http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/994776.html
HAARETZ (ISRAEL) Last update - 17:59 20/06/2008 Austrian politician: Suspected Nazi is 'treasured citizen' Milivoj Asner caused a stir just by showing up at a soccer game: Asner and his wife were spotted watching Croatia play in a European Championship match near his home in the southern city of Klagenfurt, Austria. Some have questioned whether this alpine country with its tortured World War II past is shielding him from justice. Now Austria's most notorious far-right politician, former Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, has touched off an even bigger scandal by lavishing Asner with praise. The 95-year-old retired police chief, Haider said this week, is a treasured citizen who should be allowed to live out his days in peace. "This could only happen in Austria," Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Associated Press. Officials in southern Austria contend he is mentally unfit for questioning, extradition or trial. Asner stands accused of persecuting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies and dispatching them to their deaths in WWII-era Croatia, which was ruled by a Nazi puppet regime. "Austria has the habit of closing its eyes," renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld told French television Thursday evening. The Asner case, he said, is fresh proof that the country is a safe haven for suspected war criminals. Haider's impassioned defense of Asner as a good neighbor has only reinforced that impression. Haider, who brought the Freedom Party into Austria's coalition government in 2000 on a platform tinged with anti-Semitic and xenophobic undertones, is the governor of the province of Carinthia where Asner lives. "He's lived peacefully among us for years, and he should be able to live out the twilight of his life with us," Haider told the newspaper Der Standard this week. "This is a nice family. We really treasure this family," the daily quoted him as saying. "Such praise is unconscionable," said Zuroff, who has been pressuring the Austrian government to arrest Asner and hand him over for trial as part of Operation: Last Chance - an effort to bring aging top suspects to justice before they die. "This is clearly a reflection of the political atmosphere which exists in Austria and which in certain circles is extremely sympathetic to suspected Nazi war criminals," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Israel. Asner, he added, has never showed any remorse for actions which affected the fates of hundreds of people. Asner's indictment alleges he actively enforced racist laws while police chief in the eastern Croatian town of Pozega in 1941-42, and sent his victims to a Croat-run death camp. The Wiesenthal Center ranks him No. 4 on a list of 10 top fugitives. Asner has maintained his innocence, and in an interview aired Thursday evening on state-run Croatian television, he declared: "My conscience is clear." The Croatian television reporter who conducted the interview said Asner appeared senile and was only temporarily lucid. "I am ready to face the court in Croatia, but I'm not in the best health," Asner said. He acknowledged participating in the deportations, but insisted the deportees were sent to their homelands, not to death camps. "I'm deeply convinced that the judges, if they are honest people, would acquit me as I'm a Croat," Asner said. Austria's Justice Ministry said it is reviewing a formal request from Zuroff to make a fresh assessment of Asner's physical and mental state and prove he is suffering from dementia as experts have ruled in the past. Croatia demanded Asner's extradition in 2005, the year he was formally indicted. But the Austrians demurred. First, they refused to hand Asner over on grounds that he was an Austrian citizen. Later, they claimed the statute of limitations for his alleged crimes had expired. Then, after deciding he was not a citizen, they declared him unfit - most recently on Friday after a medical examination performed earlier this week. Among those challenging that assessment is Gerhard Tuschla, a reporter for Austrian public broadcaster ORF. Tuschla said he recently interviewed Asner, who began living under the name George Aschner after fleeing Croatia for Austria in 1945, and found him to be a jovial, whiskey-drinking old man. "We suspected from the very beginning that he might have been faking it - making a specific effort to appear as unfit as possible," Zuroff said. "That might be easier to fake than physical issues." Austrian authorities have angrily denied they are giving Asner safe haven. Manfred Herrnhofer, a federal court spokesman in Klagenfurt, said officials are merely trying to comply with complicated extradition guidelines and in no way are protecting a suspected Nazi war criminal. "Austria is a constitutional state, not Guantanamo. We don't toss our principles overboard for political gain," he said. The affair comes just as Austria takes over the chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research - a 25-nation panel dedicated to maintaining the memory of Nazi atrocities. It is a big step for Austria, which Hitler annexed in 1938. But if the country really wants to demonstrate it has overcome its dark past of complicity, it needs to seize Asner, Zuroff contends. "I really can't think of a worse way to remember the Holocaust than to not arrest a leading Nazi war crimes suspect," he said. __,_._,___
