Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

OPERATION CONDOR
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that any Soviet cadres and political leaders captured be summarily executed. By extension,
within the Nazi conception of communism, this included all Jews, as they were
viewed as the chief disseminators of Bolshevik ideology. Accordingly, special mobile
killing squads, the Einsatzgrüppen, were established to accompany the combat troops of
the German army close behind in the weeks following Barbarossa. As they came upon the
villages, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews living therein, lined them up in
specially dug ditches, and machine-gunned them down.
Operation Condor. The name given to a joint campaign conducted by the intelligence
and security services of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, and
Ecuador during the second half of the 1970s. The objective of Operation Condor was to
establish a network that would hunt down and assassinate left-wing opponents of the
authoritarian (and often military) regimes of these countries, not only within South
America but also within Europe and North America. The Condor conspiracy, so far as can
be ascertained, was founded in secret at a joint meeting of intelligence officers in Chile
on November 25, 1975. The intention was to establish an anticommunist front that
would eliminate the possibility of so-called subversion through the destruction of
“internal enemies.” A coordinating office of the clandestine operation was established in
Santiago at Chile’s Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA, which served as the
headquarters of the Chilean security police. One of Operation Condor’s strategies,
targeted assassination, saw the 1976 murder in Washington, D.C., of former Chilean
foreign minister Orlando Letelier (1932–1976) and his assistant Ronni Moffit
(1951–1976), a U.S. citizen. Many other such murders of high-ranking members of former
left-wing governments, political opponents, and outspoken expatriates took place as
well. Operation Condor was responsible for murder, torture, “disappearances,” targeted
abductions, and extrajudicial cross-border transfers. Speculation exists regarding the
relationship between Operation Condor and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), theories speculating as to how far the United States was prepared to assist the
South Americans in their Cold War efforts not to allow communism to establish a foothold
on the continent. Declassified U.S. documents appear to confirm that such a
link—if not outright assistance—existed. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s a number
of revelations were made in South American truth commissions and the trials of former
military personnel that uncovered details about Operation Condor and also
demonstrated how extensive its links were, not only in the Western hemisphere but
throughout the world.
Operation Deliberate Force. As it was officially termed, Operation Deliberate Force
was the two-week long (August 29 through September 14, 1995) NATO air strike
against Serbian military targets in response to the July 1995 Serb shelling of Sarajevo.
More than three thousand five hundred air sorties took place and more than a thousand
bombs were dropped on forty-eight targeted complexes and 338 individual targets within
those complexes, including heavy weapons, command and control areas, military support
facilities, and communications installations. The NATO nations involved were France,
Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Subsequently, the Serbs ceased their military operations and genocidal activities, the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established, and Serbian
president Slobodan Milosevic (1941–2006) was, ultimately, brought to trial in The