faction already mentioned: Isaac
Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky; Melba Hernandez, Cuban pro-
Vietnamese campaigner and a veteran of Moncada; Dave Dellinger, an
American pacifist; Lawrence Daly, Scottish union leader; Peter Weiss,

German playwright; and Gunther Anders, a Jewish philosopher. It took
submissions from investigative missions and eyewitness testimony from
visitors to Vietnam, on specific incidents as well as general trends and
scientific enquiries. Notable French contributors included veteran Maoist
historian Jean Chesneaux, who gave an overview of American interven-
tion in Vietnam from 1945; tiers-mondiste journalist Gérard Chaliand,
who spoke about the bombing of Dai Lai; and Trotskyist doctor Jean-
Michel Krivine, a pied-rouge in Algeria in 1963, who testified about
bombings in North Vietnam.29 The selection of witnesses in this and
other sessions – activists, academics, reporters – reflected the Tribunal’s
tiers-mondiste position but also its public education ambitions. On
10 May 1967 the Tribunal unanimously found the US and its ‘accom-
plices’ guilty on all counts.
After being told that no more sessions were permitted in Sweden, the
Russell Tribunal moved its hearings to Denmark at the end of 1967. The
Roskilde session dealt largely with the nature of weaponry being used
by the US in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia. It considered
whether the US had used methods banned by international law, such as
chemical weapons; whether prisoners of war had been subjected to inhu-
mane treatment, including torture; whether civilians were the target of
attacks or reprisals; and, most sensationally, whether US actions in Viet-
nam constituted genocide. The Roskilde session drew heavily on the tes-
timony of former American servicemen, including Donald Duncan, a for-
mer member of the ‘Green Beret’ Special Forces group in Vietnam, and
Peter Martinsen, who had served there as a prisoner of war interrogator.
Several French journalists again contributed, including Jean Bertolino, the
1967 recipient of the Prix Albert Londres for his reporting on conflicts
in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The complicity of the Japanese
Government with American aggression was the only point of disagree-
ment when the verdict was voted upon. On all other questions, including
whether ‘the United States Government [was] guilty of genocide against
the people of Vietnam’, the answer was unanimously in the affirmative.
When the verdict was pronounced, it was celebrated by Radio Libera-
tion in South Vietnam and reported with enthusiasm by Tricontinental.30
The final verdict of the Russell Tribunal was thus received as it had been
intended: as part of a tiers-mondiste and anti-imperialist agenda.
Yet despite the obvious bias, criticised at the time and since, and notwith-
standing its organisers’ willingness to declare their own personal par-
tisanship, they endeavoured to portray the Tribunal as an independent
space where law and evidence reigned. Great emphasis was placed upon
the supposed ‘powerlessness’ and ‘universality’ of the Tribunal, its inde-
pendence from official structures.31 The right to self-defence was offered,
though not accepted, and the organisers stated their disappointment at the
Johnson Administration’s (predictable) refusal to participate in any way.32
The process was one of investigation, evidence, summation, and judge-
ment. Sartre conceded but dismissed the tension this created with the Tri-
bunal’s revolutionary perspective: ‘legalism is petit bourgeois when legis-
lation is petit bourgeois. But the fact is, precisely, that international laws
in spite of their origin, serve popular interests’.33
The Russell Tribunal was thus constructed with reference to specific
international laws and conventions, enumerated in the verdicts of the
Stockholm and Roskilde sessions. The citation of agreements to which
the US had been party gave the Tribunal the strongest grounds for
condemnation of US actions in Vietnam. As regarded Vietnam specifi-
cally, they drew upon the 1954 Geneva Agreement ending the Indochina
War, recognising the unity of Vietnam and prohibiting the introduc-
tion of new troops and material. They cited the Kellogg–Briand Pact of
1928, which precluded the use of war as an instrument of foreign pol-
icy or as a means of ending diplomatic disputes, and its confirmation in
Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Along with a UN resolution of
14 December 1960 affirming the right to independence of colonial peo-
ples, these constituted the main texts proscribing the use of force in inter-
national affairs.
Other documents were cited as standards for the acceptable conduct of
war and treatment of civilians. The first of these was from the Hague Con-
ference of 1907, specifically the convention for Laws and Customs of War
on Land, limiting the nature and deployment of particular weaponry and
prohibiting bombardments of civilian installations. Similar clauses were
cited from the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Another precedent was the
International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, which in 1945–6
tried Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity.34 In particular, the verdicts
referred to Article 6 of the Nuremberg Statute, describing the crimes to
which individual responsibility applied: crimes against peace; war crimes
(such as murder, ill-treatment, deportation, plunder); and crimes against
humanity (such as murder, extermination, enslavement or persecution on
any grounds). American critics of the war, including Telford Taylor, chief
counsel for the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials, also invoked
the Nuremberg trials as a precedent for the condemnation of events in
Vietnam and Cambodia.35
Of all of these legal precedents, the Nuremberg Tribunal was the most
important in discourse surrounding the Russell Tribunal.36 The Nurem-
berg reference had two registers. In the first, like the other conventions
and declarations, it provided the basis for legalistic criticisms of US pol-
icy. It had a special place among the legal precedents because, unlike the
Geneva Conventions, it had been used to hold individuals responsible for
acts of war.37 It was also a powerful reference because of the success with
which the Allies and particularly the US had used the IMT to pursue their
own agenda not only against the Nazis but also against the Soviet Union
in the intensifying Cold War climate. The strong association of Nurem-
berg with American moral leadership – an association fostered by the
US – added to the weight of condemnation. Yet it is also important to
remember the Soviet role at the IMT: in the 1940s Soviet legal scholars
had advanced concepts of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against peace’, fun-
damental to the Nuremberg Charter, making significant contributions to
Nuremberg’s legal innovations. The Soviet experts working on Nurem-
berg included numerous figures with experience of the Moscow Trials
of 1936–8, including then Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs Andrei
Vyshinskii, who had conducted the show trials of the 1930s.38 The direct
link between Nuremberg and the Moscow Trials is a salient reminder of
the leftist tradition of conducting show trials within which the Russell
Tribunal can also be placed.
The second register of references to Nuremberg was emotive, facilitat-
ing comparisons between US conduct in Vietnam and the Nazi destruc-
tion of Europe. Hence Sartre’s claim, for example, that the Nuremberg
condemnations would be meaningless if they did not imply future pros-
ecutions for acts described by the Nuremberg laws. Through references
to Nuremberg the leaders of the American war effort, including Presi-
dent Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara,
were by implication put on the same level as such condemned Nazi crim-
inals as Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess. The power of this compari-
son explained the frequency with which Sartre and others alluded to the
Nuremberg precedent in interviews and statements regarding the Rus-
sell Tribunal. As Sartre made clear, the creators of Nuremberg were seen
by tiers-mondistes as indifferent to the third world. Their hypocrisy was
symbolised by the failure to denounce the 1945 massacres around Sétif,
which began on VE Day and took the lives of several thousand Algerians,
three months before the Nuremberg agreement was signed.39
One of the most sustained uses of the comparison between the Second
World War and contemporary conflict during the Russell Tribunal was
Sartre’s speech for the closing of the final session, on 1 December 1967.
Its tone was strident and its argumentation compact. Sartre unflinchingly
pronounced America guilty of genocide in Vietnam and drew a picture
of a war that ‘meets all of Hitler’s specifications’. In his analysis, Viet-
nam was in the line of the wars of decolonisation, which had pitted sub-
proletarian indigenous societies against the greater might of their colo-
nial oppressors. However, unlike during the colonial wars, there were
no economic interests to dissuade the US from pursuing its terrorism
against the Vietnamese to the genocidal end point. The conflict in Viet-
nam therefore took the form of ‘the only possible relationship between
an over-industrialised country and an underdeveloped country, that is to
say, a genocidal relationship implemented through racism’.40 The geno-
cidal nature of the American actions, according to Sartre, was in no way
diminished by the fact that the Vietnamese could surrender, should they
want badly enough to end the conflict.
In Sartre’s view, moreover, American blackmail through violence went
beyond Vietnam or even Southeast Asia: it was intended as a message to
the entire world. In the era of rapid communication, Sartre argued, ‘the
current genocide is conceived as an answer to people’s war and perpe-
trated in Vietnam not against the Vietnamese alone, but against human-
ity. . . . The group which the United States wants to intimidate and ter-
rorise by way of the Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety’.
The issue of complicity, the collaboration through silence that Russell also
evoked, was of the utmost importance in this Manichean, tiers-mondiste
world view. It created a mandate for personal engagement: ‘this crime,
carried out every day before the eyes of the world, renders all who do
not denounce it accomplices of those who commit it, so that we are being
degraded today for our future enslavement’.41 The Russell Tribunal’s ver-
dict of American responsibility for war crimes and genocide was thereby
shaped by Sartre into a call for individual engagement on the part of
Western citizens. His bibliographers considered it among the most strik-
ing texts he ever produced.42
Sartre accurately compared his interpretation of the Vietnam War to
his attitude towards FLN violence during the Algerian War. The right
to violence of the oppressed was the foundation of his preface to Les
damnés de la terre, echoed in his writing on the Cuban Revolution, and
provided the basis of his call for resistance to American aggression. ‘On
Genocide’ shared with some aspects of the anti–Algerian War campaign,
notably the Manifesto of the 121, a call to resistance based on the claim
that it was impossible to escape responsibility, not acting becoming a tacit
moral support for the aggressors. Radical opposition to a hegemonic US,

