Israel ofreció armas nucleares a la Sudáfrica del 'apartheid'

Unas actas secretas, reveladas en un libro que se publicará esta semana, suponen la primera confirmación documental de la capacidad atómica israelí

La posesión de armas nucleares por parte de Israel era hasta ahora un secreto a voces, pero unos documentos revelados por el diario británico The Guardian, en los cuales el ministro de Defensa israelí se ofrece a proporcionar este armamento a la Sudáfrica del apartheid, suponen la primera confirmación documental de la capacidad atómica del Estado hebreo. La política de Israel respecto a su arsenal atómico es de ambigüedad, sin confirmar ni negar su existencia.

Las actas secretas dan cuenta de las reuniones mantenidas en 1975 entre el entonces ministro de Defensa sudáfricano, Pieter Willem Botha, y su homólogo israelí y actual presidente, Simon Peres. Según los documentos, Peres responde a la petición de cabezas nucleares por parte de Botha ofreciéndoselas "en tres tamaños". Ambos firmaron además un amplio pacto para regir las alianzas militares entre los dos países, con una cláusula que declaraba que "la propia existencia de este acuerdo" debía permanecer secreta.

Los documentos fueron descubiertos por un académico estadounidense, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, durante la investigación para escribir un libro, que saldrá a la venta esta semana en EE UU, acerca de las estrechas relaciones entre Israel y Sudáfrica. Las autoridades israelíes trataron de evitar que el Gobierno sudafricano desclasificara las actas, a petición de Polakow-Suransky.

La revelación cobra especial importancia esta semana, en la que las conversaciones sobre no proliferación nuclear que se celebran en Nueva York se centran en la situación en Oriente Próximo. También echa por tierra la pretensión israelí de presentarse como un país "responsable", que no haría mal uso de sus bombas nucleares.

La colaboración en tecnología militar entre ambos países creció durante los años posteriores. Israel proporcionó a Sudáfrica tritio, un isótopo radiactivo que multiplica la potencia explosiva de las armas termonucleares, mientras que Pretoria suministró sal de uranio, conocido como torta amarilla o yellowcake, que posteriormente se transforma en el uranio enriquecido necesario para fabricar armas nucleares.

Sudáfrica, en pleno aislamiento internacional, quería hacerse con el arma nuclear como fuerza disuasoria ante un posible ataque de un país enemigo. Pero finalmente, no se llevó adelante la compra, en parte por el coste. Además, según The Guardian, la operación tendría que haber contado con el visto bueno del primer ministro israelí, y no es seguro que lo hubiera obtenido. Finalmente, el régimen segregacionista construyó su propia bomba, posiblemente con asistencia de Israel.

http://www.elpais.com/

Unearthing Atrocities in Spain

Scott Boehm explains the Milagros site to a British television crew.

Scott Boehm:

I have participated in six mass grave exhumations in Spain over the past two years, as part of my work as an interviewer for UC San Diego’s Spanish Civil War Memory Project and as a volunteer for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. This summer, I had the opportunity to take part in two mass grave exhumations. In July I went to Milagros (Burgos) as an assistant to a television crew filming the exhumation for a British documentary, and in August, I was part of the archeological team in Villanueva de la Vera (Cáceres).

My first visit to a mass grave exhumation took place in 2007, only a few kilometers from the site in Milagros. I vividly remember holding the official Burgos prison documents in my hand that stated the fifty political prisoners uncovered in the mass grave had been set free in 1937. Yet “freed” (“liberado”) in this case meant anonymous death in the middle of a wheat field. Deaths not accounted for in the official government or historical record. Deaths that are just now starting to come to light, 70 years after the fact.

Like most of the mass graves lying beneath the surface of picturesque Spanish landscapes, the Milagros and the Villanueva de la Vera sites both date to the early days of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) when fascist death squads systematically rounded up supporters of the democratic Spanish Republic and killed them before dumping their bodies in shallow unmarked graves. Oral testimony from Villanueva de la Vera indicates that the victims were forced to dig their own grave before being shot.

How is such a thing possible? There are two keys to answering this question. The first is that General Francisco Franco’s forces won the war and afterwards Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. For obvious reasons, his regime had no interest in exhuming the mass graves of the defeated. Instead, he decorated Spain with plaques, street names and monuments that glorified the fallen on his side.

The second key concerns what happened after Franco’s death. Rather than investigate the crimes of the regime, the architects of post-Franco Spanish democracy made a pact to ignore them entirely. This process of politically engineered forgetting condemned the victims of crimes against humanity to another 25 years of suffering

Exhuming a mass grave in Galicia.
In 2000, the politics of forgetting were radically altered by the first public mass grave exhumation conducted with scientific methods. Emilio Silva, founder and president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory—and an advisor to the Spanish Civil War Memory Project—went looking for traces of his grandfather, executed by fascists during the war, in his family’s village of Priaranza del Bierzo (León). To Emilio’s surprise, he discovered the location of the mass grave where his grandfather was buried, along with twelve others. Their subsequent exhumation opened a new, controversial chapter in Spanish history, one that is currently in the process of being written.

The Spanish Civil War Memory Project is a small part of that process. Collaborating with various civic associations that conduct mass grave exhumations, I have both excavated the remains of victims and interviewed family members for the project. As survivors of tragedy, their voices testify to the lives of those executed, as well as to the trauma they suffered in the wake of mass violence and under a dictatorship of silence, only recently broken by the picks and shovels of tireless volunteers searching for answers to historical mysteries.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2009/09/28_dispatches_scott.asp