Israeli officials are upset over the resignation of Giandomenico Picco, the U.N. secretary general’s special negotiator for hostage releases.
They fear his departure may signal a decision by the U.N. Secretariat to put a low priority on efforts to effect the release of Israeli air force navigator Ron Arad and obtain information about the fate of other Israeli servicemen missing in Lebanon.
Picco announced his resignation after helping secure the release last week of two German relief workers who were kidnapped and held hostage for three years by Shi’ite militants in Lebanon.
The two, who returned to Germany on Wednesday, were the last of nearly 100 American and European hostages freed by Arab or Moslem groups in recent years.
Picco said he was quitting for “personal reasons” and it is assumed he plans to enter private business in his native Italy.
But Israeli sense the determining factor was his disagreements with his boss, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, over future efforts to secure freedom for Arad.
The Israeli airman shot down over Lebanon in 1986, believed held by Shi’ite militants, is the only one of six missing Israelis presumed to be alive. But Israel also demands concrete proof of the fate of the others.
Israeli defense officials fear Picco’s resignation will seriously hamper future negotiations.
Moreover, they say Picco’s relations with Boutros-Ghali were less flexible than with his predecessor, Javier Perez de Cuellar, who often gave his hostage negotiator a free hand.
Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian with personal and professional ties in the Middle East, tended to rein in Picco, Israeli officials say. The U.N. secretary general frequently brushed Picco aside and personally took over contacts with Arab and Moslem authorities who influenced the hostage situation, Israelis say.
Israel’s chief hostage negotiator, Uri Lubrani, also expressed regret over Picco’s resignation. He noted, however, that the United Nations is not the only body involved in hostage negotiations.
“Israel must now act on its own, as it has frequently done in the past,” he said.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Navon, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, will meet with the top political officer of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s office in Bonn this week.
He has been instructed to obtain clarification of that official’s remark last week that he had information about Arad.
Meanwhile, Bernd Schmidbauer, a top aide to Kohl in charge of coordinating intelligence agencies, was making an angry but veiled rebuttal to rumors that Germany paid heavy ransom for the freedom of its kidnapped nationals, Heinrich Struebig and Thomas Kemptner.
Although he mentioned no party by name, he seemed to be holding Israel responsible for the rumors and for what he described as pressure on mediators who were negotiating to free the hostages.
Israeli newspapers have in fact claimed in recent days that Germany paid millions for the release of its kidnapped nationals.
Commenting on reports that Picco had resigned because of an alleged ransom payment by Germany, Schmidbauer said angrily that “Picco had to endure the same kind of pressure that was put on me.”
Schmidbauer was directly involved in the hostage negotations and flew to Damascus and then to Beirut to receive the hostages and escort them back to Germany.
Since then, Israeli sources have complained that there should have been coordination that would link the release of all the hostages, including Arad.
German sources, on the other hand, have gone out of their way to stress that Germany did all it could to persuade Moslem extremists in Lebanon and their Iranian mentors at least to make available information about Arad.
At the same time, however, they acknowledged that Germany’s obligation to its own citizens came first.
Bonn also has denied emphatically rumors that it would grant pardons to Mohammad and Abbas Hamadi, Lebanese Shi’ite brothers serving prison sentences in Germany for terrorist acts, as quid pro quo for freeing Struebig and Kemptner.
But government sources did confirm last week that the brothers will soon be granted special privileges and would be confined to the same prison, which they have requested all along.
(JTA correspondent David Kantor in Bonn contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