perceived by tiers-mondistes as racist and neo-imperialist, dovetailed with
less extreme concerns about the extension of US influence into French
daily life and culture.43 Sartre acknowledged that ‘I am, like other mem-
bers of the “tribunal,” a declared enemy of imperialism and that I feel
myself in solidarity with all those who fight against it. Commitment, from
this point of view, must be total’.44 In the tiers-mondiste view, there could
be no compromise with the genocidal American machine.
For this reason, the Nuremberg trials were one allusion among many
that attempted to establish parallels between the Vietnam War and
Hitler’s campaigns. Though these allusions were frequent, they were par-
ticularly favoured by the British and American participants, who tended
to use even more inflammatory rhetoric than the Paris group. Russell led
the way, declaring that ‘the United States has behaved in Vietnam as Hitler
behaved in Eastern Europe and essentially for the same reasons’.45 In his
closing address to the first session of hearings, Russell claimed that Amer-
ica had achieved ‘a comparable degree of scientific extermination and
moral degeneracy’ to that of the Thousand-Year Reich.46 In the ‘Appeal to
the American and World Opinion’, read by Dave Dellinger but attributed
to Russell, the comparison between Nazism and American conduct was
once again central:
Paradoxically, if Hitler announced his intention to wipe out the Jews, the photos
and the reports of the atrocities did not appear in the daily newspapers or going
into the living rooms in television. And if the democratic facade in the United
States has prevented the American generals and presidents from announcing their
intentions, perhaps even from comprehending them in their full intensity them-
selves, the same democratic facade allows some of the reports and some of the
photos to appear in the American mass media.47
The comparison was thus designed to make Western, and particularly

American audiences feel complicit in murder and extermination. Russell
viewed the failure to act against the Vietnam War as akin to the failure to
act when presented with evidence of the Final Solution. In the US, where
the Jewish community was a strong part of the anti-war movement, this
was an especially powerful emotional lever. In France, as previously noted,
references to the Second World War had already served as an intensifier
in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourse.
The emotional nature of reporting on the American campaign in
Vietnam made such comparisons with Nazi violence less contentious than
they might retrospectively appear. In January 1973, forty intellectuals and
artists could unselfconsciously publish the full text of a telegram they had
sent to President Nixon comparing his actions to those of the Nazis and
calling on him to cease the use of ‘HITLERIAN METHODS’ in Viet-
nam.48 And well after the Russell Tribunal had found the US guilty of
genocide, members of its Paris faction once again expressed their outrage
at the intensification of US bombings in Vietnam. An advertisement in
Le Monde signed by Sartre, Schwartz, and Dedijer detailed the crimes
and concluded decisively: ‘WE ACCUSE Richard NIXON of being a war
criminal who should be judged as were the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg
for acts of the same nature’.49 The language of these debates was often
extreme, with common reference to themes such as genocide, the depraved
use of science, and the return of the Second World War.50
How to interpret the muted reaction to some of this rhetoric has been
the subject of disagreement. According to Arthur, the lack of debate about
the Tribunal’s claims of genocide, epitomised by the very limited engage-
ment with Sartre’s closing speech, was evidence of a lack of interest in
genocide at the time, whether as a possibility in Vietnam or as a reality
of the past.51 Her interpretation contradicted the explanation offered ear-
lier by Sirinelli, who proposed that the ‘B-52 effect’ – horror at the use of
bombings and napalm by the US – dulled reactions to some of the more
oversimplified and emotive criticisms of the war. For tiers-mondistes the
B-52 effect, which demonised the US, combined with an idealisation of
the Vietnamese as a people in arms. From this point of view, Sartre’s clos-
ing speech ‘On Genocide’ was delivered in a period of heightened and
widespread condemnation of US actions, when the parallel with Hitler’s
crimes, even at its most powerfully drawn, was not shocking. Moreover,
references to the Holocaust had been prominent during 1967, including
above all in reaction to the Six-Day War of 5–10 June when Israel attacked
Egyptian positions in the Sinai Peninsula, then fought off offensives from
Jordan and Syria. Situating this response in the history of the Holocaust
memory in French debates, François Azouvi suggested that the intensity
of the appeal to memory in 1967 was not a return after a period of for-
getting but ‘a climactic episode’ in a longer story of a rising ‘fever’ of
memories brought into the present.52
The Six-Day War was a significant moment for the memories of the
Holocaust in France. On one hand, for many Jews it cemented support
for Israel in light of fears of a second holocaust.53 In France, the war
was extremely well reported and allusions to Auschwitz, Dachau, and the
Final Solution (but also to genocide, annihilation, destruction) were insis-
tent and emotive in commentary.54 Many who referred to the Holocaust
memory in reference to the Six-Day War felt the connection not as a

