Argentine Jews Seek Clinton’s Help

Three years after a terrorist bomb killed his daughter and 85 others in one of the bloodiest anti-Semitic attacks since the Holocaust, Luis Czyzewski is still hunting for justice. Today he will ask the help of the most powerful leader in the world.

The Argentine accountant has already told his story to foreign leaders: During U.S. congressional hearings on terrorism, he moved lawmakers to tears with the tale of the death of his 21-year-old daughter, Paola, in the carnage at a Jewish community center here in July 1994.

Today, behind closed doors, he will make his case personally to President Clinton. “We don’t want our dead to die twice--once because of the bomb, a second time because of indifference,” Czyzewski, a dignified 53-year-old with tired eyes, said in an interview. “That will be my message to the president.”

In different forms, a cry for justice has long echoed in South America, a region where the super-rich elite and the masses remain divided by a social and economic chasm, where fledgling democracies still struggle to maintain control over rogue police and sophisticated criminals, where the rule of law sometimes has aching exceptions.

As Clinton has jetted around the continent this week, offering sunny visions of a more prosperous future, he has often alluded to this yearning. In Venezuela, he applauded growing international cooperation to fight drug traffickers, who corrupt police and politicians. In Brazil on Wednesday, he visited a desperately poor shantytown and called it a “betrayal” when only a few “reap the benefits” of economic reforms that have swept the Americas. To business leaders in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he described the gap between rich and poor as “the age-old curse of Latin America.”

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Although Argentina has the continent’s highest standard of living, today’s meeting in Buenos Aires stands out in Clinton’s largely noncontroversial weeklong schedule in a way that can hardly thrill his hosts: By sitting down with Jewish leaders and relatives of the victims, he will cast a spotlight on two terrorist acts that continue to embarrass President Carlos Menem’s government and raise questions about links between Middle Eastern terrorists and police officials.

The only suspects arrested in the 1994 bombing at the community center are four police officials. Two years earlier, 29 people were killed in a bombing at the Israeli Embassy here, and the lack of progress in that case raises suspicions that the attackers were aided or protected by law enforcement.

Today’s meeting, which was included in Clinton’s schedule after repeated requests from within Argentina and the United States, adds a discordant note to a visit designed as a celebration of a growing U.S.-Argentine alliance. Indeed, Menem has yet to meet with victims’ family members, a fact ruefully recited by their advocates--though Argentina’s ambassador to the United States said he recently tried to set up such a meeting with Menem but received no response from the relatives.

In a Sept. 29 letter urging Clinton to focus on the bombings during the trip, eight U.S. senators, including Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, declared: “By raising this issue, both in private meetings and in public statements, you would show the government of Argentina that combating terrorism is an American priority. . . . We urge you to show that the United States stands with” Argentina’s Jewish community.

Administration officials maintain that Clinton already was sensitive to the unsolved bombings, which underscore shared security concerns about terrorism within the Western Hemisphere. “It is clearly a sensitive matter,” said one high-ranking U.S. official. “But it is one within the larger issue of the president’s trip.”

White House aides Wednesday remained uncertain whether Clinton would address the bombings specifically in his public remarks or would limit himself to a broader condemnation of terrorism.

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It is the fervent hope of family members, along with their sympathizers in Argentina and the United States, that the statement will somehow illuminate an investigative trail that has remained dark.

In the community center case, a dogged investigative magistrate last year charged four alleged accomplices: a high-ranking commander and three officers of Buenos Aires province’s police force, an agency with a brutal, scandal-plagued history. They are accused of providing the van used as a vehicle bomb.

Investigators suspect that the Hezbollah terrorist group and Iranian spies were the masterminds. But some Jewish leaders and other critics--citing vanishing evidence, dubious witnesses allegedly coached by police and other oddities--believe there has been a larger cover-up of the role of Argentine accomplices.

“The government is protecting the killers,” Laura Ginsberg, a biologist whose husband was killed in the blast, declared this week. “Until there is a political decision to lift that protection, neither case will be solved, and there will be fertile ground for a third attack.”

Jewish leaders say Clinton can offer more than moral and symbolic support by freeing up technical and investigative resources of U.S. law enforcement to assist in the cases. Police here made important progress in another high-profile murder case after the FBI lent them a computerized system for tracing phone calls.

Meanwhile, Czyzewski hopes to tell Clinton about the agony and absurdity of his experience. His diminutive, bubbly daughter, who rejected the family profession of accounting and studied law, rarely went to the community center. But in a twist of fate, she was there on the day she died because her parents asked her to help with a big auditing project.

Paola went downstairs to the lobby to meet a delivery man bringing coffee just as the explosives-laden van crashed into the front entrance, demolishing the six-story building.

Her mother survived because she had gone to the rear of the building to use a fax machine.

“What can I ask of Clinton?” Czyzewski said. “What can I ask of the world? What happened to us already happened. We ask that everything be done so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Despite the bombings, the Argentine government has established good relations with Israel and tried to erase the fascistic, anti-Jewish traditions of Argentina’s past.

But the two anti-Semitic attacks sum up the chief worry of diplomats, investors and many Argentines, a worry that resonates throughout the continent in various degrees--that judicial and law enforcement systems have not yet recovered from the corruption, abuse and right-wing extremism of the past.

“My pessimism clashes with my emotional need for answers,” Czyzewski said.