A tribute to Dick Marty
by Guy Mettan,* Geneva
(2 February 2024) I think it makes sense to revisit the death of Dick Marty. On the one hand, because the tributes paid to him did not do justice to his merits. On the other hand, however, because I reproach myself for not having honoured my promise to visit him last spring.
As is so often the case, eulogies often serve more to praise the merits of those who deliver them than to emphasise the qualities of the deceased. I knew little about Dick Marty the public prosecutor, Dick Marty the State Councillor and Dick Marty the Councillor of States, except from what the press reported about him at the time. But I was very interested in Dick Marty, who was the Council of Europe’s rapporteur on the secret CIA prisons and the shameful smuggling by the Kosovo Liberation Army KLA during the Kosovo war. Two causes that deeply marked the last third of his life and of which the media remembered little. The third cause, which was very close to his heart and was also kept quiet, was his civil engagement in the service of popular initiatives such as the one in favour of “corporate responsibility” and a “micro-tax on cashless payments”.
In recent years, we had met in the committee in favour of the micro-tax, of which he was also a member, and in emails after he was detained under police protection following the abstruse affair surrounding an alleged attempted murder by Serbian extremists that was to be blamed on Kosovars. This attempted murder took place just a few weeks after the imprisonment of the Kosovar leader and tormentor Hacim Thaci by the International Criminal Court. A story that is unclear, to say the least.
Our last exchange took place at the end of February 2023. I had promised to visit him in Ticino to talk about his latest book (“Sous haute protection”, Favre) after I had returned from a trip to North America. A project that never materialised due to a culpable hesitancy I regret today. You believe that people live forever and waste your time until it’s too late.
In hindsight, I realise that he made decisions and suffered consequences that, in my eyes, demand respect and made his life a destiny. Why did a bourgeois politician who had succeeded in everything and who had held the highest offices in all three spheres of power – the judiciary as a public prosecutor, the executive as a member of the government and the legislature as a member of the Council of States and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe – renounce the honours and sinecures that his prestigious career could bring him in order to transform himself into an uncompromising defender of the truth and to right the wrongs that had been done to the most invisible victims of our society?
Instead of joining the board of directors of a bank or chairing a prominent cultural institution at the end of his career like so many politicians, Marty opted for solitude, criticism and exposing the shameful deeds of the powerful. He preferred the risk of disgrace, which usually befalls those who break with caste and reject their privileges, to honour and attendance fees. And not to pursue special interests, but to restore the truth and bring justice to those who were unjustly tortured in the illegal prisons of the first world power and perished in the notorious dungeons of a guerrilla organisation that financed itself by selling the organs of its prisoners.
This decision, a conscious decision, deserves our full respect.
The second decision, which requires great strength of character, is his determination to act against the aberrations and misdeeds that are being committed here, on our doorstep, and not in the Antipodes. In his latest interviews and the Italian version of his book (“Verità irriverenti”, Casagrande), he condemned the threat to democracy here in Switzerland and in Europe – not in China, Russia or North Korea.
At the risk of being seen as a conspiracy theorist, he was concerned about the diktats of the European Commission and governments that were massively restricting civil liberties without any real need and forcing vaccines on people through treaties that were so secret that neither the people nor their elected representatives could take note of them, let alone approve them.
With his calm stubbornness, he was one of those who would rather see the beam in his own eye than the mote in another’s, unlike so many busybodies who would rather blaspheme about mistakes on the other side of the world than to own up to their own mistakes. An ease to which he never succumbed.
Finally, Dick Marty will have ended his earthly life with a great hurt. I could not talk to him about it, but I sensed that he was deeply hurt, angry and confused about the way his country had treated him in the last three years of his life, putting him and his family in danger through careless behaviour (by warning the alleged perpetrators) and doing nothing to correct this faux pas, as he had indicated on Anne-Frédérique Widmann's French-speaking Swiss TV programme “Temps present”.
Being under constant surveillance for months on end, regardless of your relationships with your loved ones and your privacy, is acceptable when it comes to being protected. But when you are cornered for months and nothing is done to end these abuses and eliminate the causes, it is bitter. No one, neither in the federal justice and security authorities, nor in his party or from his former colleagues, has taken even the slightest step to solve the problem.
If you spend your life serving your country in every possible way and then must end it with the feeling that you have been abused by your own country, that deserves more than respect: it deserves admiration.
| * Guy Mettan (1956) is a political scientist, freelance journalist, and book author. He began his journalistic career in 1980 at the “Tribune de Genève” and was its director and editor-in-chief from 1992 to 1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of the “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Guy Mettan has been a member of the Geneva Cantonal Parliament for 20 years. |
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