sudden discovery but as the culmination, or confirmation, of a threat
against Jews felt continuously since the invention of Auschwitz.55 The
French government adopted a pro-Arab position, related to its efforts to
regain influence in the region following the North African debacle, and
de Gaulle’s November 1967 description of Israelis as an ‘élite people, sure
of itself and domineering’ met with uproar from a mainstream that sup-
ported Israel.56 Other events in these years, including the Leningrad trial
of Jews attempting to flee the Soviet Union (December 1970) and the
discovery of Soviet anti-Semitism, further heightened fears of this threat.
On the other hand, for radicals the Six-Day War highlighted and intensi-
fied the suffering and injustice endured by Palestinians. Many gauchistes
felt that the widespread sympathy for Israel, combined with its backing
from the US, was evidence that both French and Israeli societies were the
enemy of progress.57 For some, sympathy for Israel was the sign of a Euro-
pean guilt for the Holocaust, but also a misreading of the politics of the
Middle East: Israeli actions were compared to Nazi violence. In this view,
it was the Palestinian people who had taken on the historical position of
the persecuted Jews, threatened by a militarised state that sought their
destruction. Reactions to the war thus bore evidence of the intersections
between a post-war process of reflection on guilt and the anti-colonialist,
tiers-mondiste discourse of the 1960s.58
The importance of references to the Holocaust in the period of the
Russell Tribunal, combined with the extensive condemnation of US con-
duct of the Vietnam War, thus explains the modesty of reactions to the
inflammatory language of its genocide verdict. Despite its timeliness and
intransigence, the Tribunal’s impact on public opinion was questionable.
In France, a significant part of public opinion was already against the war
and reporting of the hearings was fitful.59 American newspaper coverage
claimed it was ‘flogging a dead horse’ given that European public opinion
was already set against the war.60 Amongst American opinion, according
to the major study of the Tribunal, it had less effect upon support for
the war than the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when several hundred
civilians were tortured and killed by American soldiers.61 In a longer-term
perspective though, it has been argued that the Russell Tribunal ‘demon-
strated that the failure of official criminal law to punish may not be fatal
to efforts at stigmatizing those guilty of international crimes’.62
Richard Falk, who had been critical of aspects of the Russell Tri-
bunal at the time, later reflected on the merit of the intellectuals’ activist
judgement on crimes against humanity in Vietnam. Falk emphasised its
testimonial function: the demand that ‘the law should be applied to the
strong as well as the weak’ and the aim ‘to speak truth to people, awaken-
ing public opinion from its apathy to the responsibilities of being human
(concern for the victimised other) and duties as citizens of free society’.63
He also suggested that the resonance of the Tribunal had grown with the
passage of time. In effect, the International War Crimes Tribunal of 1967
gave rise to a series of successors for other international causes. A second
Russell Tribunal was held for state terrorism in Latin America (1974–6),
a third for violations of human rights in the Federal Republic of Ger-
many (1977–8), and in 2009 the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP)
was convened.64 Comprising five sessions over four years, the RToP was
the most ambitious of the different incarnations. With an ever-widening
geographical and political range of targets for investigation, these initia-
tives moved away from the tiers-mondiste agenda of the 1967 campaign
while nonetheless perpetuating its engaged, internationalist, and activist
spirit.
the régis debray affair

On 20 March 1967, French philosophy student Régis Debray arrived
at a guerrilla camp at Nancahuazu, Bolivia. ‘What greater dream for
a militant than to be under Che’s orders!’ he would proclaim, but the
realisation of Debray’s dream came at the cost of his arrest, torture,
trial, and a thirty-year prison sentence.65 As a result, he became ‘per-
haps the most celebrated political prisoner in the world’.66 The campaign
for Debray’s release became a major event in France and internationally,
attracting such diverse luminaries as André Malraux, Jean-Luc Godard,
Pablo Picasso, François Mauriac, and Graham Greene. Many participants
defended Debray’s dream as well as denouncing his treatment. Yet by its
end the campaign had become an illustration of the paradigm shift in
which revolutionaries themselves were becoming ‘a focus of sympathy as
exemplary victims of human rights abuses’.67
Prior to his arrest, Debray had been one of the leading figures of
European tiers-mondisme. For French revolutionaries, ‘Régis Debray in
the Bolivian maquis was our leading representative in the righteous
nations’.68 A trip to Tunisia in 1961 connected Debray with libera-
tion fighters and fuelled his passion for the third world.69 He subse-
quently made his way to Cuba from the US, crossing from Miami in
summer 1961, and for two months assisted with the rural literacy cam-
paign.70 He spent much of 1963–4 touring Latin America, including
Venezuela where the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) under

Douglas Bravo offered Debray another direct encounter with a guerrilla
struggle. His account of ‘Two weeks in the Venezuelan maquis’ combined
a travelogue-style description of the guerrillero lifestyle with lengthy cita-
tions from Bravo that added weight to the report’s authenticity.71 At the
end of 1965 he returned to Cuba to take up a position teaching phi-
losophy at the University of Havana. This academic post provided the
cover for Debray to observe and participate in guerrilla training camps.72
Welcomed by the Cuban leadership, his contributions ‘crystallised’ the
alliance between Havana and the far-left intelligentsia.73 His collected
writings were presented as a tool for ‘all those who want to fathom or
live out the revolutionary process’.74
Although he was not the only French militant to take up arms in Latin
America (Pierre Goldman and Michèle Firk – the latter also a porteur de
valises during the Algerian War – both also bore arms in Latin America
and for longer than Debray himself did75 ), Debray’s combination of intel-
lectual output and physical commitment were exceptional. A short essay
by Debray on Fidel Castro’s ‘long march’ in Latin America, published
in January 1965 after his first travels in the region, had been read and
studied obsessively in French gauchiste circles. But in September 1967, he
explained that ‘when one has written what I have written, one must neces-
sarily, from a theoretical and moral necessity, one day or another, become
a simple combatant. Poor the pen without the gun; poor the gun without
the pen’.76 Debray rejected the idea of ‘a theory that takes the air of an
aristocrat or bureaucrat, giving orders to the “practitioners” (!) from on
high’.77 Furthermore, he considered a dual approach not only a desirable
attribute but a historical reality, warning that ‘imperialist bullets do not
distinguish between the poet and the cane cutter’.78
Based on his own experiences but drawing heavily upon his contact
with the Cuban leaders, in 1967 Debray published Révolution dans la
révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine. First pub-
lished in Havana, this tiers-mondiste classic articulated the ‘foquismo’
theory of the Cuban revolutionaries, advocating the fusion of theory and
practice and capturing the mindset that had produced the heroism of the
Sierra Maestra and the glory of Castro’s victory over the Batista regime.
It asserted that ‘the people’s army will be the nucleus of the party, not
vice versa’, announcing the primacy of the military line over the political
or civilian organisation.79 As a model of revolutionary combat, it dis-
pensed with the need to establish or reinforce a political party or a mass
movement: arguing that uprisings would occur naturally in response to
the military campaign, it declared that ‘insurrectional activity is today

