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10. 09. 09. - 13:00

Israel 'made a deal with Waldheim'

By Lisa Chapman

Israel offered to help rehabilitate former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim in 1991 if he secured the release of an Israeli soldier in Lebanon, according to an Israeli journalist.

The Vienna daily Die Presse reported today (Thurs) that Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman had related the story in his just-published book "By Any Means Necessary: Israel's Covert War for its POWs and MIAs."

Bergman said former Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin came up with the idea of asking Waldheim to intercede with former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on behalf of Israeli soldier Ron Arad, who the Israeli government believed was being held by Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon. He had gone missing in 1986.

In return, Rabin offered to have Jewish organisations around the world stop attacking Waldheim and to reinvigorate frozen Israeli diplomatic relations with Austria.

Rabin sent Israeli lawyer Uri Slonim to Vienna to talk with Waldheim with a personal letter from former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, whom Waldheim knew from their time together in New York as ambassadors to the UN.

Waldheim, who was considering whether to run for re-election as Austrian president, welcomed the Israeli offer and said he would do what he could for Arad.

Waldheim raised Arad’s case with Rafsandjani during a state visit to Iran in June 1991, but the Iranian president brushed him off, saying he didn’t know who Arad was or what had happened to him. Arad has been classified as missing to this day.

Waldheim shortly thereafter decided not to run for re-election.

Slonim and Waldheim’s former press spokesman Heinz Nußbaumer have both confirmed Bergman’s account to Die Presse.

Waldheim, born on 21 December 1918, was UN Secretary General from 1972 to 1981 and president of Austria from 1986 to 1992.

His activity as an intelligence officer in the German army during World War II surfaced during his presidential campaign in 1985 and caused international controversy because of his possible role in German reprisals against civilians or mass massacres during his service in the former Yugoslavia during the war.

In view of the ongoing international controversy, the Austrian government decided to appoint an international committee of historians to examine Waldheim's life between 1938 and 1945.

They found no evidence of his personal involvement in war crimes but said he must have known about some of them even though he had claimed he had not.

The US government put Waldheim and his wife Elisabeth on a watch list of people banned from entering the USA in 1987.

He did not visit any other Western countries as president, going instead to the Middle East, the Vatican and a few Communist states.

Waldheim died on 14 June 2007.

Austrian Times

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