[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

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Argentina's 9/11: Ten years later


SHIMON SAMUELS Jul. 21, 2004
Jerusalem Post





At a Paris meeting in July 2003, during his first foreign tour, the newly elected president of Argentina advised me that he was "committed to transparency - a full disclosure of the archives pertaining to Nazis in postwar Argentina, the crimes of the generals and the "disappeared" in the 1970s, and the investigations into the bombings in 1992 of the Israeli Embassy and in 1994 of the AMIA Jewish Center."

A week later, in Buenos Aires, on the 9th anniversary of that yet-unsolved atrocity that left 85 dead and hundreds wounded, president Nestor Kirchner characterized the AMIA bombing to a Wiesenthal Center delegation as Argentina's 9/11.

Now, on the 10th anniversary, with no prosecution in sight, we took the issue to the Latin American Common Market Summit convening in Puerto Iguazu, on the Argentine side of the Triple Frontier (TF) region, bordered also by Paraguay and Brazil.

Following the attack on the Israeli embassy, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had viewed the TF as a terrorist haven, calling it "a Hizbullah enclave in Latin America."

In 1993, while following the trail of Alois Brunner (responsible for the Nazi deportation of the Jews of Austria, France, Greece and Slovakia) that led from Damascus to Ciudad del Este on the TF's Paraguayan border, I first noted the unforgettably impressive mosques and Koranic schools along the skyline.

The TF was already notorious as a center for arms and drug running, money laundering, human trafficking allegedly for body organs and, more prosaically, cassette, CD and DVD piracy.

This lawless zone last week hosted eight presidents and foreign ministers - a golden opportunity for a call to order against local terror masters and to enlist Latin American support for our center's global campaign to designate suicide bombing as a crime against humanity.

The initiative was launched last December with the pope and then taken to the foreign ministers of Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Turkey and the European Parliament.

A LONG and inconclusive investigation now indicates that the AMIA was a victim of suicide bombing:

Ali Khalil Mehri, a 33-year-old Lebanese, who, according to British intelligence, made huge bank transfers to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Al Shahid, a Hamas support fund for families of suicide bombers, is a suspect in the bombing.

He is the owner of several electronics stores in Ciudad del Este. Mehri employed several Palestinians who fled to the TF from Israel in CD counterfeiting. The several million dollars in proceeds went to the establishment of Al Muqawama - the Brazilian cell of Hizbullah.

Mehri, implicated in a gangland-style murder of the local Lebanese chairman of the Chamber of Commerce who had attempted to control CD production, disappeared and recently resurfaced in Damascus.

At the Summit, we urged Argentine Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa, Paraguay's Leila Rashid Cowles, and Brazil's Celsio Amorim to immediately demand Mehri's extradition from Syria, on grounds of his alleged complicity in the AMIA attack.

Assad Ahmad Barakat was described last month, by the US Treasury Department, as a "global financier of terrorism" and "Hizbullah's Latin American regional director."

Though based in the TF, he built a Hizbullah fundraising network in the tax-free zone of Iquique, in northern Chile. When he returned to Ciudad del Este, he was denounced by a rival in crime and arrested by Paraguay, where he is currently detained for "tax evasion."

We similarly urged Argentina to extradite Barakat for trial in Buenos Aires as an AMIA perpetrator suspect.

Paraguay was also requested to investigate allegations that the Nabi Muhammad Mosque in Ciudad del Este acts as a recruitment center for Hizbullah, a movement described by the Mosque's Imam, Sheikh Munir Fadel, as "a legitimate political and religious organization."

FOR DECADES, the Arab communities of Latin America resisted politicization, often working in harmony with their Jewish neighbors. The birth, four years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil, of the anti-globalization World Social Forum has radicalized the young generation among the continent's over five million citizens of Arab origin.

Anti-Americanism, the intifada, and encouragement from the Arab Social Forum in Cairo as well as the Palestine Social Forum in Ramallah all led to the 2003 Porto Alegre march of 85,000 demonstrators screaming "Viva la Intifada Global," decked with such banners as "Nazis, Yankees, Jews - No More Chosen Peoples."

We protested to the mayor against the posters downtown and at the airport which displayed an Israeli (pointedly called "Jewish") soldier's gun targeting Arab women and children. The picture was based on the Warsaw ghetto surrender photo of a Jewish child, arms raised, under Nazi rifles.

The eight foreign ministers at the summit - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela - all pledged their support for the Wiesenthal Center's initiative against suicide terrorism, with Uruguay's Didier Opperti Badan welcoming it as "a landmark measure for the region" and requesting from us a data base of incidents, perpetrators and victims.

These commitments will, however, remain cosmetic as long as there is a Hizbullah enclave acting with impunity in the TF. Not only will the victim families of the AMIA bombing continue to suffer in the absence of justice and psychological closure, the fragile democratic structures of Latin America will also be targeted by the terrorist scourge.

Either these Latin American states will take appropriate measures to contain the import of the Middle East into their region, or they are likely to pay a high price for continued appeasement.

A concerted effort to finally prosecute those complicit in the AMIA atrocity - Argentina's 9/11 - will be the litmus test for the entire continent.

The writer is director for international liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris.
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