Ex-ECB chief found dead in pool

Wim Duisenberg, the former head of the European Central Bank, has been found dead in a pool at his villa in south-east France, French police say.

Police have not yet given a cause for his death, but say he was found on Sunday morning in the town of Faucon.

The former Dutch finance minister was the ECB's first president, and oversaw the introduction of the single European currency, the euro.

Under Mr Duisenberg, the euro moved from a market-traded currency to coins and notes in the pockets of people in 12 European countries.

Born in 1935, Mr Duisenberg worked for the International Monetary Fund before serving as his country's finance minister from 1973 and 1977.

A member of the Dutch Socialist Party, his views on responsible economic management changed. Later in life, he preferred strong fiscal discipline rather than a strategy of promoting growth through major public spending.

Germany and France - the two biggest eurozone economies - wrangled over Mr Duisenberg's appointment in 1998, and over who should succeed him.

Mr Duisenberg became first ECB president with strong German backing - with Mr Trichet being named as his successor at the same time as part of a Franco-German deal to share power.

The shift to euro notes and coins took place on 1 January 2002, and was feted with firework displays and street parties in some European cities.

The ECB cut interest rates in the euro countries to their lowest level since the World War II under Mr Duisenberg.

But critics said the slowdown in the eurozone would not have been so severe if he had cut rates sooner and more aggressively.

She hung a Palestinian flag outside her home, started an organization that calls for economic sanctions on Israel, and is the target of sharp criticism from the Dutch Jewish community. Next week, Gretta Duisenberg will visit here. Gretta Duisenberg, at a pro-Palestinian rally in September in Amsterdam: "I want to show what I feel and that's why I hung the flag in my house."

Wim and Gretta Duisenberg. "My husband has a certain position, but it is not my position."

Next week, Gretta Duisenberg, wife of European Central Bank president Wim Duisenberg, will visit the territories. Dozens of foreign journalists will cover her meetings with Yasser Arafat and with Israeli MKs. Duisenberg has been at the center of a storm of controversy ever since she hung a Palestinian flag from the balcony of her Amsterdam home six months ago.

Her neighbor, Rosa van der Wieken, a Jewish physician and member of the city council, was not pleased by the sight. "I can see that flag from every window of my house," she says. She and her husband, Ron, a cardiologist, wrote Duisenberg a letter. "We have two daughters in Israel," the letter said. "One lives in Tel Aviv and the other lives in Jerusalem. They could fall victim to Palestinian terror. We are sensitive to this flag and we've understood your message. Please be good, considerate neighbors and take down the flag." Duisenberg refused. "This is what I feel. I won't take it down," she told her neighbor on the phone.

Duisenberg, 60, has been in the headlines ever since the story was first publicized in the Dutch press. She criticized Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policies, organized a pro-Palestinian demonstration and founded an organization that calls for an end to the occupation and the imposition of economic sanctions on Israel; 6,000 people have signed the organization's petition. The Arabic press is applauding her and the Jewish community in Amsterdam is divided between supporters and opponents.

Two Jewish lawyers in Amsterdam have filed lawsuits claiming that Duisenberg is anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League has called on her husband to publicly disavow her statements. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has threatened to work to make Wim Duisenberg persona non grata in the United States. European banks are paying close attention to the ECB president's responses to the situation. One poorly considered utterance from him and the Euro could be weakened.

The ruckus began on April 13 during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Amsterdam held in response to Operation Defensive Shield. The demonstration was very unruly: Some demonstrators carried signs equating Sharon with Hitler, others beat a Jewish bystander and shouted that all the Jews should be burned in gas chambers.

"It was a very threatening and very anti-Semitic demonstration," says Van der Wieken. "The demonstrators dressed up like Hamas militants, sang Hamas songs and burned Israeli flags. In Amsterdam, you don't normally see people burning something, especially flags. The next day, we saw the PLO flag hanging from Mrs. Duisenberg's balcony."

Duisenberg took part in the demonstration alongside a group of women from Jenin. When she returned home, she hung the flag on the balcony outside her study. Journalists from all over the world tried to interview her and a television crew from Reuters even hid behind her house for several hours. When she went out to get the mail, she agreed to be interviewed.

"I want to show what I feel and that's why I hung up the flag," she told Dutch television. "My main feeling is that Europe and especially Holland are terrible because we sit still and no one does anything and Sharon can get away with it and I don't like it." And she told the newspaper De Telegraf: "It's important for me to continue my efforts in support of the Palestinian people. Every day, the Palestinians have to see the Israeli flag and Israeli tanks in the territories. I see the PLO flag when I come home."

