The forgotten bombing

If we had paid attention to the 1994 attack on a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Sept. 11 might not have been such a surprise

By MARCUS GEE

Saturday, March 2, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A17

July 18, 1994, began like any other day for Aida Plaksin. Her husband, Abraham, made her a cup of tea, dressed for work and kissed her goodbye as he went out the door, reminding her to see about plane tickets for their coming anniversary trip to the United States and Israel.

But at 9:53 a.m., a huge bang shook the apartment. A bomb had gone off outside the Argentine Israelite Mutual Aid Association (AMIA), the Buenos Aires Jewish community centre 40 blocks away where Mr. Plaksin had worked for 36 years.

Mr. Plaksin, who was 61 and a cultural director at AMIA, fell from an office on the fourth floor to another on the second as the building collapsed, landing sprawled on a desk. Later that day, Mrs. Plaksin heard that her husband of 34 years was among the 85 dead.

"One day my husband went to work, and by 5 p.m. they were dragging out his corpse," she said, squeezing a balled-up handkerchief and fighting tears as she told me the story last month in her Buenos Aires apartment, surrounded by pictures and mementos of Mr. Plaksin.

Who planted the bomb that killed Abraham Plaksin? Nearly eight years later, Mrs. Plaksin and the rest of Argentina's 200,000 Jews are still waiting for an answer.

The investigation of the AMIA bombing has been marked all along by domestic incompetence and international indifference.

Argentine authorities bungled the case from the start. Instead of going through the rubble for evidence, they carted most of it away and dumped it at a local landfill. Bits and pieces were still turning up at a city flea market years later.

Joe Goldman, an American journalist who wrote a book about the case, told me he went to 43 apartments around the AMIA in the weeks after the bombing to ask questions about what the residents may have seen or what physical evidence they might have found. Only three had been visited by police.

Later, it came out that 66 audiotapes taken from wiretaps of local suspects had gone missing. So had a stack of U.S. dollars that, investigators believed, had been used to pay for the white Renault van that is thought to have been used as a car bomb in the attack. The marked cash had been traced to a money dealer in Iran.

Could the police have really been so ham-handed, or was there a cover-up? Leaders of the Jewish community have long suspected that the Argentine government was less than keen to get to the bottom of the attack. Argentina was once a haven for Nazi war criminals, and some figures in the military junta that once ruled the country were unrepentant anti-Semites.

There were rumours, too, about Carlos Menem, Argentina's president from 1989 to 1999. The son of a Syrian immigrant, he had close ties to the Middle East. In 1988, he went to Syria as a guest of Hafez Assad, whose regime was a well-known backer of terrorist groups.

Mr. Menem's backers pointed out that he had visited Israel, too, the first Argentine president to do so. Furthermore, they say, he downgraded ties with Iran in 1998 when Argentine authorities accused Iran's cultural attaché of being directly involved in the AMIA attack.

But, in the past few weeks, the Menem story has taken on new life. In late January, Swiss authorities said they were looking into an allegation that Mr. Menem had taken a $10-million (U.S.) bribe from Iranian agents to cover up Iran's role in the attack.

Israeli and U.S. authorities have suspected from the beginning that Iran and the anti-Israel terrorist group it supports, Hezbollah, conspired with local accomplices in the bombing.

The Swiss investigation springs from evidence that came out at a trial of five Argentine men accused of having a hand in the attack. The evidence was given by a witness known only as C, an Iranian deserter and former member of Iran's secret service who gave testimony to an Argentine prosecuting judge in Mexico in 1998 and 2000.

C gave a detailed description of Iranian clandestine operations in South America, including gun running and espionage. He said a special task force of Iranian agents had organized the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, the precursor to the AMIA attack.

But his most startling allegations concern Mr. Menem. He said Iran had transferred $10-million for Mr. Menem to an account at the Luxembourg Bank in Geneva.

The revelations have galvanized the victims' survivors, who believe their suspicions about a high-level cover-up have been vindicated. Whether they are true is another question.

When I interviewed him last month, Mr. Menem waved off the charges as "nonsense," cooked up by his political adversaries. That could be so. Mr. Menem says he plans to run for president again in 2003; the current president, Eduardo Dulhalde, is his bitter foe.

But in a post-Sept. 11 world newly alive to the dangers of terrorism, the Menem probe has focused new interest on Iran's connection to the AMIA bombing and its support of terror around the world.

Iran is thought to spend about $100-million (U.S.) a year supporting Hezbollah. A group connected to Hezbollah and Iran was behind the 1996 bombing of a Saudi apartment building that killed 19 Americans. More recently, Israel stopped a ship in the Red Sea carrying 50 tons of weapons that Hezbollah had shipped from Iran to support the Palestinian struggle against Israel.

Iran's sponsorship of terrorism goes back years, but, for a long time, many people didn't want to know about it. At the time of the AMIA bombing, Germany, France and the United States were hoping to warm ties with Iran after years of estrangement. A little thing like a bombing in faraway Buenos Aires was not going to get in the way, and the attack faded from the world's consciousness.

Sept. 11 should bring it back. The AMIA attack now looks like a forerunner of the Sept. 11 attacks. We can never really know, but it is just possible that a tougher response to the bombing that killed Abraham Plaksin might have headed off the horrors that came later. Regardless, it now becomes doubly urgent to solve the crime, wherever the trail may lead.

Some days, Aida Plaksin still wakes up expecting to see her husband bringing her a morning cup of tea. Nothing will bring him back, but she still wants justice. "If my children and grandchildren know one day who committed this crime, that's all I can hope for."
mgee@globeandmail.ca