Jewish Leader Again in Spotlight, This Time over Deal with Serbians

A top Jewish organizational leader is back in the glare of the media spotlight after news reports said one of his business deals may have violated U.S. sanctions against Serbia.

Ronald Lauder’s plans to provide long-distance telephone service to and from Yugoslavia are under review by the Clinton administration, which in June banned all investment in the Serbian republic of that Balkan nation.

Lauder has strongly denied any wrongdoing, saying that no deal has been concluded and that any agreement would be conditioned upon U.S. government approval.

And, at least at this point, few Jewish organizational leaders say they are concerned that the matter will diminish Lauder’s ability to serve effectively as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — a post he was elected to earlier this month.

The umbrella group of 55 Jewish organizations historically has represented American Jewry to the White House.

Most leaders who were questioned focused on the legal aspects of the issue, rather than the moral implications of doing business with the Serbians, who have been accused of perpetrating atrocities in Bosnia and the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

The executive vice chairman of the group, Malcolm Hoenlein, defended Lauder and said the issue has “no relevance to the conference.”

The current wave of newspaper coverage is the second time this year that Lauder has been the subject of media scrutiny.

His nomination for the conference chairmanship was awash in controversy stirred by U.S. and Israeli news reports suggesting that he had political and financial ties to Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the end, no proof of such ties was brought forward. After Lauder successfully defended his record to conference leaders, he was elected head of the group overwhelmingly.

Lauder, who serves as president of the Jewish National Fund, is slated to replace the current chairman of the conference, Melvin Salberg, for a two-year term beginning in June.

Whether the latest news reports occasion a new round of interviews at the conference remains to be seen.

If the news accounts of the deal prove to be true, they raise “serious issues for the community, which we will have to discuss with Ronald Lauder,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

But Hoenlein, the conference executive vice chairman, said the matter had already been clarified.

The New York Times said that the telecommunications deal had been signed in August, two months after President Clinton banned all investment in Serbia, one of two Yugoslav republics.

The sanctions aim to stem the violent repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

A spokesperson for Lauder refuted reports that an agreement had been signed with Telekom Serbia.

“There is no deal in operation between RSL Communications and Serbia. And there will never be any deal over U.S. government objection,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement responding to JTA’s questions.

In a separate statement, the spokesperson said Lauder’s company “has essentially applied for permission from the U.S. government to provide the same kind of telecom service in the area already offered by AT&T, MCI Worldcom and others.”

But even if Lauder’s firm is cleared of any legal violation, there might still be cause for the Conference of Presidents to re-evaluate Lauder’s chairmanship, said Rabbi David Saperstein, the executive director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, whose two parent organizations are members of the conference.

The group, he said, is “left with the moral dilemma of a major leader seeking to engage in activity that so clearly violates the spirit of the strong U.S. action that the Jewish community has sought in the face of repeated violations of human rights.”

Lauder has said that he was offered the business venture while visiting Serbia on behalf of the Jewish community there. He said he presented his plans to the State Department for evaluation and is awaiting its reply.

The cosmetics-company heir is heavily invested in the region’s media market. RSL Communications, a publicly traded company based in Bermuda, operates in more than 20 countries.

He is also heavily involved in supporting the revival of Jewish life in the region. The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation supports schools, camps and community centers in a dozen countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

His involvement with the Yugoslav Jewish community goes back to the early 1990s.

The New York Times reported that Lauder met with a Milosevic protege, Zoran Lilic, at a telecommunications conference last year in Belgrade. A spokesperson for Lauder was quoted as saying the two men discussed the local Jewish community.

“Mr. Lauder meets with local leaders literally everywhere he goes,” his spokesperson told JTA. “It would have been very odd indeed if he had not met with a local leader when he was in Belgrade for a regional telecommunications conference. The Times was told about that fact; they chose not to report it.”

The Times did report that RSL Communications had signed a separate deal in May to provide international telephone services in the Republic of Srpska, the Serbian-controlled part of Bosnia.

Bosnian Serb leaders were indicted in 1995 by an international tribunal on war crimes charges. Their political leader, Radovan Karadzic, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

But Lauder’s spokesperson warned against equating business negotiations with support for such regimes.

“Providing a dial tone for international calls is fundamentally different from providing bullets for guns,” the spokesperson said. “It’s ridiculous to the point of insult to ask whether Ronald Lauder supports the atrocities committed in that blood-soaked land.”

The spokesperson pointed out that Lauder, a former ambassador to Austria, had campaigned to expose Austrian Chancellor Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past.

“The times he may have lost business opportunities by standing up for his Jewish heritage in a region where anti-Semitism is well-known, no one wondered darkly about his ability to lead” the spokesperson said in the statement to JTA.

Some Jewish leaders also drew a strong distinction between the legal and moral issues that Lauder’s Serbian business deal raises.

“Does Milosevic rise to the level of a Nazi war criminal?” asked Foxman of ADL. “Listen, our secretary of state deals with him.”

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently adjourned peace talks between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians.

Lauder is not “doing anything to relieve guilt or immunize Milosevic from prosecution,” said Phil Baum, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress.

Lauder’s only clear obligation as an American Jewish leader, Baum said, is “to stay within the confines of the law.”