the number one political activity’.80 One of the virtues of Debray’s theory
was thus to turn the situation of marginality into a positive asset. It was
therefore received with enthusiasm by radical movements internationally,
including the Weathermen in the United States and the Red Army Faction
(RAF) in West Germany.81 As a result, it became ‘the single most influ-
ential manifesto of the Latin American guerrilla movement’.82 Révolution
dans la révolution? made Debray a cult figure among radical movements
across the world and was one of the vectors for his influence during May
’68 despite his absence.
By then, implementing his own revolutionary philosophy, Debray had
returned to the maquis, seeking out guerrilla combat alongside Che Gue-
vara in Bolivia.83 Debray made a convoluted journey from Havana to
La Paz, via various underground contacts, carrying a message from Cas-
tro. Arriving in camp on 20 March 1967, he appeared in Guevara’s diary
under the nom de guerre ‘Danton’, though his stay with the guerrillas
was short-lived.84 (Far longer was the period he would spend in a Bolivian
prison as a result of this engagement.) The soldiers he met were exhausted,
outnumbered, and vulnerable. Debray marched with them, took his turns
standing watch, and handled weapons, though was not called upon to use
them. Guevara noted the Frenchman’s desire to participate in the guerrilla
struggle but entrusted him instead with the responsibility of organising
material and financial support for the Bolivian campaign from Europe.
Debray’s notoriety proved treacherous when he was picked up by the
Bolivian military on leaving the camp. He was arrested on 20 April 1967,
in the company of two other foreigners: Ciro Roberto Bustos, an Argen-
tine artist and guerrilla sympathiser, and George Roth, a British journalist
who had previously been working alongside the regular army and who
was released without charges in July 1967. Within hours of being arrested,
the foreign prisoners were being tortured and initial reports speculated
about Debray’s presumed death. Fortunately, they had been seen and even
photographed by a passing journalist on the day of their arrest. Somewhat
ironically, given the US’ bloodthirsty reputation among tiers-mondistes,
Debray credited American intelligence agents with saving his life by tak-
ing over the interrogation from the more reckless and brutal Bolivian
soldiers.85 Nonetheless there was, as the French ambassador to Bolivia
Dominique Ponchardier emphasised, a very real threat to Debray’s life in
the early days of his interrogation.86
An international campaign sprang up on Debray’s behalf. ‘Captured

Marxist becomes a cause célèbre’, proclaimed an article in Life maga-
zine three months after the arrests.87 While more strident left-wing cam-
paigners accused the Bolivian government of political persecution, others
pointed to irregularities in the judicial process or defended the principle
of freedom of movement for journalists and writers. In France, though
Debray was a hero of the left, his family connections on the right
mobilised in his favour and transcended the ideological bias that was
so evident in the Russell Tribunal. It became, to use Sirinelli’s term, an
‘endogenous phenomenon’, as the intellectual milieu attempted to defend
one of its own.88 The aim of this mobilisation, encapsulated by the
‘extraordinary truce’ and joint initiative of Mauriac, Malraux, and Sartre,
was recognised by contemporaries as ‘the sole concern, beyond all pro-
paganda and ideology, to come to the aid of Régis Debray’.89
An intensification of reporting and petitioning occurred above all in
response to menacing statements from Bolivian authorities. From early
May 1967 two of the main themes were the lack of information about
Debray’s situation, notably the absence of any formal charges against him,
and the threat posed to his life.90 Some tiers-mondiste coverage of his case
also eschewed political themes to focus on these issues.91 Early appeals
for the respect of Debray’s rights as a prisoner or as the subject of a judi-
ciary process were made by the lawyers of the Paris bar and by the head
of the French chapter of PEN International, the organisation promoting
freedom of expression and literature.92 De Gaulle addressed a message to
Bolivian Head of State General René Barrientos Ortuño on 15 May after
the latter had alluded to the death sentence awaiting Debray.93 The cause
was also international even in this early phase, with interventions from
Chilean President Salvador Allende, from Latin and Caribbean students,
and collective protests from Italian, Belgian, and American intellectuals.94
Further protests continued the ecumenical campaign after more threats
from Barrientos. A number of French intellectuals and personalities sent
a telegram appealing to the Bolivian authorities’ humanity and sense of
justice and referring to Debray’s rights under the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. This text was signed by several members of the Académie
Française such as François Mauriac and René Clair; by multiple members
of the Institut Français, including Raymond Aron and the human rights
campaigner and soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize recipient René Cassin; by
the Nobel laureates Jacques Monod and François Jacob; and by many
academics and intellectuals, including Alfred Koestler, Emmanuel d’Astier
de la Vigerie, Philippe Sollers, Georges Perec, and Françoise Sagan. Var-

ious French organisations, including the alumni of the Ecole Normale
Supérieure (ENS), the tertiary employment union, the Paris municipal
council, and Secours Populaire Français, sent messages or made appeals.
Sartre was one of the most vociferous campaigners. The dust had not
yet settled on the first session of the Russell Tribunal when Sartre spoke
at a rally for Debray at the Mutualité building in Paris on 30 May. This
speech was subsequently published as the preface to a collection of doc-
uments on Debray’s case. Sartre’s speech, unlike many of the petitions
published to that point, drew attention to Debray’s militant activities and
revolutionary engagement. He argued that Debray was arrested not as a
combatant in the military sense but for a ‘crime of opinion’ as the author
of a revolutionary theory, as a man ‘who wanted to free the guerrilleros of
all restraints’.95 Sartre was unequivocal in his analysis of the case and his
portrayal of the two ideologically opposed sides. He argued that Debray
was arrested because ‘a revolutionary, theoretician of Latin American
revolution, wherever he comes from and whatever he does, is enemy
number one for a Latin American government’. The historical reality of
revolution, for Sartre, made the actions of the Bolivian authorities doubly
wrong: not only was their persecution of an individual ‘intolerable’ but
it was also pointless.96 Sartre concluded by calling for the unconditional
liberation of his philosophical and tiers-mondiste confrere in the name of
freedom of opinion.
Back in Bolivia, Debray was in the solitary eye of a hysterical storm.
Protests and posters calling for Debray’s death heightened tensions, espe-
cially in Camiri, where he was being held. Death threats were also made
against Ponchardier and the French ambassadorial staff. Concerned about
Debray’s safety and the threat of torture, Bertrand Russell sent a team to
investigate conditions and meet with the hitherto isolated prisoner. Tariq
Ali and Robin Blackburn (two of the team’s five members) were given per-
mission to photograph Debray although not to interview him. This was
the meeting that alerted Debray to the international mobilisation in his
name.
His initial relief notwithstanding, the prisoner soon grew ambivalent
about the publicity attached to his cause. He expressed his objections in
early September in a letter to his supporters in France. Despite allusions
to the threat to his life and his manifest fears about the prejudice of the
trial he would shortly face, the focus of Debray’s concern was the integrity
of the revolutionary cause, which he saw as compromised by the ‘circus’
in which he was made to play the ‘clown’. Above all, he considered it
a distraction: ‘instead of the “Debray affair” serving as a looking glass

