My favourite TV channel, ARTE, showed the first part of Olivier Assayas’ film “Carlos” last night. The French film is a film biography about the career of Illich Ramírez Sánchez, alias Carlos, and I had to realize fast that I know practically nothing about this Carlos, who (after some research) turned out to have been one of the most wanted terrorists of the Cold War during the 70s and 80s.
Born 12th October 1949 in Venezuela as son of a communist lawyer, Carlos grew up in a communistic influenced environment and joined the youth movement of the national communist party at an early age. In 1966 he moved to Europe, first London, and later for his law studies to Moscow, where he was expelled after two years because of “anti-Soviet propaganda”. In 1973 then the former chef of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Wadi Haddad, admit him to join the group under the name “Carlos”. From then on Carlos became one of the most active and thus most wanted terrorists of that time, being responsible for numerous attacks in the UK, France and also the OPEC-attack in Vienna. He led the six-person terrorist-team that attacked the meeting of OPEC leaders on December 21, 1975, where they took over 60 hostages and killed three of them. After that Carlos was thrown out of the PFLP, temporary arrested in Yugoslavia, assaulted attacks in London, Munich and Paris, was expelled from Hungary in late 1985, and ended up in Syria, where he was expelled too in 1991. He escaped to Sudan, but the government handed him over to French agents in 1994. In 1997 the French tribunal sentenced Carlos to life imprisonment.
There's some interesting material online about the topic “Carlos” and “terrorism during the Cold War”, such as articles published in the German magazine Spiegel from that time, which contain amongst others also an interview with Libya’s former head of state, Muammar el-Gaddafi, in 1976, in which he defines what terrorism is for him and denies repeatedly not to know neither about Carlos and his group, nor about other terroristic organizations of that time such as the Baader-Meinhof group or the Japanese Red Army. However one of the terrorists involved in the OPEC-attack from 1975, the German Hans-Joachim Klein, explained afterwards that the incident was planned independently by the group itself, but that the idea for it, the weapons and information came from Libya. It is well known that Carlos’ group is said to have had contact with the Gaddafi-regime.
ARTE shows the second part of the film tonight, starting at 8.15 pm.
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