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From: berman@psuvax1.UUCP (Piotr Berman)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: What Happened to Nicaraguan Jews
Message-ID: <2041@psuvax1.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Mar-86 02:46:24 EST
Article-I.D.: psuvax1.2041
Posted: Wed Mar 26 02:46:24 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Mar-86 09:27:15 EST
References: <7801136@inmet>
Organization: Pennsylvania State Univ.
Lines: 66

>
> The following is an excerpt from an open letter by  U.S.  senator
> Chic Hecht, of Nevada:
> ==================================================================
>
> Nicaragua's Jews suffered at the hands of  the  Sandinistas  even
> as  the  revolution  was beginning. On a Friday evening in 1978,
> Sandinista gunmen threw a  fire-bomb  at  the  Managua  synagogue
> while it was filled with worshippers. As members of the congrega-
> tion tried to escape, the gunmen forced them back into the  burn-
> ing building.
> ................................................................
>  The seventy Jewish families in Nicaragua  were  terrorized  both
> during the revolution and after.
> .......  Now the Nicaraguan Interor Minister, Borge has  pledged
> to Yasir Arafat that: "Nicaragua is his land and the PLO cause is
> the cause of the Sandinistas."
>
> To demonstrate this commitment, the Sandinistas allow the PLO  to
> maintain an "embassy" in Managua and provide PLO members with Ni-
> caraguan passports with which to travel freely as they  plan  and
> execute their terrorist attacks.
>
I feel a little uneasy with the testimony of the Nevada senator.
New York Times published a rebuttal to those charges by Jewish
clergymen who investigated the matter.  We deal here with a
very small community which allegedly was very much connected
with Somoza.  Thus the reprisals could have purely political
character (which perhaps is nasty, but we talk here about a
civil war).

The last charge is clearly made up. I do follow the news and
I never heard about terrorist carrying Nicaraguan passports.
This is even not very plausible: an Arab guy would carry Nicaraguan
passport as not to create any suspitions?   The terrorist attacks
occurred in West Europe where there are millions of persons with
Algerian, Tunisian, Morrocan and Egyptian passports, and, not
surprisingly, those kinds of passports were used by the terrorist
which were caught.
>
> The Federation of Jewish Communities in Central America and Pana-
> ma  have expressed the fear felt by the region's Jews in the face
> of the Sandinista threat: : "The Jewish communities would be  the
> first  to feel the consequences" of another revolution in Central
> America. "The communities would disappear or be trapped".
>
>  Just how real is this threat? In April, 1985 when a  Nicaraguan-
> trained  terrorist network was broken up by police in Costa Rica,
> one of the terrorists told the police that the group had plans to
> kidnap leading members of the Costa Rican Jewish community.

Again, this is not so clear cut evidence as it seems.  First,
the assumption that all terrorist belong to the same ilk (but
why they quarrel so much as to kill each other occasionally?).
Second, testimony of a guy who wants its sentence reduced may
well be an 'improvemnt' of real facts.  Third, traditionally
kidnapping rich bissnessmen was a source of money for terrorist
groups in Latin America.  So we could deal with only slight
'improvement' of the real facts.

The problem with Sandinista is that there are not nice enough
to like them and not ugly enough to justify the current Reagan's
rhetoric.  I challenge anyone to prove that they are any worse
that PRI, the ruling party of Mexico.

Piotr Berman