for outraged good consciences or as a source of income for the weekly
emotion-vendors, it should be used to alert opinion a little to the general
problems of America, and the revolutionary struggle, of the new Yankee
fascism’.97 He was troubled by the confusion, misinformation and bour-
geois sentimentality of portrayals of his case. This was, again, not only
for himself but because of the tactical advantage it offered the Bolivian
authorities.
Debray felt himself unable to make use of the attention focused on him
as an accused revolutionary leader. Of the seven defendants in the trial,
including the Argentine Bustos and five Bolivians, Debray was the biggest
prize and the most valuable capture. Yet despite his desire to proclaim his
solidarity with the guerrilla cause, Debray felt himself constrained to deny
the charge of having actually participated in combat, as this would have
seemed to confirm the authorities’ claim that the Bolivian guerrilla forces
were an externally organised, foreign-led provocation. After his arrest,
Debray was accused by the Bolivian Government of handing over infor-
mation regarding Guevara’s activities and whereabouts. These claims,
as Maspero pointed out, were designed to tarnish Debray’s reputation
and undermine the international support campaign.98 In the face of these
manoeuvres, Debray saw his own conduct as part of a propaganda battle
to be fought, and won, in fidelity to the revolutionary cause.
When Debray’s trial opened on 26 September 1967, it was evident
that the Bolivian authorities also had a propaganda battle in mind. The
arena had been prepared with supposedly spontaneous protests calling for
Debray’s execution.99 In total contravention of legal procedure and com-
mon logic, the prosecutor effectively made his closing speech, denouncing
communism and Castroism, detailing Debray’s alleged crimes, and call-
ing for the maximum penalty to be delivered, before the charges had even
been read out in court. In this speech the prosecutor, Colonel Remberto
Iriarte, described Debray as ‘a man who calls himself a philosopher but
who is in reality a leader of the Red conspiracy trying to take over Latin
America’.100 Spectators of the trial applauded lengthily in the courtroom
when Iriarte had finished. French reports of the first day’s events, to which
both Le Monde and Le Figaro dedicated front-page headlines, emphasised
the threatening atmosphere, military aspect, and procedural anomalies.101
The terms of the battle changed drastically with news of Che Guevara’s
death. Executed by the Bolivian military on 9 October 1967, his death was
confirmed by Castro on 15 October and three nights later almost a mil-
lion mourners attended a national wake for the fallen leader in Havana’s
Plaza de la Revolución. An editorial in Tricontinental paid homage to

Che’s commitment and sacrifice and declared that even in death ‘Che’s
image will rise every moment like the Phoenix bird, battle-hardened and
warlike’.102 The Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa
and Latin America (OSPAAAL) issued a tribute to the ‘heroic and glori-
ous Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara’ and called for militants through-
out the world to pay homage to him ‘by intoning funereal dirges with
the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and
victory’.103 European and American intellectuals, many of whom were
campaigning for Debray, offered tributes to the fallen leader. Interviewed
about Guevara from his cell in Camiri, Debray compared the revolution-
ary to Christ and affirmed that his quest was ‘a mystical adventure’.104
More than most, Debray could claim to be directly affected by
Guevara’s death. In response to the news, he wrote a remarkable letter
to the judges announcing his complicity with the guerrilla movement on
a moral and intellectual level. Released by the knowledge that the risk to
Guevara could not be exacerbated by his own actions, Debray declared
that ‘I am morally and politically co-responsible for the acts of my guer-
rilla comrades . . . If I cannot, unfortunately, claim the honour of having
been a combatant, I claim at least that of having stood alongside [d’être
considéré comme solidaire de] my comrades’. Debray evoked his ‘great
sorrow’ at not having died alongside the revolutionary hero and his self-
sacrificial letter was perhaps an attempt to imbue his own fate with some
of the Guevarist heroism. Indeed, he began the letter by affirming that
‘Che is not one who dies: example and guide, he is actually immortal
because he will live in each revolutionary’.105 In asserting his solidarity,
therefore, Debray was performing the perpetuation of Che’s legacy that
he described.
A month or so later, Debray would extend his revolutionary mea culpa
in a speech to the court before sentencing. Like Castro after Moncada or
the pro-Algerian militants in France, Debray used his speech to describe
a vision of revolutionary engagement and to indict the system that had
put him on trial.106 He denied any guilt for the acts of which he was
accused, but also denied their categorisation as criminal, rejecting the
validity of the world view the trial enacted. Addressing the judges directly,
he warned that ‘you do not represent peace and happiness, while we rep-
resent violence and pain. Each one has to decide which side he is on – on
the side of military violence or guerrilla violence, on the side of violence
that represses or violence that liberates’.107 This division of the world
into good and evil, the forces of liberation and the forces of repression,
justified Debray’s revolutionary engagement and in particular the use of
violence. Debray believed that the politically motivated proceedings were

not in essence directed against him but against the revolutionary struggle
he supported.
At the same time, however, he felt obliged to downplay his contribution
to the guerrillas’ cause. He expressed his regret that he had not played the
role that the prosecution attributed to him in the fight between freedom
and repression, declaring that ‘I would make myself perfectly ridiculous
if I were seriously to accept, even for a moment, its flattering imputa-
tion that I have master-minded the guerrilla movement’. His implication
was that it was the prosecution that had become ‘ridiculous’ by pushing
this point. Debray attempted to re-establish the division between com-
mon criminality and ideological action, which the Bolivian Government
was intent on erasing. He therefore asserted that ‘even if I declare a thou-
sand times that I regret not being guilty the way the prosecuting attorney
would like me to be, that I regret not having died beside Che, this does
not give you any legal right to sentence me, since penalties are provided
for deeds, not intentions’.108 For the sentencing tribunal, this argument
was either unconvincing or irrelevant and on 16 November 1967 Debray
received the maximum penalty of thirty years’ jail.
Of these thirty years, Debray would serve only three. Nonetheless, the
period was a source of many ordeals. For the early phase of his deten-
tion, according to ambassador Ponchardier, Debray was again beaten and
kept in isolation; the year ended before his situation normalised.109 He
was released on 24 December 1970, granted amnesty by General Juan
José Torres, a left-leaning president. Instead of returning to France on
his release, Debray went to Chile, where he did a series of interviews
with Allende.110 In France, to his displeasure, he was a celebrity.111 But
his prison diary, published a few years later, revealed that he consid-
ered himself ‘Tartempion’: a failure, a revolutionary imposter. In one pas-
sage he chastised himself that ‘you are over twenty-six years old and
you have been neither Hoche, nor Bonaparte, nor Orson Welles, nor
Fidel Castro’.112 The precise reason for the rapidity of Debray’s abandon-
ment of his revolutionary mission is a subject for speculation. No doubt
his insistence in court that he had not been part of the guerrilla move-
ment had hit home; it has also been suggested that the intervention of
the French state on his behalf fostered Debray’s appreciation of Western
democracy.113
After his release, Debray’s politics moved away from the idea of revolu-
tion. His diary showed his increasing scepticism about the desirability of
the cult of revolution; his own contribution to it was dismissed as ‘bluff’.
His first major work on revolutionary theory to be published after his