Death Threat

The wide publicity that Duisenberg's action earned spawned a wave of Palestinian flags being displayed throughout Holland. The country's largest flag manufacturer reported a sharp increase in demand for Palestinian flags. Dutch journalist Emerson Vermaat estimates that thousands of people followed Duisenberg's lead, but says that some people also put up Israeli flags.

Duisenberg won much praise from the Arab press. In July, the Iran Daily wrote: "Only a few Western politicians have felt free to express their true positions regarding the Palestinians, but thanks to the media revolution, the Internet and satellite television, politicians and influential people in the West are starting to cross the red lines."

Amsterdam's Jewish community was understandably less pleased about it all. Herman Lonstein, head of the Dutch Jewish Federation, told Time magazine: "It's even worse that the Palestinian flag should be displayed in a neighborhood from which so many Jews disappeared into the camps."

Hedda Rothstein, one of Duisenberg's neighbors, told the English-language Daily Telegraph: "Mrs. Duisenberg knows that Dutch Jews suffered greatly. Many of our relatives managed to survive the gas chambers and settled in Israel. She must have known that she was insulting Jews in general."

Duisenberg even received a letter containing a death threat, sparking an investigation by Dutch and German police. She lives with her husband in Frankfurt, Germany, where the ECB headquarters is located, and returns to her home in Amsterdam on the weekends. The ECB's security personnel also investigated the threat. "I'm not afraid," she said, "but it was a dirty letter."

Duisenberg has also managed to anger liberal Jews. "If Gretta Duisenberg really had guts, she'd show both sides of the conflict, but she doesn't do that," says Van der Wieken. "She has no idea what she's talking about. She's never even been to the region. I'm not a fanatic right-winger. I'm a member of the peace coalition. I'm against the occupation. I think that Israel had made serious mistakes - but I'm opposed to a one-sided view of the conflict. Both sides are guilty. The Palestinians have also done terrible things and both sides will have to compromise. She's using the poor Palestinians as a way to gain publicity for herself. We decided to speak out about her putting up the PLO flag. We decided that to keep quiet would be the same as acquiescing with her. And now we're not even sure that we did the right thing, because we gave her a lot of publicity."

The Rich Jewish Lobby

All the publicity eventually led Duisenberg to take down the flag. Van der Wieken said that during her conversation with Duisenberg, the latter said that Israel was able to harm the Palestinians thanks to rich Jews that helped the State of Israel exist. Duisenberg said that she was misquoted and that while she did say that the rich Jewish lobby is perpetuating Israeli injustices in the territories, she did not condemn wealthy Jews.

Jewish organizations did not accept her denials. "She accompanies her husband to major economic events where she meets wealthy Jews," says Ronny Naftaniel, director of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) in Amsterdam. "People should know whom they're dealing with. She has even attacked me. In one interview in the Dutch press, she said that the Israeli lobby has a lot of influence in the United States and that whoever supports Israel is made a minister. `What would you say if Naftaniel was made a minister?' she asked. It's a ludicrous remark. One can support Israel and still be a minister, and with her views, she could also be a minister. It made me very angry."

Attorney Herman Lonstein filed a complaint with the state prosecutor arguing that Duisenberg's statements were anti-Semitic. The investigation has not yet been completed. Abe Foxman of the ADL wrote a letter to Wim Duisenberg in which he asked him to condemn his wife's anti-Semitic pronouncements. "While your wife is a private citizen and is entitled to her own opinions, she is given a public platform by virtue of your position as president of the European Central Bank. We urge you to immediately and publicly reject these expressions," he wrote. And the WJC threatened to work to have Wim Duisenberg declared persona non grata in the U.S. if no action were taken. The adverse impact on the ECB president of such a turn of events is easy to imagine.

That same day, Duisenberg flew from Frankfurt to Amsterdam and took the flag down from his balcony. "We were compelled to take down the flag in wake of threats made by the WJC," Gretta Duisenberg told a Dutch newspaper. "But when the Palestinians finally win their own state in the Middle East, I'll fly an even larger Palestinian flag."

Wim Duisenberg has been careful to stay out of the fray. He stood beside his wife when she was interviewed by Reuters, but did not say anything. A bank spokesman told the European media: "We view this as a private matter." Speaking on the telephone from Frankfurt, Duisenberg does not pretend that no dilemma exists. "You can guess what I think about it," he says. "But because of my position, I am outside of all of this."

Gretta Duisenberg claims that her husband agrees with her. In interviews with the Dutch press over the past several months, she has repeatedly affirmed her right to hold her own views, condemned the policies of the Sharon government and called for the imposition of economic sanctions if Israel does not withdraw from all of the territories.

"My husband has a certain position, but it is not my position," she told a Dutch newspaper. "I am a free woman and I am allowed to do whatever I like."

