ROMANIA: An extreme nationalist Romanian leader unveiled a statue of murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin yesterday despite an outcry from Israel and Rabin's children, who said his memory was being exploited.
The president of the Greater Romania party (PRM), Mr Corneliu Vadim Tudor, has denied a Holocaust took place in Romania, where about 400,000 Jews were killed during the second World War, and has been accused of using his newspaper as an anti-Semitic platform.
But Mr Tudor, who is running for the presidency of Romania in November, told about 1,000 supporters in the Transylvanian city of Brasov yesterday the statue was a testament to his change of heart.
"You cannot be a Christian and hate Jews," he said in an hour-long speech interspersed with Biblical references, his own poetry and proposals for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Israeli embassy in Bucharest protested against the statue, saying Mr Tudor, a former court poet for communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was using the memory of Mr Rabin for purely electoral reasons.
"Mr Rabin represented the values of democracy and liberalism," embassy spokeswoman Ms Sandra Simovici said. " is known for its anti-Semitic, xenophobic and anti-democratic views." Mr Rabin was shot dead in 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to his interim peace deals with the Palestinians.
Opinion polls show the PRM party rising to second place behind the ruling social democrats.
PRM supporters at the unveiling said they did not believe their leader was anti-Jewish but an honest man who would fight the scourge of corruption. They also doubted the number of Romania's second World War Jewish victims. "Nobody died in Romania," said Violeta Petrescu (22), an unemployed college graduate. "These numbers are exaggerated." - (Reuters)