period in prison was La critique des armes (1974). It represented an over-
haul of his earlier foquismo theory, expounding flexibility and versatility
instead of the dominance of the military unit of the foco and emphasising
national specificities over the internationalist mindset.114 In 1975, he fur-
ther aired his change of attitude with the reflective essay Les rendez-vous
manqués and satirised it in his novel L’indésirable, set in an unspecified
Latin American country. In the latter, the decision of the guerrillas to mem-
orise Debray’s own Révolution dans la révolution? provokes the mirth of
the movement’s political guru, who sums up: ‘if all these would-be theo-
reticians could leave us the hell alone and stay at home instead of coming
to evangelise the natives!’115
Yet, as this barb suggests, Debray’s revision of his tiers-mondiste
engagement did not engender the turn towards sans-frontiérisme of so
many of his contemporaries. Interviewed in 1988 about his experiences
in Bolivia, Debray admitted coming to the conclusion that ‘I should have
stayed home [il fallait rester chez soi]’.116 Rejecting the internationalism
associated with tiers-mondisme, Debray had decided that ‘one can’t come
to preach struggle against a foreign imperialism and not be from the coun-
try itself, it is contradictory’. While abandoning the concept of interna-
tionalism, Debray also rejected the notion of human rights as a political
principle, sneering that ‘the first condition for the practice of human rights
in the West is that they do not exist elsewhere’.117 His refusal to partici-
pate in the sans-frontiériste campaigns of Bernard Kouchner, with whom
he had initially shared Latin American aspirations, stands in contrast to
the political evolution of many activists.118
However, in one campaign Debray remained in touch with the obses-
sions of his peers, both revolutionary and humanitarian. This was the
pursuit of the Nazi official Klaus Barbie, one of few constants across
Debray’s political evolutions. Like many French militants of his gener-
ation, Debray envisioned third-world causes as a way of perpetuating
the struggle against Nazism. He described his younger self as a ‘Latino
Frenchman’ who ‘had ultimately gone to Latin America in search of
situations that he hadn’t lived through, such as the Resistance or the
Spanish Civil War’.119 The discovery that the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ was liv-
ing in Bolivia, under the assumed name of Altmann, seemed to vindicate
this conception of the post-war world. Barbie had in fact been assisting
the Bolivian military in the fight against the rebels and was a successful
arms dealer.120 After his release from prison, Debray constructed a plan
with Serge Klarsfeld for the kidnapping of Barbie and his return to France
via Chile, making use of Debray’s privileged relations with Allende’s gov-
ernment and his contacts with Bolivian guerrillas.121 This plan did not
lead to anything. Still, the failed plot had a more successful literary echo
in L’indésirable. The greatest sense of achievement in this novel about the
obstacles confronting the revolutionary movement occurs when Frank,
a tiers-mondiste militant originally from Europe, assassinates Rossi, an
Italian fascist and torturer who made his money through weapons deals
in Latin America.122 Off the page, Debray’s influence could perhaps
be discerned a decade later, when President François Mitterrand struck
a deal with Bolivia for Barbie’s extradition: Debray was his personal
advisor.123
Despite the intentions of the Bolivian government in trying Debray, the
episode of his arrest was a propaganda success for radicals. As a theoreti-
cian of revolution, Debray – already extremely well known – became even
more famous. For the revolutionaries in Bolivia, his case was a publicity
coup: Guevara noted with satisfaction at the end of May 1967 that ‘the
clamour over the Debray case has raised our profile more than ten vic-
torious battles’.124 Yet with Guevara’s assassination in October the guer-
rilla movement lost one of its most compelling figures and the foquismo
theory that Debray had formalised took a near-fatal blow. Successive fail-
ures to ‘export’ the revolution to other countries in Latin America and
Africa throughout the 1960s, which had begun in earnest after Brussels
and Washington engineered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice
Lumumba in 1961, diluted the prestige of the guerrilla movement. When
in 1971 the Cuban comandante threw one of the nation’s most presti-
gious authors into prison, the implications for their own ideals became
too great for France’s intellectuals to ignore.
the end of the cuban idyll

Throughout the period of Debray’s travels in Latin America, and during
his imprisonment in Bolivia, the Cuban regime was a beacon of progres-
sive politics in the continent and beyond. This image was shattered with
the episode of Heberto Padilla’s arrest, self-criticism, and public humilia-
tion in Spring 1971, consistently cited as the moment when the interna-
tional left broke off its love affair with the Cuban Revolution.125 Foreign
intellectuals who had previously been supporters of the guerrilleros in
Havana publicly aired their disenchantment with the acts of the Cuban
Government and promptly saw their privileged ties to the country severed.
The role of culture and the rights of the intellectual – whether within or
beyond the revolution – were an essential theme in the exchanges over

the plight of the imprisoned poet.
Cuba offered a tropical escape from the repressive stalemate of the
Algerian conflict and an alternative to the disappointing alignments, Stal-
inist and colonialist, of the PCF. Against such a backdrop, French tiers-
mondistes professed that ‘the profound song of the Cuban Revolution
has given us the will to live and the strength to fight’.126 Cuba became
the primary destination for tiers-mondiste revolutionary tourists. Visi-
tors always went by invitation, though in various ways: as individuals, in
group tours, and in the late 1960s for congresses organised by the Cuban
Government.127 Documentarist Chris Marker, in his 1961 film Cuba si!,
showed a marching band in the street accumulating dancers as their music
transformed a military march into a Latin rhythm. The significance of
such sights was explained by de Beauvoir:
For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been won by
violence; our previous experiences, especially the Algerian War, had only revealed
it to us in its negative guise: the refusal of the oppressor. Here the ‘rebels’, the
people who had supported them, the militia who would perhaps soon go off to
fight, all glowed with gaiety.128
‘Such was Havana in 1961’, Marker’s voiceover concluded, ‘machine guns

on the roofs and conga in the streets’.129 Intoxicated by the vision of a
Caribbean third way, transfixed by the virility of the male leaders and the
beauty of its female militants, enthused by the rigours of revolutionary
justice and the spirit of social reform, visitors to Cuba returned to these
themes time and again in their odes to the Cuban nation.130
From the outset, the Cuban Revolution had a dual appeal. On one
hand, the guerrillas were men of action, unafraid of hardship, proven
in battle, gallant in victory. They were ‘high-colour characters, bearded
Christ-like men’; ‘soldiers-become-peasants, [who] carried into the cities
their warlike austerity and country moralism’.131 They cultivated this
image, never shedding the military fatigues that made Castro’s pub-
lic image instantly recognisable. On the other hand, the Cuban leaders
were seen as scholars and intellectuals: Castro, a lawyer by training, had
demonstrated his eloquence during his 1953 trial; Guevara, as a medi-
cal doctor, had commitment and compassion. The period of literary and
artistic vitality and innovation that immediately followed the revolution
seemed to speak well of the rulers’ cultural habits. The music of Latin
America imbued the Cuban Revolution as a whole with a sensitivity and
sensuality that no other movement could replicate. Ultimately, however,
the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Cuban Revolution suffered at

