Switzerland sees no reason to renegotiate a 1946 deal on reparation payments for buying Nazi gold, a foreign ministry spokesman said Wednesday.
The spokesman was replying to demands by a senior U.S. senator, Alfonse D'Amato, who asked the U.S. administration Tuesday to reopen the pact between Switzerland and the World War II Allied powers."This treaty has been negotiated, signed and honored and 50 years have elapsed. This treaty is valid, and for the time being we have nothing more to comment on it," foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Philippe Tissieres told Reuters.
Tissieres also said there was no reason to comment because D'Amato's demand was made in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher rather than in any official form to the Berne government.
D'Amato, a New York Republican, based his call on newly declassified U.S. government docu-ments that he said showed Swiss banks, companies and the government had accepted far more Nazi assets and treasures than Swiss negotiators admitted to during the 1945-46 talks.
"We must obtain the truth after fifty years of deception and manipulation by the Swiss," D'Amato wrote.
Tissieres said discovering the truth about Switzerland's role as neutral banker to both Nazi Germany and its victims, including the fate of Nazi and Jewish assets after the war, was the point of a government historical commission announced last week.
"It is precisely the will of the government to shed all light on this period of history," he said.
The government commission, expected to start up by next April, will work parallel to an international commission set up by Swiss banks and world Jewish groups in May with a narrower mandate to find lost accounts left by Holocaust victims.
Members of parliament also rejected the idea of reopening the 1946 Washington Agreement that settled Allied claims against Switzerland for Nazi assets, including stolen gold, sold or banked in the neutral Alpine country during the war.
Under the accord, the Swiss paid about $60 million at the time in return for buying gold stolen by Nazi forces and another $121 million for Nazi assets frozen in Switzerland shortly before the war's end.
"This is a treaty under international law . . . I can think of no example for an international treaty being renegotiated 50 years after the fact," said Lilli Nabholz, head of the law commission of the National Council, or lower chamber.