Jewish groups boycott Holocaust event over Argentina prosecutor's death
|
Version 0 of 1. Jewish community leaders in Argentina have announced that none of their representatives will attend an official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony next week, amid growing anger over the mysterious death of a state prosecutor who was investigating the alleged coverup of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. The body of Alberto Nisman was found late on Sunday next to a .22-calibre handgun and a bullet casing on the floor of the bathroom of his flat in Buenos Aires. Nisman had been due to testify to Congress on his allegations that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had conspired to protect Iranian officials implicated in the attack on the Argentinian Jewish Mutual Association, Amia, in which 85 people died. On Friday, the Amia, the Daia – the country’s affiliate to the World Jewish Congress – the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires and other groups announced their refusal to send any representatives to the ceremony at the country’s foreign ministry on Tuesday. “The charges are so gruesome and extend to so many areas of government that it would be an insult to the memory of our victims of the Shoah to attend,” said Waldo Wolff, vicepresident of the DAIA, the son of a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany who soughtrefuge in Argentina after Germany’s Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogroms of1938. Anger was focused on the alleged role of the foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, who Nisman alleged had participated in secret talks with Iran – and who is also Jewish. “I am horrified by the charge that someone who is both an Argentinian and a Jew is suspected of plotting to cast darkness on an investigation undertaken in his own country to solve the Amia bombing,” said Diana Wang, head of the Children of the Shoah association. Wang arrived in Argentina in 1947 at barely two years of age with her parents, who were Holocaust survivors. Related: Argentinian government points to rogue intelligence agents in Nisman death As prosecutor in the Amia investigation, Nisman had attempted to obtain Interpol arrest warrants for the five Iranian officials to stand trial in Argentina. In the charges he presented in court only four days before his death, Nisman claimed that Fernández and Timerman plotted to lift those warrants in exchange for Iranian oil. Government officials have rejected the allegations, and suggested that Nisman was killed by rogue intelligence agents. The decision not to attend the celebration of the 70th anniversary of theliberation of Auschwitz concentration camp is a sharp blow to Argentina’sgovernment, which has dedicated many years of patient effort to clear thiscountry’s reputation as a post-war safe haven for some of the most importantNazi criminals, such as Adolf Eichmann, who organised the transport ofmillions of Jews to the concentration camps, and the Auschwitz doctor JosefMengele. |