Now, the Timmerman Affair

By Patricia Blake

A bitter quarrel over an embattled exile's testimony

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (TIME, June 15) is a riveting tale of a man who underwent unspeakable torture and survived. In horrifying detail, exiled Argentine Publisher Jacobo Timerman, 58, details the sadism, brutality and anti-Semitic abuse he suffered during 30 months of imprisonment in Argentina between 1977 and 1979. His recently published book is also a devastating indictment of Argentina's junta, which the Council on Hemispheric Affairs has called the most flagrant violator of human rights in Latin America.

Initial reviews of Timerman's memoir were generally favorable. Now, however, an increasingly acrimonious quarrel has erupted over Timerman's testimony, involving prominent U.S. intellectuals and leaders of both the Argentine and American Jewish communities. In part, the arguments have arisen because of Timerman's political impact. On U.S. television, he has criticized President Reagan's low-key human rights policy and the Administration's efforts to improve relations with Argentina's military dictatorship. Last month Timerman was a silent but nonetheless potent presence at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Reagan's nomination of Ernest W. Lefever as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Timerman, who has become an Israeli citizen, was not invited to testify at the confirmation hearings, but he had evidently become a symbol of liberal opposition to Lefever's view that human rights questions should not interfere with U.S. alliances. When Committee Chairman Charles Percy introduced Timerman at the hearings, the applause was loud and demonstrative. Democratic Congressman Richard Ottinger of New York even wrote Timerman that if the committee rejected the Lefever nomination it would be "clearly attributable to your efforts."

The first resounding volleys against Timerman were fired by conservative intellectuals who also happen to be supporters of Lefever. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the neoconservative political scientist Irving Kristol characterized Timerman as a "Solzhenitsyn of the left" whose liberal partisans prefer to castigate friendly "authoritarian" regimes like Argentina's rather than hostile "totalitarian" governments like the Soviet Union's. Kristol also questioned Timerman's assertion that he had been imprisoned and tortured primarily because he was a Jew and a Zionist. According to Kristol, the real cause was Timerman's association with David Graiver, a mysterious Argentine financier who allegedly looted two U.S. banks of some $40 million while serving as a bagman for the Montoneros, Argentina's leftist guerrillas. Kristol expressed astonishment that Timerman's book makes no mention of Graiver, who had been part owner of La Opinion, the newspaper published and edited by Timerman before his arrest. Still, Kristol conceded that there was "no evidence" that Timerman had known about Graiver's alleged misdeeds.

Compounding these charges, Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. cited Simon Wiesenthal, the famed hunter of surviving Nazis, as having told a Uruguayan journalist that Timerman had interfered with Wiesenthal's decades-long pursuit of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician who performed deadly experiments on Jews at Auschwitz. Buckley claimed that Wiesenthal had also characterized Timerman as a "leftist" who had been sent to jail not because he was Jewish, but because he was "accused of being in favor of terrorism." In Israel last week, Wiesenthal said the latter statement had been quoted out of context, though he had once mistakenly thought that Timerman had hindered the search for Mengele.

Other voices joined in the debate.

Much to the dismay of Timerman's advocates, many leaders of Argentina's 350,000-member Jewish community disagreed with his warning that a new Holocaust may be in the making there. Said Mario Gorenstein, president of the Delegation of Jewish Associations of Argentina, in a pointed reference to Timerman: "We don't seek to have publicity spectaculars." Other Argentine Jews suggested that Timerman has exaggerated their plight under the junta, thus making things worse for them. Following the lead of Argentine Jewry, influential U.S. Jewish leaders have downplayed the bombings of synagogues, the proliferation of virulent anti-Semitic literature and the discrimination against Jews in government service in Argentina.

Timerman has repeatedly compared the see-no-evil attitude of Argentina's Jews with that of Jewish leaders in Nazi Germany in the '30s, who begged Jews abroad to keep silent about Hitler's persecution in the hope that German Jewry might thereby be saved. In his book, Timerman declared that he had been humiliated not "by torture, by electric shock on my genitals" but "by the silent complicity of Jewish leaders."

No one questions Timerman's account of his personal ordeal. Never charged with a crime, he disappeared into the secret cellars and torture chambers of the military, like an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 other Argentine men, women and children. Timerman's critics, however, have questioned some of the conclusions he has drawn from that grim experience. Close observers of Argentine politics agree that anti-Jewish feeling runs deep in Argentine history and culture. But they doubt that the ideology of the junta is profoundly antiSemitic. They also question Timerman's theory that Argentine Jews are involved in a conspiracy of silence about their present peril.

Says Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, an expert on Latin America at the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith: "Anti-Semitism in Argentina is subtle and complex. There are no official laws directed against the Jewish people." Jacob Kovadloff of the American Jewish Committee maintains that human rights have improved in Argentina in the past six months. He also argues that "Timerman is not accurate when he says the Jews of Argentina are afraid to speak. Right now there is an open dialogue between the leaders of the Jewish community and high-ranking members of government."

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger interceded with the Argentine government for Timerman's release in 1978. Kissinger told TIME that "the trigger for his arrest was not anti-Semitism," although he also believes that the Argentine publisher was treated more brutally because he is Jewish. "There is no doubt that there are many anti-Semitic trends in Argentina, but not in the Nazi sense," he says. Kissinger agrees with the Reagan Administration that the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian governments is a valid one, adding, "but that doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose violation of human rights in either place."

Among Timerman's most eloquent supporters is Argentine Human Rights Leader Emilio Mignone. On a visit to New York City last week, he insisted that "Timerman has told the total truth." Said Mignone: "All political prisoners or dissidents have a hard time of it when they are arrested, but the Jews suffer more than the others. They get the worst beatings, the crudest torture, the vilest insults. The important thing about Timerman is that he spoke up; that is the best policy in facing a repressive regime."

In an interview with TIME'S Victor Perry in Tel Aviv last week, Timerman accused Buckley of "lying" about him in his column. Timerman derided Kristol's claim that he was arrested because his business partner was a crook, pointing out that the Argentine government had never accused him of conspiring with Graiver.

Contrary to the optimistic reports made by some Jewish leaders, Timerman insists that the position of Argentine Jewry has deteriorated. He says: "Anti-Semitism in Argentina is official, promoted, sponsored and organized by the regime." U.S. efforts to present Argentina as a useful anti-Communist authoritarian power continue to anger him. "The people are friendly," he says, "but not the military dictatorship there." Other witnesses dispute Timerman's impassioned judgment about that military dictatorship.

They do not question that he speaks with authority about the depravity of his captors, or about the anguish he so heroically endured. --By Patricia Blake. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis/NewYork

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