LONDON–Watch out Slobodan Milosevic, watch out Saddam Hussein and Hun Sen. As Martin Luther King said, “The arm of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” One day you too may be old and ill and want to use your ill-gotten gains to go to the best medical treatment money can buy–in London, New York orGeneva–and they will get you. Just as the British police have now pounced on Chile’s 82 year old ex-dictator lying in a London hospital. They’ll pull you out of bed a few days after your operation, and slam you behind bars, just when youthought you’d go and recuperate under the warm sun in an exclusive hotel in the Seychelles.

Whether the arrest made in London on the request of a Spanish magistrate willstand up in court remains to be seen. If only the World Criminal Court, created in Rome in July (but without America’s vote), were ratified and up and running there’d be no doubt about it. The Spanish government, with the connivance of parts of the British government, would not now be looking for a way to diffuse the issue, shortsightedly worried that it would affect their growing economic stake in Chile.

It will be interesting to see how the British courts, which now may be asked to rule on an extradition request, will weigh up the extra-territorial reach of European human rights law and the relevance of such international obligations as the Genocide and Anti-Torture Conventions. Moreover, Spain has a law that allows foreigners to be tried in Spain for genocide against its citizens even when the crime was committed outside the country, which they must also take into consideration.

The Spanish magistrate, Justice Baltasar Garzon, can be assumed to have done his homework. He has just successfully had put away Spain’s former Minister of the Interior in the recent Socialist government and the chief of the security forces for killing Basques terrorists in an undercover operation. Especially if he limits the prosecution to cover only the murder of Spanish citizens by the Pinochet dictatorship, a small fraction of the 4,299 political opponents killed or disappeared according to a Chilean government report, he seems to have a strong case for being allowed to go ahead and have Pinochet transferred for trial in Madrid.

Twenty-five years ago and one month after the military coup that deposed the legitimately elected leftist government of Salvador Allande is not a day too late. Pinochet, with the financial support of the American telecommunications giant ITT and the political nod from Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, ordered the storming of the presidential palace which led to the death of Allende and 17 years of iron-clad rule, in which, until towards the end, not a whisper of dissent was tolerated.

However, it has to be said, unlike many dictators, his economic legacy was benign–he revamped and modernized the economy and erected South America’s most effective social safety net for the poor. And in the end he did voluntarily withdraw from direct political power and allow new elections. But he stayed on as commander-in-chief to ensure no legislation was passed that would affect him and, finally, stepping down from the post he got himself elected senator for life to ensure his legal immunity.

Why did the post-Pinochet government let him get away with all this manoeuvre, and why is it shouting for his release now? Although the new democratically elected president, Patricio Aylwin, promptly established a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation which meticulously documented the abuses, it did not refer for prosecution those responsible. Unlike its near namesake in South Africa it did not even demand a quid pro quo for granting immunity from prosecution. At the least, as in South Africa, it could have traded immunity in return for a confession of crimes and the asking of a public pardon. The murderers in Chile got off scot free.

According to Ayreh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, writing in his just published book “War Crimes”, it was a mistake to believe that consolidating democracy was more important than doing justice. The two, he argues, must go hand in hand. He points to Honduras in Central America where Carlos Roberto Reina, a human rights lawyer, became president in 1994. He immediately initiated a prosecution of officers for torturing six leftist college students thirteen years earlier. Both democracy and the law have emerged stronger.

Now, belatedly, the past is catching up with Chile. True to previous form the government of Chile has protested the arrest of Pinochet. This is going too far. Rather Chile should recall their response when Erich Honecker, the former dictator of communist East Germany, was overthrown and he took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow. Chile decided to return him to Germany for trial for the shoot-to-kill policy he had ordered for those trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.

If Chile, in more detached mode, was able to recognize the right to extradition for a human rights crime in the Honecker case, it mustn’t indulge in nationalistic, protective, reflexes now. A change in the Chilean government’s stance would speed procedures in the London courtroom. Pinochet deserves to be seriously punished both for its own sake and, even more important, as a warning to war criminals still practising their craft. There are standards in place that didn’t exist two decades ago. The world has moved on, and Chile must move with it.