3 0 Friday, August 24, 2012OPINION&ANALYSISThe Australian Jewish News – jewishnews.net.au

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ALLON LEEMEDIA WEEKBurns’s lukewarm analysis IN The Sydney Morning Herald (17/08)former US diplomat Nicholas Burnsargued that a diplomatic solution in Iranwill only arise when America “create[s] adirect channel between Washington andTehran and begin[s] an extended one-on-one negotiation with all issues onthe table … To be successful, however,the US must be ready to compromise byoffering imaginative proposals thatwould permit Iran civil nuclear powerbut deny it a nuclear weapon.”There is no Iranian desire for one-on-

one negotiations with America, as theUK Daily Telegraph’s David Blairexplained in The Age (17/08), notingthat at the last multilateral meeting in

June: “Seven countries were repre-sented in Moscow … Wendy Sherman,number three in the US StateDepartment, sat opposite Saeed Jalili,head of Iran's Supreme NationalSecurity Council ... But the two nevermet one-on-one. The Americans hadoffered a bilateral meeting, but Jalilideclined. This was quite understand-able, for a public meeting with the GreatSatan's emissaries would have exposedJalili to attack in the viper’s nest ofIranian domestic politics, quite possiblyending his career.”

Some get it, others don’t AN Associated Press report by Ali AkbarDareini in The Canberra Times (18/08)

succinctly summarised the nature of theIranian threat: “Israel considers Iran anexistential threat because of its nuclearand missile programs, support for radi-cal anti-Israel groups on its borders andrepeated references by Iranian leadersto Israel's destruction.” Meanwhile, The Australian Financial

Review (17/08) reprinted US analystKenneth Waltz’s factually incorrectappraisal of the effect Israel‘s nuclearprogram has had on the Middle East:“Israel's regional nuclear monopoly,

which has proved remarkably durablefor more than four decades, has longfuelled instability in the Middle East. Inno other region of the world does alone, unchecked nuclear state exist. It is

Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desirefor one, that has contributed most to thecrisis.”The Iranian nuclear weapons initia-

tive was kick-started in 1989 after theconclusion of the eight-year Iran-Iraqwar. And as WikiLeaks showed, most ofthe Middle East’s Arab leaders are fran-tically worried about Iran’s nuclearweapons prospects and thinking aboutdeveloping their own nuclear deterrent.They never sought this deterrent earlier,despite Israel’s supposed nuclear capa-bility, because they understood it didnot threaten them.

Justice deniedTHE Australian’s Chris Merritt (16/08)

blasted the Australian High Court rejec-tion of the Hungarian government’sextradition request of alleged Nazi warcriminal Charles Zentai: “If he is inno-cent, he has cause to complain. Butwhat if those allegations are right? TheHigh Court majority has found that theproceedings brought against him werebased on an offence – ‘war crime’ – thatwas created retrospectively. Withrespect, that really is a bit cute. Thesame could be said of the crimesagainst peace that resulted in a numberof successful prosecutions at the post-war trials at Nuremburg.”

The Zentai travesty

ONE of the best ways to evaluate averdict by a court is to check thereactions of the protagonists. Ifno evidence comes to light but

the aggrieved party and its supporters arecrestfallen, whereas the individual whoallegedly committed the crime and his orher backers are ecstatic, it may be that thejudicial decision in question is deeplyflawed.

A good example of such a verdictwould be the recent decision of theAustralian High Court in Canberra toblock the extradition to Hungary for warcrimes of indicted murder suspect CharlesZentai more than seven years after hisextradition was requested. In this case,although it was the Hungarian govern-ment that officially submitted the extradi-tion request to the Australian authorities,ostensibly it is only the aggrieved party.Those truly “victimised” by this outra-geous decision are not the Hungarians, butrather the Australian Jewish community,and especially the Holocaust survivorsamong them, the Simon WiesenthalCentre, and those who sincerely care aboutbringing alleged Nazi war criminals to justice.

