Interviews by Marguerite Feitlowitz

The Italian arrest of Jorge Olivera, a retired Argentine army major, soon became a bizarre legal theatrical. Detained in Rome on August 6 on a French extradition request for the torture and forced disappearance of a French citizen in Argentina in 1976, Olivera was released on September 18 on the basis of a highly suspicious document, soon found to be have been faked by Olivera and his associates. In order to circumvent the fact that cases of forced disappearance have no statute of limitation in international human rights law, Olivera (who is also a lawyer) presented a supposed death certificate for Marie Anne Erize, the French woman he is accused of kidnapping and torturing, and whose body has never been found. By the time the document was proven to be false, Olivera had been flown back to Argentina, where he has legal immunity for atrocities committed during the dictatorship. In Italy, the two judges who released him are under investigation. In the Buenos Aires suburb where he lives, Olivera was officially declared Persona Non Grata; human rights and citizens groups have spray-painted Asesino! Torturador! on the front of his house. Human rights groups are studying ways to bring this miscarriage of justice to an international tribunal.

How best to confront such dynamism has become a heated legal, moral, and political issue. The experts consulted for this article disagree, sometimes starkly, on optics, emphases, and preferred courses of action.

Only when asked to compile a working list of former heads of state vulnerable to international arrest in the wake of the Pinochet precedent, did our experts widely concur. For most of the respondents, the magnitude and scale of atrocities were decisive factors in their selections:

IDI AMIN IN 1979 LIAISION

Idi Amin [de facto president of Uganda, 1971-1979], for the scale of his general brutality, purging of the Lango and Acholi tribes, and expulsion of the country's entire Asian population. It is believed that over 300,000 perished in his bloody reign of terror. He is living under official protection in Saudi Arabia. When Human Rights inquired of a Saudi ambassador about the possibility of extraditing him for prosecution, he was told that such an action would violate "Bedouin hospitality."

MILTON OBOTE

Milton Obote, president of Uganda (1980-85), for continued brutality and repression on a scale that some believe to exceed that of Idi Amin. He lives in Zambia.