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Note #6336 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

01017

Presbyterian torture survivor to testify
about friend's death in Argentine "dirty war"

Minister from New York takes witness stand in Nuremberg

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - In Nuremberg, Germany, this week, a coalition of humanitarian
groups is demanding justice for German citizens who "disappeared" in
Argentina during its "dirty war" in the 1970s.
The group is petitioning Germany's chief prosecutor to charge 21 Argentinean
military officials in connection with the torture and murders of 11 Germans.
	The "dirty war" was a seven-year period of intense repression following an
intense military coup.
One of two key witnesses in the case is a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
minister, the Rev. Dianna Austin of Elmont, NY. The hearings began on Jan.
18.
Austin will tell a terrible story.
It begins on March 8, 1977, when Austin's friend, Elisabeth Kaesemann, was
"disappeared." Kaesemann's body - shot execution-style - was exhumed from a
mass grave on June 10, 1977, and returned to Germany for burial the next
day. Austin also was "disappeared," but she was released, for reasons she
doesn't completely understand now.
Of the 85 Germans who were "disappeared" and executed by the Argentinean
military, Kaesemann is the only one whose body has been recovered. About
half of the dead are Jewish.
When Austin "disappeared," she was interrogated and beaten for 14 hours in
the room next to where Elisabeth was being tortured. She thinks now that the
basement torture chamber - which smelled of sweat and burning flesh - was
inside the First Army Command in Palermo. Released in the custody of four
officers, she was then taken back to her apartment, raped repeatedly over
two days and nights, then ordered out of the country.
The PC(USA) and the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC) bought
Austin's airline ticket to New York, where she was hospitalized, and where
she, Robert McAfee Brown and Dorothee Soelle of Union Seminary, and
Kaesemann's father, Ernst, a prominent theologian in Germany, worked
frantically for Elisabeth's release.
"For me, this is just something I've got to do," Austin told the
Presbyterian News Service as she prepared to leave the country with her
daughter, Elisabeth, 21, and her son, Lukas, 17. "It is my responsibility. I
survived. God knows why. Survivors have to tell the story.
"That's our job."
The coalition wants Germany to charge the military officers with crimes
against humanity; it is hoping that Argentina will try the accused or
extradite them to Germany for trial. In effect, such a charge would confine
the accused to Argentina because to leave the country would be to risk
arrest. The group also wants the German government to publicly admit its
failure to assist German young people who died in Argentina's concentration
camp.
A stash of letters appealing for help from some who were incarcerated in
camps has been recovered from the German embassy's archives in Buenos Aires.
The German chief prosecutor has one year to decide whether to pursue this
case further after Thursday's hearing.
"We want it to be that these officers can not leave Argentina," said Stefan
Herbst, the human rights director of a mission center for Franciscans in
Bohn, speaking on behalf of the coalition. "We want the German government to
put pressure on the Argentine government."
Kaesemann's body is pivotal evidence because no other bodies have been
recovered. Austin's testimony is also pivotal because she is one of very few
live witnesses.
According to Austin, the recovery of Kaesemann's body is unprecedented. "The
mistake the fascist military made with her was it didn't realize who her dad
was. He was a very prominent theologian in Germany, and he still is, though
he died last year," she said.
The wounds on Kaesemann's body indicated that she was executed. 
Austin intends to tell the court that when she left Argentina, Elisabeth was
alive. She was under constant surveillance and was required to meet
regularly with military officials, who warned her to keep silent because her
family, who worked for the British government, remained in Argentina. "We
have nothing against her, but we have some ideological differences," Austin
was told when she asked about Elisabeth's release. "He confirmed that they
still had her in their custody."
The second witness, an Argentinian woman named Elena Alfaro, who escaped to
France, will testify that she saw Elisabeth in a concentration camp alive,
and that she was executed along with Alfaro's husband, Luis Fabri, a
unionist.
"In the case of Elisabeth Kaesemann, we have the body. The method in
Argentina was to 'just disappear' the people. But we have proof of what
happened to her. And we have Elena Alfaro, who saw her one day before she
was executed," said Herbst. He said the coalition chose Nuremburg for the
hearings because of its symbolic importance as the site of the Nazi
war-crime tribunal after World War II.
According to Amnesty International, the military junta in Argentina, intent
on stamping out subversion "at any cost," resorted to torture and
extra-judicial executions and made abductions rather than arrests. General
Jorge Rafael Videla, president and commander of the armed forces of the
first military junta (March 1976 to March 1981), said at the time: "A
terrorist is not just someone with a gun or bomb, but also someone who
spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization." A
long-term policy of planned "disappearances" was put into place to round up
so-called enemies of the state.
When free elections were held in 1984, the new government issued a report
documenting 8,960 "disappearances," but said the true figure could be much
higher, according to Amnesty International.  It identified 340 clandestine
detention centers in Argentina and concluded that the armed forces had used
the state's security apparatus to commit human-rights violations in an
organized manner.
Some rights organizations claim the death toll may be as high as 30,000. 
The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent in South America. There was a coup in
Brazil in 1964, in Bolivia in 1969, in Uruguay in 1972, in Chile in 1973 and
in Argentina in 1976.
To this day, Austin has no idea how Elisabeth was apprehended. She simply
left Austin's apartment and never came back. Three days later, "the milicos"
came for Austin between 1 and 2 a.m., breaking down the doors of her
apartment and covering her eyes with an elastic band.
At the time, the two women were part of a network that was creating false
papers to get endangered people out of the country. Austin said the women
understood their role to be similar to that of Christians in Germany who
helped Jews escape the Nazis.
 