the hands of the political leadership.
As a leading cultural figure in Cuba and, crucially, part of the revo-
lutionary generation of intellectuals, Padilla’s international stature was
immense. His reputation, however, did not protect him from the repres-
sive cultural policies of the 1960s. Padilla was among the founders of the
highly influential journal Lunes de revolución in 1959, in the days of post-
revolutionary creative effervescence. When it was banned two years later,
Padilla worked as a correspondent for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban
news agency, and Granma, the organ of the Cuban Communist Party.
In 1968 he was awarded the prize of the National Union of Writers and
Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), selected by an international jury, for his collec-
tion of poetry Fuera del juego. This work, which expressed doubt about
some of the rigidities of the revolution, saw Padilla accused of ideological
betrayal; he lost his position at Granma as a result.132 Given the official
decree of April 1967 that put an end to royalties, making writers finan-
cially dependent on state patronage through employment, Padilla was in a
precarious position. The same was true for many other writers who found
themselves on the vulnerable side of the divide between intellectuals will-
ing to ‘subordinate their craft to the demands of the historical moment’
and those who found themselves increasingly isolated as the ideological
crusade intensified.133
Alongside affronts to freedom of speech were other repressive mea-
sures directed against political opponents and social nonconformists.
In the months after Castro and his comrades took power, newspapers
announced daily the scores of executions taking place, some of which
were carried out in sporting stadiums before thousands of spectators.134
Those who subsequently went into the prison system risked being held
for long periods with no appeal: for example, Huber Matos, a guerrilla
leader and military governor who criticised the revolution’s turn towards
communism, was convicted of treason and conspiracy in October 1959
and spent twenty years in prison.135
Nonetheless, in the early years, French supporters of Castro were eager
to excuse his repressive measures in the name of their shared revolution-
ary goals.136 Following Castro’s arrival in power, for instance, Claude
Julien conceded that the procedure used in passing death sentences may
have been questionable but saw this as normal and even argued that Cas-
tro had been lenient in not executing hundreds more. The long-standing
editor of journal Le Monde Diplomatique, which was a connecting point
for numerous tiers-mondiste currents and authors, Julien complained that
for the American press, ‘the execution by the revolutionary regime of two
hundred perpetrators [bourreaux] carries more weight than the 200,000
murders of the Batista dictatorship’.137 De Beauvoir claimed that the pub-
lic executions were merely a way of containing the popular demand for
reprisals. She was disappointed that the French press represented this ‘nec-
essary purge’ as a crime.138 A similar sentiment was expressed by writer
Françoise Sagan, who spent nine days in Cuba in 1960. The executions
were, for Sagan, evidence of the commander-in-chief’s ‘horror of blood’:
‘that Castro succeeded in giving to the vengeance of a people humil-
iated for six years only six hundred of those responsible represents a
great accomplishment’.139 For many tiers-mondistes, Castro’s glory was
so great that shadows over his achievements simply did not register.
The arrest of Heberto Padilla, therefore, from the point of view of Cuba’s
European supporters, became a turning point. He was arrested by secu-
rity police on 20 March 1971 and held for thirty-seven days. Padilla’s
wife, fellow poet Belkis Cuza Malé, was arrested on the same day but
released much more rapidly. Reports in the international press carried
news of the couple’s arrest but could offer nothing to explain it, as the
Cuban authorities remained silent about the reason. During his detention,
Padilla was interrogated daily – with the exception of a six-day period
when he was kept in isolation in total darkness and spoke to no one, not
even the wardens.140 He was beaten, mocked by guards who taunted him
with lines from his poem ‘In difficult times’ as they struck him, and more
than once was also injected with drugs prior to interrogation. Eventually,
Padilla was ordered to produce a confession and self-criticism, to be writ-
ten in prison on his own typewriter, as a symbolic gesture to exorcise the
‘counter-revolutionary lies’ he was accused of spreading through his lit-
erary work. In the meantime, unbeknownst to the prisoner, his case had
stimulated the concern and activism of intellectuals who had previously
been among Cuba’s strongest international supporters. The French were
especially active in this campaign.141
The first decisive sign of the change in the winds towards Cuba came
in the form of an open letter to Castro, published in Le Monde on 9
April, twenty days after Padilla’s arrest. The letter expressed fears that
the official silence about Padilla’s fate indicated the reappearance of a
strong and dangerous ‘sectarianism’ in Cuba. It warned that ‘the use of
repressive measures against intellectuals and writers who have exercised
the right of criticism within the revolution can only have deeply negative
repercussions among the anti-imperialist forces of the entire world’.142
The rhetorical precautions of this protest, which was couched in the lan-
guage of left-wing solidarity and reaffirmed the belief in the principles
of the Sierra Maestra, could not disguise the ideological rupture that the
letter represented.
The signatories were a mix of European and Latin American intellec-
tuals. French tiers-mondistes of note to sign this critique of Cuban repres-
sion included Jean Daniel, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dionys
Mascolo, Claude Roy, and Anne Philippe. Amongst the Latin Americans
who added their names were Carlos Franqui (of Cuba), Julio Cortázar
(Argentina), Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz (Mexico), Gabriel Gar-
cía Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru). Their protest
received further momentum when it was published in English translation
in the New York Review of Books in early May 1971. It was seconded,
to take just one example, by a statement from the PEN Club of Mexico
calling for Padilla’s liberation in the name of intellectual criticism and cul-
tural freedom.143 Observing the clearly repressive climate, it was becom-
ing more difficult to maintain, as Sartre had in 1960, that Fidel was ‘at
once the island, the men, the livestock, the plants and the land, and, a
particular islander . . . he is the entire island’.144
Padilla’s release on 25 April did little to assuage critics or quell the
international campaign in his name; rather, the denunciations intensified.
The spectacularly ill-calculated decision by the Cuban Government to
have Padilla memorise and pronounce his self-criticism to a UNEAC meet-
ing, and then to diffuse a transcript of this document to the international
press, only reinforced the concerns of international observers. Padilla’s
confession was a classic piece of Stalinist self-accusation, subsequently
compared to those produced during the Soviet show trials of the 1930s.145
He avowed his shame at his previously critical attitude. He praised the
generosity and intelligence of his interrogators, those ‘valiant comrades’.
He attacked other intellectuals, Cuban and foreigners. He declared: ‘I
have made so many mistakes, mistakes that are truly unforgivable, truly
reprehensible, truly indescribable, and I feel amazingly light-hearted and
amazingly happy after all that I have experienced now that I shall be
able to start a new life’.146 It was difficult, as Cuban exile Juan Arcocha
pointed out, to see how this exaggerated confession could be the result of
anything other than torture.147
A second open letter to Castro was then published, in Le Monde on 22
May. Roughly sixty intellectuals threw their weight behind its assertions,
with most (though not all) of those who endorsed the first letter reiterating
their concern. The language in this letter was far more severe than in the
first. They wrote:
With the same vehemence as we had, from the very first day, in defending the
Cuban Revolution that seemed to be exemplary in its struggle for freedom, we
exhort you to spare Cuba the dogmatic obscurantism, cultural xenophobia and
repressive system which Stalinism imposed upon the socialist countries and of
which events similar to those in the process of occurring in Cuba were the first
glaring manifestations.148
This second letter thus described, though with greater force, the sepa-
ration between ideals and reality newly perceived by intellectuals which
marked the first open letter regarding Padilla. The allusion to Stalin-
ism was particularly damning from the point of view of a tiers-mondiste
movement that had taken the refusal of Stalinism as one of its original
principles. The letter also accused Castro of ‘contempt for human dig-
nity’ in submitting Padilla to violence and public humiliation. The con-
trast with earlier portrayals of the Cuban Revolution could not be more
striking. It was recognised by contemporaries as a definitive break from
the Cuban regime on the part of intellectuals who had stood alongside
the guerrillas in the 1960s.149 In June 1971, a dossier in Les Temps Mod-
ernes reiterated the condemnation of Padilla’s treatment: it reprinted his
self-criticism in full and, among other critiques, carried an article by Car-
los Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and supporter of the Cuban Revolution,
comparing Castro to the great despots of the twentieth century – Mus-
solini, Hitler, and Stalin.150
The international mobilisation on behalf of Padilla was received with
great anger and little diplomatic nuance by Fidel Castro. After the first
letter, he accused the signatories of being agents of the CIA and banned
them from Cuba. After the second, he was so riled by the interference
in Cuban affairs that no book by a foreign writer that dealt in any way
with Cuba would make it past the customs inspection.151 In a speech
to the Cuban National Congress of Education and Culture, on 30 April
1971, Castro lashed out at Padilla’s supporters for thinking that ‘the prob-
lems of this country can be the problems of two or three stray sheep, who
have one or two problems over the revolution because they do not have
the right to continue poisoning and intriguing against the revolution’.152
He declared that for these ‘bourgeois intellectual gentlemen and bour-
geois libellists and agents of the CIA . . . Entry is closed indefinitely, for an
indefinite and infinite period!’ As Sartre remarked, ‘he was ferocious with
us’.153
The Padilla affair marked the definitive demise of the French radical
left’s enthusiasm for revolutionary Cuba. Pronouncements like those at
the Education and Culture Congress were too severe to be explained away,
too clearly anti-intellectual to be ignored. With Padilla kept under unoffi-
cial house arrest and membership of UNEAC drastically cut back by state
interference, it became clear that the poet’s case was not to be viewed as
an aberration.154 If many were still willing to point to the Cuban Revo-
lution’s achievements in medicine and especially literacy, the time when
Cuba’s political situation could be unequivocally admired and defended
was over.155 Yet as recently as 1968, 500 intellectuals and artists from
70 countries had travelled to Cuba to participate in a cultural congress
hosted by the comandante himself. The Padilla affair undoubtedly played
a crucial role in bringing about the change in attitudes.
conclusion
Historians have pointed to several contextual factors to explain the
rapidity of the turn against the revolutionary government in Havana.
Firstly, Che Guevara’s death in 1967 had initially increased his mythi-
cal standing, but ultimately deprived the Cuban Government of one of its
most admired members.156 Secondly, and perhaps more meaningful, was
Castro’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Castro’s declarations in favour of the repression disappointed many intel-
lectuals who had hitherto hesitated to align Cuba, despite its communist
evolution, with the Soviet Union.157 Thirdly, as Jeannine Verdès-Leroux
argued, the Padilla case was the culmination of a series of attacks on intel-
lectuals within Cuba which had the effect of touching intellectuals outside
Cuba more sharply than the persecution of homosexuals, for example.158
Finally, as Cuba became increasingly repressive, alternatives were offered
by, on one hand, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and, on the other, the
May ’68 events in France.
The impact that Padilla’s case had on attitudes to Cuba may also have
been magnified by its inclusion within another narrative, that of the rise
in importance of the figure of the political prisoner, both Frenchmen and
foreigners. The case of Régis Debray, so prominent in the late 1960s, was
a key part of this narrative. Another French citizen, Pierre Golendorf, was
also imprisoned in Latin America, having been arrested in Havana in early
1971 for espionage. Golendorf’s case did not become a cause célèbre like
Debray or Padilla, though he was spared from serving the full ten years
of his sentence and published an account of his experience entitled 7 ans
à Cuba: 38 mois dans les prisons de Fidel Castro.159 Within France, a

