Haig, Timerman And Human Rights
Lewis, Anthony
GUEST EDITORIAL ANTHONY LEWIS Secretary of State Haig had a closed meeting last week with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a general discussion of policy. In the course of it there was an...
...For in the last five years Argentina, under its military regime, has experienced anti-Semitism so widespread and brutal that it cannot be a secret to anyone who cares...
...When he was visited by Yigal Allon of Israel, he writes, "I told him that I had not been humiliated by torture, by electric shocks on my genitals, but had been profoundly humiliated by the silent complicity of Jewish leaders...
...More often they were simply never seen again...
...Haig replied that Timerman was not the only expert on the subject...
...Is it possible that Alexander Haig is unaware of those facts...
...They were kidnapped by armed military men...
...He felt in his torturers "a gut excitement, the sense of one's entire being abandoned to hatred...
...And Timerman is not the only firsthand witness who has described the anti-Semitism at work in Argentina...
...Reprinted by permission...
...According to two persons who were present, Haig replied: "A belief in God...
...How must we appear to ourselves...
...Sometime later Representative Gerry Studds, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked the Secretary what values he thought we shared with the Argentine regime except for opposition to Communism...
...There is a question here, too, for the American Jewish community...
...But of course it is not just a Jewish question...
...Is it going to sit quietly by while a high official of its Government says we share values—"a belief in God"— with a regime under which violent anti-Semitism has been practiced...
...How must we appear to our most important Latin neighbors, Mexico and Venezuela...
...Over the last five years thousands of Argentines of all faiths—the estimates run from 5,000 to 15,000 and more—have "disappeared...
...Anthony Lewis is a columnist for the New York Times...
...That troubled Jacobo Timerman more than anything...
...In a country where most political expression is banned, anti-Semitic magazines are freely sold...
...Can we conceivably believe that embracing them as our own will strengthen our influence in this hemisphere...
...The Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, former senator James Buckley, urged the Foreign Affairs Committee successfully not to demand some Argentine steps toward decency before resuming arms aid...
...Sometimes their bodies turned up, hacked to pieces or burned...
...Of Julius Streicher...
...The United States, he said, had shared values with Argentina: a compatibility of views...
...The question is one of our own soul...
...In the words of Jacobo Timerman, "nothing equal to it has taken place in the Western world since 1945...
...Is the American Jewish community going to accept such statements, such insults to common intelligence, in silence...
...Nor is it by any means a question limited to Argentina...
...What kind of country are we...
...He was taunted as a Jew...
...After Haig's answer about a shared belief in God, Congressman Studds said he thought Jacobo Timerman would be surprised...
...Timerman, who was a leading Buenos Aires editor and publisher until his detention and torture by Argentine military units, describes in his just-published book what it was like to be a Jew in those circumstances...
...Amnesty International estimates that murder squads under direct Guatemalan Government control have carried out more than 3,000 political killings in the last two years...
...The Congressman said he noted the comments but still would like an answer to his question: What values do we share with the Argentine Government...
...For several minutes, in emotional tones, Haig denounced those—presumably including Studds—who did not understand how Communism was advancing in our hemisphere...
...In Argentina many Jewish community leaders thought it best not to protest too loudly, not to rock the boat...
...He assured the committee that the Argentine Government was not involved in anti-Semitic acts...
...In the course of it there was an extraordinarily revealing exchange...
...Could he have meant the God of Torquemada...
...He heard the Nazi talk, the theories of Jewish conspiracy...
...The Christian Democratic Party has had 76 of its leaders assassinated in the last 10 months...
...Copyright © 1981 by The New York Times Company...
...Haig's remarks showed at the least an incredible insensitivity to the fact and meaning of anti-Semitism—and to the terrible danger for everyone, Jew and non-Jew, when it appears in so morbid a form in a supposedly civilized country...
...Are things at such a point that we Americans must enlist torturers and murderers as our allies and proclaim their values, their God, as ours...
...Haig was explaining the Reagan Administration's plan to resume arms aid to the right-wing military Government of Argentina...
...The swastika appears on the walls of prison interrogation rooms...
...And no one with the least knowledge of the situation doubts that official military units were responsible...
...Of the Cossacks who terrorized Jews...
...The Reagan Administration is now considering the resumption of arms sales to the Government of Guatemala that in some ways makes Argentina's look moderate...
Vol. 6 • June 1981 • No. 6
