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Peres snipes at Belgians over 'Sharon case'
By Herb Keinon and Reuters
JERUSALEM (July 3) - Diplomatic tension between Israel and Belgium,
which took over as rotating president of the European Union on Sunday,
continued unabated yesterday, when Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said
Belgium has no moral right to judge Israel, since it did nothing to help
this country when it fought for its existence during the Yom Kippur War.
His comments came as a Belgian judge opened an investigation of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon for alleged crimes against humanity in a 1982
massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon, a Belgian judicial
spokesman said yesterday.
Examining Judge Patrick Collignon opened the investigation after finding
merit in two complaints filed against Sharon for his alleged role in the
killings at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, said Josef Colpin,
spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Brussels.
The investigation will determine if there is enough evidence to press
charges against Sharon, Colpin said.
Yesterday was the second time Peres made reference to Belgium's behavior
during the 1973 War, when according to diplomatic officials it refused
Holland's request to use the Belgian port of Antwerp to send
badly-needed oil to Israel.
The first time was last month, in Belgium, when he was asked by a
television reporter about the legal moves against Sharon.
Alluding to Belgium's EU presidency Peres said that if Belgian diplomacy
can't control what is going on in Brussels, it calls into question how
it can do other jobs.
Belgian diplomats have told Israel's Foreign Ministry that they have no
control over their country's independent judiciary.
The complaints filed in Belgium earlier this month by survivors of the
Sabra and Shatilla massacre accuse Sharon of war crimes and genocide
under a relatively new Belgian law allowing its courts to prosecute
foreigners for human rights abuses committed outside the country.
The maximum punishment for the crimes is life imprisonment.
Peres, speaking yesterday at a fortnightly Foreign Ministry forum that
brings together the government's leading spokespeople on diplomatic and
security issues, said that under the Belgian law there is not a leader
in the world who could not be put on trial.
Sharon, who will visit Germany and France for the first time as prime
minister on Thursday and Friday, has dropped Belgium from his itinerary.
Mehdi Abbes, a Brussels lawyer who filed one of the complaints against
Sharon, said the opening of the investigation was the first step in a
long process.
"We have a long road ahead of us," he told Reuters yesterday,
referring to the amount of time that Collignon would need to carry out
the investigation. "It isn't going to done in 30 days."
A landmark Belgian trial earlier this year of four Rwandans for
involvement in their country's 1994 genocide occurred six years after an
examining judge opened his investigation into complaints against them.
That trial, which led to the conviction of all four, was the first to
apply the law and has since led to the filing of a slew of complaints in
Brussels against figures ranging from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to
Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo.
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