  But Austin doesn't believe that's why either woman was abducted: "If they
knew that," she says, "they'd have never let me go. Elisabeth never gave
that up, under torture."
Elisabeth, 29, was a student at the university, studying sociology and
economics; she worked as a translator for a milk-products company. Austin, a
seminary graduate who'd worked in Argentina's slums, was employed by an
agency of the NCC as a scriptwriter and mission interpreter.  She believes
they were targeted for their left-leaning opinions.
"They went back and forth between us (during the interrogation), verifying
answers.  Both she and I were being questioned so as to establish that we
were friends, not political subversives. They also asked, 'What did I think
of the Third World Movement? Of the communists? Of the World Council of
Churches? Why did I have so many Jewish friends?'  	"That last question
triggered my anger, for a moment greater than my fear, and I asked if they
were Christians. They laughed. One of them took my hand to his chest and
made me feel his chain and cross. It was a swastika. 'We are good
Catholics,' he said. And then for some reason the interrogation stopped. I
will never know why."
Austin says she has trouble eating and sleeping these days. Testifying
dredges up memories that she puts aside most of the time. "I have a fairly
normal life that is periodically interrupted by this stuff," she says. "But
that is the cost of being a survivor."
She says her Christian practices help her understand what she has to do to
heal. She says she moves back and forth between remembrance and hope,
clinging to the image of Jesus, who liberated and laid down his life for his
friends.
"I named my daughter Elisabeth," Austin says. "If you want to talk hope,
there's hope."
She recalls how powerful her daughter's baptism in 1980 was for her, with
Brown and Soelle officiating. She says she still sends photos of the girl to
the Kaesemann family in Germany.  "There's resurrection. It is saying that
(the executioners) are not going to have the last word ...
"You either lose your faith, become a total cynic and say, 'No,' to God. Or
you let your faith carry you," she says. "I don't mean there aren't times
when I am blown away with sorrow.  Or that I don't rage at God; I still
rage. But that means that I still believe."
Elisabeth Kaesemann is buried in Tubingen, Germany.
Although charges have been filed in Argentina against the military officials
who violated Kaesemanns' and Austin's human rights, no steps have been taken
to put them on trial.
"We want the German chief prosecutor to charge these officers with crimes
against humanity," Herbst says. "We want him to issue an international
warrant for their arrest. The relatives of these young people are starting
to die now, and we want the prosecutor to act soon. We can't wait."

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