NZ censures Israel over passport affair

The government of New Zealand announced a series of sanctions against Israel yesterday following the sentencing of two Israelis who sought to illegally obtain New Zealand passports. The two were accused by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark of being Israeli intelligence agents.

Under the sanctions, all Israeli officials wishing to enter New Zealand are now required to acquire entry visas prior to arrival.

Prime Minister Clark also announced that New Zealand was unwilling to receive President Moshe Katsav during a visit that he planned to carry out in Australia and New Zealand in August.

The visits of senior delegations to and from New Zealand have also been canceled, and the credentials of the new Israeli ambassador will not be approved, while contacts with the local honorary consuls of Israel in New Zealand will be severely limited.

At the completion of a trial in Auckland yesterday, in which Elisha Cara, 50, and Uriel Kelman, 31, were found guilty of seeking to obtain a New Zealand passport through illegal means, and of belonging to a criminal organization, the two were sentenced to six months' jail and fined 50,000 New Zealand dollars.

After the court passed its verdict, Clark announced that they operated "on behalf of the intelligence services of Israel."

Foreign Minister Phil Goff said, "We know this, the government of Israel knows this and it knows why we know," that they are agents of the Mossad. The minister suggested in an interview with Israel Radio that the arrest of the two Israelis was not an isolated incident and hinted at claims made to Haaretz by New Zealand police that the Mossad had allegedly sought to acquire as many authentic passports as possible in a long-term operation.

The New Zealand sources pointed to the fact that Cara, who claims to be a tourist agent based in Australia, entered New Zealand 24 times during the past three and a half years.

The Australian daily, The Age, reported that Canberra had also initiated an operation to uncover whether its sovereignty had also been compromised by alleged Israeli agents.

For its part, the government of Israel is refusing to treat this as a matter involving its intelligence service and has initiated efforts to curtail the damage this affair has caused its foreign relations in general, and with New Zealand in particular.

In a short announcement issued by the Foreign Ministry, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom expressed "regret" at the decision of the New Zealand government to impose sanctions and said "Israel will do everything to restore the relations to normalcy."

The sanctions announced by the government of New Zealand yesterday had been decided in March, soon after the two men were arrested. The government of New Zealand refrained from making the sanctions public to avoid interference with the trial of the two suspects.

The sharp deterioration in the attitude of the New Zealand government stemmed from the failure of the government of Israel to respond to its request for an official explanation and an apology, three months ago.

Foreign Ministry sources said last night that the policy of ambiguity regarding the affair was imposed on them by the Prime Minister's Office and the Mossad.

As a result of the pressure, the sources say, the handling of the matter was left to a low level diplomat, Orna Sagiv, who is responsible for relations with New Zealand and operates from Israel's embassy in Australia.

Sources in New Zealand told Haaretz that the sanctions are purposely directed against the government of Israel and not the Israeli people.

The strongly-worded announcement of the government of New Zealand stated: "Israel is a country with which New Zealand has had friendly relations for a long time. The government of New Zealand relates to the activities of the Israeli intelligence agents not only as utterly unacceptable but also as a violation of the sovereignty of New Zealand and international law."

"New Zealand condemns without reservation these actions by agencies of the Israel government," Clark said in the statement. The Israeli agents attempted to demean the integrity of the New Zealand passport system and could have created considerable difficulties for New Zealanders presenting their passports overseas in future," Clark said.

The two were arrested four months ago, when an Interior Ministry official became suspicious after speaking with a man with a Canadian accent. The man requested that the passport request be expedited, but when the official called the person to whose name the passport was to be issued, he learned that the individual in question was seriously handicapped.

	Elisha Cara, left, and Uri Kelman during their sentencing in an Auckland court yesterday for illegally trying to obtain a New Zealand passport.
	Photo by: AP