AMIA ANNIVERSARY
ON THE morning of July 18, 1994, Daniel Pomerantz had arrived early to begin the day’s administrative duties at the Jewish xentre in the Calle Pasteur in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires.
When an elderly colleague called him to the back of the building belonging to the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Amia), Mr Pomerantz reluctantly abandoned his steaming cup of coffee. At 9.53am, a massive car bomb exploded, destroying the office where he had been sitting just moments earlier, along with most of the building. The blast killed 85 people and wounded another 300.
It was the worst atrocity committed against Jews anywhere in the world since the Holocaust.
Exactly a quarter of a century later, Mr Pomerantz, now Amia’s executive director, remains appalled that nobody has been brought to justice for the attack: “In one way or another, every Argentinian government over the past 25 years bears responsibility.”
In March 1992, in a tragic foreshadowing, a suicide bomb at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires had killed 29 and injured 242. In the first three years after the Amia bombing, the judge heading the inquiry ordered 22 arrests — mostly Buenos Aires provincial policemen.
The case was then turned over to two new prosecutors, Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos, who in 2007 brought the matter to Interpol, requesting that “red notices”, or arrest warrants, be issued to nine suspects, including former Iranian President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and the former Iranian ambassador to Argentina, Hadi Soleimanpour.
Although Argentina’s former head of the State Intelligence Secretariat, Hugo Anzorreguy, was sentenced to 54 months in prison and the used-car dealer who sold the van containing the bomb, Carlos Telledín, received 42 months in jail for accepting bribes to incriminate police officers, no Iranian suspects have been charged.
In 2013, the government of Argentina’s then President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, signed a surprise, controversial “memorandum of understanding” with Iran in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to investigate the Amia bombing.
Two years later, Mr Nisman, by now working alone, claimed to be in possession of evidence proving that a deal had been negotiated at the highest levels of the two governments which would see Tehran deliver oil to Argentina in exchange for food, weapons and a pledge to convince Interpol to drop the red notices on the terrorist suspects.
But on January 18, 2015, the day before Mr Nisman was due to present this information in the Argentine Congress, he was found shot dead in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment. Authorities called it a suicide but doubts immediately surfaced, given the nature of the charges Mr Nisman was about to bring.
Nearly three years later, federal judge Julián Ercolini officially ruled that Mr Nisman had been drugged, beaten and murdered, possibly by more than one person.
Since taking office in 2015, Argentina’s current President Mauricio Macri has pledged to bring the perpetrators of the Amia bombing to justice. In 2018, Argentina and the United States agreed to work together to cut off the funding networks and money laundering activities of Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, which they said was financing terrorism across Latin America.
At a special session last month at the United Nations in New York to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the bombing, during which 85 candles were lit in memory of each of the Amia victims, Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Jorge Faurie, declared: “We will not stop in our demands for justice.”
He called the atrocity “not only an attack against the Jewish community, but against all Argentinians and the democracy of our country.” Amia President Ariel Eichbaum told the UN session that the 1994 bombing had left a
“wound that has not been able to heal.”
This week, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution commemorating the Amia attack and demanding that those responsible be brought to justice.
Although Argentina has had an antidiscrimination law on its statute books since 1988, the most recent national statistics released in a report by the Argentinian Jewish umbrella organisation Daia indicate that antisemitic incidents rose by 14 per cent in 2017 over the previous year.
Every government over the past 25 years bears responsibility’