Whether or not her husband agrees with her, she is essentially linking the ECB to these views, says Emerson Vermaat, who published a profile of Gretta Duisenberg in last week's Wall Street Journal. "The main problem is that she is exploiting her husband's name, because most of the attention she receives is due to the fact that she's his wife."

`The Majority Agrees With Her'

Two weeks ago, Gretta Duisenberg was caught up in another media frenzy. In June, she founded an organization called "Stop the Occupation." The organization published its petition on its Web site and in several large Dutch newspapers. It calls upon Israel to "unconditionally withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967 and implement all relevant UN resolutions."

Some 6,000 supporters signed the petition, including former Dutch prime minister Dries Van Agt and Socialist Party parliamentarian Harry van Bommel. "We want to pressure Israel to act in accordance with the UN resolutions and we hope that the conflict will be one of the issues in the upcoming elections in Holland," says Van Bommel.

You ignore all the suffering caused to Israelis and concentrate solely on Palestinian suffering.

Van Bommel: "We condemn all violence by each side, but there is no justice for the Palestinian civilians who just want to live in peace."

Several weeks ago, demonstrators gathered in downtown Amsterdam for a rally staged by the organization that called for an end to the occupation. Duisenberg's supporters consider this a great accomplishment. Within a short time, the young organization was able to mobilize hundreds of activists. Her opponents say she has no broad public support. Despite the abundance of publicity that accompanies all of her activities, the demonstration only drew several hundred people. After the demonstration, Duisenberg was interviewed on Dutch radio. She was asked how many signatures she'd been able to gather for the petition against the occupation and replied that 6,000 supporters had signed so far. And how many signatures would you like to collect, she was asked. Duisenberg hesitated for a moment and then said, "Six million," and laughed.

Her answer sparked a furious reaction. Reuven Zis, director of the Federation of Dutch Jews, says that Duisenberg's choice of words warrants alarm.

"The Holocaust was something unique and it hurts to think that a distinguished woman like her sees a connection between the Holocaust and the conflict in the Middle East. Her words offended Holocaust survivors who live in Holland. When people here such a respected woman talk like that, it can give a sense of legitimacy to negative feelings about Judaism. She is very one-sided. She and her friends present the conflict in a way that says that if the occupation were to end, everything would be fine, but history proves that this is not true. There were problems in the area before 1967, too. This is a conflict between Western society and Arab society, and not between Israel and the Palestinians."

Attorney Abraham Moszkowicz, the son of Holocaust survivors from Amsterdam, filed a complaint with the state prosecutor saying that Duisenberg's remarks were anti-Semitic and constituted an unseemly reference to the six million victims of the Holocaust. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office told Reuters last week that her office is looking into the complaint. At the Israeli embassy in Amsterdam, they preferred to keep a low profile. "We don't want to stir things up, though her remarks were obviously very unpleasant," they said at the embassy.

"From talking with her, I know that she regrets what she said," says Van Bommel. "She didn't think for a moment about the number six million in the context of Holocaust victims," says writer and journalist Milo Anstadt, a close friend of Wim Duisenberg. "I talk to her twice a week and I know that the six million number occurred to her because of the 6,000 signatures that were already collected. That was the connection. The media chose to focus on the six million and right away there was this big fuss about her being anti-Semitic and that's not true.

"She is not anti-Semitic. I'm a writer, I understand people. If she were anti-Semitic, I'd see it. I'm a Jew. During World War II, I was in the resistance movement in Holland and I survived thanks to my ability to smell danger. I'd pick up on anti-Semitism right away thanks to the senses that I developed during the war. Just as I know that my wife, who is Catholic, is not anti-Semitic, I know that Gretta Duisenberg is not anti-Semitic."

The use of the number six million makes Jews uneasy.

Anstadt: "There is a group of Jews in Holland who think that Israel is always right and they consider anyone who dares to criticize Israel's policy a traitor and anti-Semite. They also called me a traitor because I disagree with their views."

Anstadt signed Duisenberg's organization's petition. "And I'm not the only Jew who signed. Basically, there isn't much difference between her views and the views of the left in Israel. In Holland, the majority agrees with her and is opposed to Sharon's occupation policy. Groups from the Christian right are the only ones that criticize her."

Her detractors say that, no matter what, she has benefited, since she has earned tremendous publicity in recent months.

"That's nonsense. What does she need publicity for? She's married to a very well known man, she participates in events with world leaders and royal families, she's a pianist and gives private recitals - She has enough to satisfy her ego. She just feels that she wants to be active on these issues."

Anka Mauthaun of the action group "An Other Jewish Voice" in Holland says that Duisenberg is not anti-Semitic.

"She's pro-Palestinian. That doesn't mean that she's against Israelis. I agree with everything she says apart from her call for Israel to accept all the UN resolutions, which would mean a realization of the right of return. That's unreasonable."