campaign to support French Maoists incarcerated under the so-called loi
anti-casseur gained significant momentum – so much so that Mick Jagger
made a plea on their behalf during a concert at the Palais des Sports – and
led to the founding of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) in
February 1971.160 Designed to give voice to the prisoners themselves, the
GIP undertook hundreds of investigations of the conditions of detention
and treatment of prisoners in France.
There was also, crucially, a rise in French activism on behalf of for-
eign political prisoners. The work of the GIP intersected, at times explic-
itly, with concern for members of the Black Panther Party, held in a
state of perpetual and at times fatal precarity in American prisons.161
Playwright Jean Genet was an ardent supporter of the Black Panther
detainees; he wrote a preface for a GIP-produced pamphlet on the death
in prison of one of its members.162 A French chapter of Amnesty Inter-
national, the British organisation whose mandate was to campaign for
the rights of political prisoners, was founded in 1971. Despite some diffi-
culties in adapting Amnesty’s Anglo-Saxon nomenclature and style to the
French mode of political engagement, membership climbed throughout
the decade to more than 20,000 in 1981.163 The case has also been made
for seeing the emergence of a focus on political prisoners in the campaign
against the Vietnam War: after the Paris peace accords of 27 January
1973, the emphasis of left-wing pro-Vietnamese campaigners shifted to
the plight of political prisoners, symbolised by the infamous ‘tiger cages’
on Con Son Island.164 The treatment of detainees in Germany, notably
the Red Army Faction members incarcerated in Stammheim prison, also
came to prominence in France in 1974.165 Finally, campaigns for polit-
ical prisoners fed into the public prominence of the figure of the left-
wing dissident following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet
labour camps. Heberto Padilla was thus a forerunner, in a third-world set-
ting, of the intellectual archetype whose Soviet embodiment was Andrei
Sakharov.
And so, as the figure of the political prisoner or solitary dissident
gained prominence, that of the guerrilla commando began to slip away.
Though the romanticism and heroism of the guerrillero never faded, the
influence of the guerrilla warfare model in its political and military form
declined. The innovative humanitarian missions of the sans-frontiéristes
offset some of the yearnings for adventure and solidarity that had pre-
viously mobilised tiers-mondiste militants. And in a novel variation on
the political prisoner, sans-frontiériste volunteers imprisoned by hostile
governments also became the subject of petition campaigns in France.166

The justification of revolutionary violence, which had been one of the
tenets of the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggle in Algeria, Viet-
nam, and Cuba, would be replaced in the years after Padilla with a focus
on the exiles, prisoners, and refugees fighting for their freedom from the
revolution in power.

The Struggle For International Justice

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3

The struggle for international justice

genocide and international conscience

compared the campaign for Vietnamese victory to the international

American pacifist; Lawrence Daly, Scottish union leader; Peter Weiss,

moral support for the aggressors. Radical opposition to a hegemonic US,

The comparison was thus designed to make Western, and particularly

memory in reference to the Six-Day War felt the connection not as a

the régis debray affair

Venezuela where the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) under

the military campaign, it declared that ‘insurrectional activity is today

An international campaign sprang up on Debray’s behalf. ‘Captured

de la Vigerie, Philippe Sollers, Georges Perec, and Françoise Sagan. Var-

a distraction: ‘instead of the “Debray affair” serving as a looking glass

Plaza de la Revolución. An editorial in Tricontinental paid homage to

violence. Debray believed that the politically motivated proceedings were

His first major work on revolutionary theory to be published after his

the end of the cuban idyll

beyond the revolution – were an essential theme in the exchanges over

‘Such was Havana in 1961’, Marker’s voiceover concluded, ‘machine guns

the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Cuban Revolution suffered at

à Cuba: 38 mois dans les prisons de Fidel Castro.159 Within France, a

governments also became the subject of petition campaigns in France.166

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