Polanski arrest as Swiss up in arms

With Roman Polanski's arrest, Switzerland may have taken another step to shed its image as a land where wealthy fugitives and tax evaders live can above the law in genteel luxury.

But Polanski's weekend capture and the crackdown on foreigners stashing money illegally in Swiss banks are also threatening the Alpine nation's cherished legacy as safe haven in an unpredictable world.

Across Switzerland, the arrest has been met with widespread anger and a bout of national handwringing about relinquishing a proud history of independence and neutrality in the face the modern-day reality of living under the shadow of a superpower like the United States.

"Swiss neutrality is not about taking sides," said Julien Grollier, a Geneva resident. "They're doing a favor for the United States that they wouldn't do for another country."

Another Swiss citizen put his anguish at seeing his country arrest Polanski at America's bidding more bluntly.

"I'm ashamed to be Swiss," said Ernest Scherrsz, the Grand Palace Hotel owner in Gstaad, where the 76-year-old Polanski owns a chalet.

The anger echoing across the nation is not a simple case of America-bashing or defending an internationally acclaimed artist whose tragic past includes losing his mother at Auschwitz and wife Sharon Tate to a grisly 1969 attack by the Charles Manson cult.

The Swiss criticism largely stems from an inherent fear of losing sovereignty and a tradition of restrained governance and policing that places a supreme value on individual rights.

Fierce independence is central to the national mythology: Switzerland has fought off foreign invaders for centuries and Geneva holds a festival every year commemorating the day in 1602 when burghers fought off attack by a neighboring French duchy by pouring boiling oil down the city walls as the invaders clambered up.

The Swiss still credit their neutrality for escaping invasion from neighboring Nazi Germany during World War II.

From the center of the continent they have rebuffed the European Union, and welcomed in recent decades countless political refugees and famous cultural figures such as Charlie Chaplin, who found a home here after he was refused re-entry into the United States in 1952 over charges of Communist sympathies.

It also bucked Washington in the 1980s when the U.S. sought the extradition of Marc Rich, the fugitive trader known as the "King of Commodities" who was controversially pardoned in 2001 by Bill Clinton just hours before he left office as U.S. president.

Rich fled from the U.S. to Switzerland in 1983 after he was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on more than 50 counts of fraud, racketeering, trading with Iran during the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and evading more than US$48 million in income taxes.

Switzerland didn't regard tax evasion as a crime and, as a neutral country, didn't have any embargo against Iran. So it refused to treat Rich as a crook or hand him over to the United States despite strong diplomatic pressure.

But Switzerland's independent streak has faded in recent years as globalization made it increasingly difficult to preserve its lofty perch of isolation.

In 2002, it finally joined the United Nations and has been forced to tighten its venerated banking secrecy laws after a series of international flaps over dictator cash, Jews who couldn't access their Holocaust-era accounts and, most recently, wealthy Americans who stashed billions of dollars in Swiss bank UBS AG.

It has become a world leader in returning potentate money, sending back hundreds of millions in Swiss accounts linked to the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philipines and Peruvian spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos. And reforms have made it much harder to open up confidential accounts from abroad.

"We don't make any difference between criminal acts," said Guido Balmer, spokesman for the Swiss Justice Ministry. "The basic principle is whether the act is criminally punishable in both countries."

He said Polanski's case is different from Rich's because sex with a minor is a criminal offense in Switzerland and the United States. But coming so shortly after a U.S.-Swiss deal to help U.S. authorities prosecute nearly 5,000 American accountholders, a number of politicians weren't so sure.

"Maybe Switzerland wanted to serve the United States," Green Party chief Ueli Leuenberger noted on the radio panel with Brunner, in a rare moment of accord between Switzerland's main right-wing and left-wing parties.

Jean Ziegler, a former Socialist politician and author who advises the United Nations on human rights issues, called the arrest a "political action."

"The government is so traumatized by the IRS and whole UBS scandal," said Ziegler, a frequent critic of the U.S. government and Swiss banks. "If any American authority asks for anything in Switzerland, they get it in 24 hours."

Balmer called Polanski's arrest and incarceration a "legal process" and said the government had not been affected by lingering tension with American authorities. Similarly, he said it would not be swayed by pressure from France and Poland, where the 76-year-old filmmaker has citizenship and whose foreign ministers have sharply criticized Switzerland for the arrest.

But questions remained.

Polanski's friends and lawyers note that he has spent long periods of time at his Gstaad chalet, right in the middle of the Swiss Alps, and could easily have been arrested then.

Asked about the timing of the arrest, Balmer said the question was irrelevant.

"Last week, we received precise information when and where he would arrive, enabling us to make the arrest. That was the first time," he told The AP. He would not comment further on previous contacts with U.S. justice officials.

Ziegler said celebrities would now think twice before traveling or relocating to Switzerland if the government has "no choice" but to arrest people when asked by powerful governments like the United States. "The Swiss image as such in the world will suffer," he said.

Their were some dissenting views, however, especially among Swiss legal experts.

"The extradition department at the Justice Ministry had no other choice," said Dieter Jann, a former Zurich prosecutor.

One Geneva resident said it was a simple question of right and wrong.

"It's right that he was arrested. He did something bad so he has to go to jail, even in Switzerland," said 18-year-old Cecile Bocco.