Mauthaun doesn't think Duisenberg's hanging of the PLO flag warranted such vicious criticism. "They made too much of a fuss about it. In 1973, I hung up an Israeli flag and no one said anything. I wouldn't put up a PLO flag, but I'm Jewish and she's not. The problem with certain Jewish groups is that anyone who expresses a different opinion is immediately classified as anti-Semitic and that's no good for anyone, and it's also too easy. It's possible to criticize Israeli policies without being considered anti-Semitic. People just don't want to think about what's happening so they resort to easy solutions."

Controversial Friendships

Gretta Duisenberg, nee Gretta Bedier de Prairie, is the daughter of a police officer. She studied at the University of Amsterdam and subsequently worked as head nurse at an Amsterdam hospital. Her first husband was a doctor, and they had three children. They divorced in the early 1980s. In his Wall Street Journal article, Vermaat writes that she was close to Marxist, anti-globalist circles. She became friends with a Pakistani man, Ahmed Aqbal, who supported Muammar Qaddafi and George Habash and founded a research institute in Amsterdam that became a magnet for Trotskyites and pro-Cuban socialists. According to Vermaat, she and Aqbal expressed vehement opposition to international financial institutions like the World Monetary Fund, where Wim Duisenberg was on the board for 15 years (1982-1997).

Gretta Bedier de Prairie was also a close friend of Hans van Mierlo, who was the Dutch defense minister in the early 1980s. Vermaat says that Holland's internal security service was concerned about this friendship. It worried that she would pass state secrets to elements hostile to NATO and the United States.

In 1987, Gretta Bedier de Prairie married Wim Duisenberg. It was his second marriage as well. He has three children from his first marriage. They have no children together. Wim Duisenberg, 67, was a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Groningen, finance minister (1973-77), a member of parliament from the Socialist Party (1977-78) and head of the Dutch Central Bank (1981-97).

"It's odd that a woman with views like hers married Duisenberg at the time when he was governor of the Dutch Central Bank," Vermaat wrote this week in The Wall Street Journal. "Even though he's a social democrat, Duisenberg isn't considered a typical leftist. He represents the establishment above all else. He has even been critical of people who prefer to live off a welfare allowance instead of finding a job, the kind of comment that was considered taboo in the politically correct atmosphere of Holland in the 1980s, especially among the Social Democrats."

For 15 years, Gretta Duisenberg froze her political activity. Vermaat notes that it was only now, just months before her husband is due to complete his term as ECB president, that she ventured to reveal her opinions. Wim Duisenberg - who was president of the European Monetary Institute, the predecessor to the ECB, was elected to his present post in May 1998 with strong backing from French President Jacques Chirac. Despite rumors to the effect that Chirac's support was contingent on Duisenberg serving only a four-year term instead of the usual eight-year term, Duisenberg did not give up his seat that quickly and recently announced that he would retire in July 2003, when he turns 68.

He is determined not to be pushed out of his position, according to an unflattering profile in a September 2001 issue of the British Independent. According to The Independent, Duisenberg - a touchy, chain-smoking wine enthusiast and Johnny Cash fan (whom the British tabloids have dubbed "Dim Wim") - is the main obstacle to Britain's joining the euro bloc. His hasty and ill-considered remarks have sent the euro into a tailspin on more than one occasion, writes Sonia Purnell in The Independent.

Wim Duisenberg has a knack for straightforwardness and clarity - two inauspicious traits when it comes to the global financial markets. In the Time Magazine interview, he was asked if he would intervene in order to strengthen the euro in the event of a war in the Middle East. His response, "I wouldn't think of doing that," sent investors rushing to sell billions of euros. Now, some say that even word that Duisenberg is about to give an interview or hold a press conference is enough to send the euro tumbling. "I'm direct," says Duisenberg in his own defense. "It's part of my character. I couldn't change it even if I wanted to. It's been built over the course of many years."

Next week, his character will be put to another test when his wife arrives in the region as part of a delegation of women sent by the Dutch organization called United Civilians for Peace. Gretta Duisenberg's secretary is already trying to set up a meeting with Arafat, and the organization's representative in Bethlehem, Toine van Teeffelen, is trying to arrange meetings with Israeli women MKs. "Her participation in the delegation doesn't mean that we agree with all of her public statements," he says.

Kees Otto, director of the organization's Amsterdam office, who arranged for Duisenberg to be included in the delegation, says that her presence in it assures that the visit will attract a great deal of media interest. "Wherever she goes, she receives a lot of publicity. This visit will also get a lot of publicity, thanks to her. She herself isn't interested in publicity. She just wants the occupation to end. She could have drunk tea with other ladies for the rest of her life and talked to them about her money, but this activity is more important. A third party has to come and help you, and it could be someone like her."

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