In the late ’80s, the Australian Jewishcommunity fought very hard to convinceits government to take legal action againstalleged Nazi war criminals discovered liv-ing in the country. The Simon WiesenthalCentre contributed to that noble cause byexposing the escape to Australia of numer-ous Holocaust perpetrators, includingquite a few members of Lithuanian andLatvian murder squads who were stillalive at that time. Ultimately, Australiapassed legislation enabling criminal prose-cution of such suspects in 1989 and estab-lished a Special Investigations Unit (SIU)to handle these cases, decisions of greatmoral and judicial significance, whichinspired confidence in thegovernment’s ostensible determination toseriously address this issue. These good

intentions, however, never bore practicalfruit.

The initial three prosecutions did notyield any convictions, and the prematureclosure of the SIU in mid-June 1992doomed the remaining investigations tofailure. In that respect, the Zentai case wasthe final straw, the last chance for the gov-ernment to take legal action against analleged Nazi war criminal who had foundpostwar refuge in Australia.

To add insult to injury, the verdictappeared to fly in the face of all logic andnumerous judicial precedents. By a mar-gin of 5-1, the judges of the High Courtstopped the extradition of Zentai on thegrounds that it had been submittedbecause he was charged with a “warcrime,” but at the time he allegedly com-mitted the crime in question, November 8,1944, no such category of crime existed inHungary. What the judges ignored, how-ever, were the many significant cases, start-ing with the Nuremberg Trials, in whichthe leaders of the Third Reich, as well asNazi war criminals, had been prosecutedfor “crimes against peace”, “conducting awar of aggression”, “war crimes”, “crimesagainst humanity”, and “genocide”, all cat-egories of crimes that had not existed atthe time that the defendants committedthem, but had been especially created byinternational law to reflect the legal realityof World War II and the Holocaust.

As far as the other parties involved inthe case are concerned, I would separatebetween the authorities in Australia andHungary and the Zentai family. Eventhough the former both had an ostensible

interest in carrying out the extradition ofthe accused, and they officially pursuedthe case to the highest court in the land, ineach country there were important factorswhich ultimately made their stance muchless unequivocal than that of theAustralian Jewish community and theWiesenthal Centre. One must, for exam-ple, take into consideration that the origi-nal extradition request was filed in March2005, when Hungary was ruled by a left-wing coalition, whose policies onHolocaust-related issues were very differ-ent than those of its current right-winggovernment, which has an absolute major-ity in Parliament and a strong nationalistagenda. Currently under pressure to pros-ecute recently exposed alleged Nazi warcriminal Laszlo Csatary, the last thing thisgovernment needs is another case of aHolocaust perpetrator whose trial mightfurther undermine their patriotic creden-tials and boost the support for their even-more extreme right-wing and anti-Semiticopposition party Jobbik. Thus the sigh ofrelief in Budapest could even be heard inCanberra, not only in Jerusalem.

In the case of Australia, the High Courtdecision reflects a lack of understanding ofthe uniqueness of the crimes of the Shoahand the urgency and significance of takinglegal action against those of its perpetra-tors who illegally found refuge in TheLucky Country. The Zentai case appar-ently marks an unfortunately final andabysmal end to the efforts to do so. In thatregard, it is not fortuitous for the causethat the defendant was charged with onlyone murder (which he denied), had led a

decent life in Australia, and was veryactively defended by his Australian family.Perhaps one of the many other cases ofallegedly worse criminals would have faredbetter, but that is no reason to haveignored Zentai.

As for the Zentai family, while theirrelief was understandable, last week’s deci-sion was no cause for elation. It was notabout Zentai’s guilt or innocence, simplyabout a technical point of law. He remainsan alleged war criminal with evidenceagainst him and in that respect, they arethe true losers of the High Court decision,since the only way to prove his innocencewould have been in a Budapest court-room, a result which they fought againstfrom day one.

Dr Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of theSimon Wiesenthal Centre and director of its Israeloffice. His latest book, Operation Last Chance; One

Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice(Palgrave/Macmillan), relates how the Zentai

case evolved and deals with Australia’s failure tobring to justice the Nazi war criminals who found

refuge here.

DR EFRAIM ZUROFF

Viewpoint

Last week’s High Court decision wasless a triumphant victory for analleged war criminal than a sorryindictment of Australia’s seniorjudiciary.

The High Court last weekrejected an appeal by the

government to extraditeCharles Zentai to Hungary.

A picture of Peter Balazs, the man CharlesZentai is accused of murdering.