Former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman: I Am a Political Prisoner in Argentina
Former Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman who has been held under house arrest for the past week, published an editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday entitled 'I Am a Political Prisoner in Argentina'.
Timerman was arrested on December 14 on the orders of Argentine Federal Judge Claudio Bonadío on “treason” charges in which former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, now a senator, was also included. The judge also sought her expulsion from the Senate to facilitate her arrest - a request rejected by the Senate for being “partisan and unjustified.”
The charges stem from the Memorandum of Understanding Timerman signed with Iran in 2013 for a joint investigation of the AMIA bombing, a still-unsolved 1994 incident in which 85 died in a Buenos Aires Jewish community center.
“Advancing the case was a key goal of the administration in which I served as foreign minister from 2010 to 2015,” Timerman wrote. “An Argentine judge would question the suspects in Iran and begin judicial proceedings to bring truth and justice to the victims, with a nonbinding truth commission of international jurists to observe the case.”
“For Mr. Bonadío, the agreement 'undermines' the investigation into the AMIA case and is the pretext for my indictment.”
Timerman noted, however, that before the agreement “the investigation into the attack was so flawed and corrupt that in 2004 the entire trial was annulled and the judge who led it was put under investigation. Judge Bonadío — who now accuses me of treason — led the investigation into that cover-up but was removed from it in 2005.”
Bonadío's charges rest on allegations that Fernández de Kirchner and Timerman petitioned Interpol to lift Red Notices against Iranian officials implicated in the AMIA attack - a claim rejected by the former Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald K. Noble. The three year-old claim, dismissed by Argentine courts in seven instances - including two appeals - was revived on December 14 by Bonadío.
“A biased Judge Bonadío report cannot change the truth,” Noble tweeted. “INTERPOL was never asked by Argentina or Timerman to remove the AMIA Red Notices!” He offered to testify in Argentina to that effect.
CELS, a prominent Argentine human rights organization, condemned the “use of the penal system to persecute political opponents.”
“Even if the agreement with Iran provided little guarantee of justice for the AMIA victims,” Human Rights Watch Americas director José Miguel Vivanco said, “pursuing criminal charges for treason against officials responsible for negotiating an international accord seems strained and unreasonable.”
Bonadío had been exposed in 1996 as a “napkin judge” - a shortlist of judges who lent themselves to politicized trials at the behest of then-President Carlos Menem. More recently, he has dismissed numerous corruption charges against President Mauricio Macri - including those stemming from the Panama Papers.
“Sadly, it is not the first time my family has been a victim of political persecution,” Timerman concluded. “Forty years ago, my father, the journalist Jacobo Timerman, was also a political prisoner. He spent over a year under house arrest, after being kidnapped and tortured in clandestine centers run by the military during my country’s last dictatorship.”
“Defense of human rights has been vitally important in my personal and professional life. I considered my diplomacy in this case to be part of that ideal. Instead, I find myself in a Kafkaesque process that aggravates my cancer and robs me of the time I have left.”
At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/timerman-argentina-political-prisoner-bonadio.html
Former Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and former Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble discuss the AMIA case in 2013.
Noble has refuted claims that Timerman sought the lifting of Red Notice alerts against Iranian officials,
and has offered to testify in Argentina to that effect.
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