“Freezing assets here is easy,” writes Roger Thurow in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“All it takes is a banker’s suspicion of a client’s ill-gotten gain and a quick call to the federal money-laundering office, and it’s done.”

“Thawing out assets, though, can be an entirely different story. Consider the tale behind the Nixon-family portrait on the desk of Jean-Pierre Allaz in this small wine village on the shores of Lake Geneva.”

” ‘To His Excellency General Mobutu,’ begins the good-luck message scribbled across the photo. It is signed by Richard Nixon, framed in marble and topped with the U.S. presidential seal.”

“This memento was no gift, for Mr. Allaz never knew the Nixons or the late Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko. Rather, it fell into his hands when the Swiss government froze Mr. Mobutu’s assets in Switzerland in 1997, as he was being booted from power. Mr. Allaz happens to be the local bankruptcy-claims official in the region where Mr. Mobutu had a grand villa. The residence contained an eclectic mix of furniture, 300 bottles of wine and a key to the city of San Francisco. Mr. Allaz was entrusted with all of it.”

” ‘We were thinking one, maybe two years, that we would have it. But not four years!’ he says. Last month, Mr. Allaz was finally able to auction off the villa for about $2 million. In June, he had sold most of the contents, except for some personal items such as the Nixon portrait. But the proceeds, along with $4 million in cash previously seized, are still frozen. ‘We’re waiting,’ he says, ‘for the [Swiss] federal government to tell us what to do next.’ “

“The federal government, meanwhile, is waiting to hear from the Democratic Republic of Congo, as Zaire is now called, that the money was indeed illegally spirited out of the country. The Congo government is wondering how it is going to prove that.”

” ‘In a dictatorship, the government treasury is mixed with the pocket of the dictator,’ says Therese Nseka-Koko Diakanua, a diplomat at the Congo embassy in Bern. ‘When the dictator takes money from his bank, he just takes the money.’ “

“But without evidence that a judicial inquiry is underway in Congo, Switzerland won’t release the assets. ‘It looks so simple, but it isn’t,’ says Jacques de Watteville, head of financial and economic affairs in the Swiss foreign ministry.”

“Since the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, many officials in the U.S. have been clamoring about freezing. Few have dwelled on unfreezing. Lists of individuals and institutions suspected of involvement in terrorism have been sent around the globe by the White House and the United Nations, and tens of millions of dollars in hundreds of accounts have been frozen or are under investigation.”

” ‘Right now, the focus has been on freezing the assets and getting the money out of the terrorists’ hands,’ says a U.S. Treasury official.”

“But then what? Will frozen terrorist money go to victims of the terror attacks? Will it help to rebuild the World Trade Center? Will frozen Taliban money go to the Northern Alliance or some future government of Afghanistan? What about the Afghan people?”

“To seek some answers to these questions and others about repatriating frozen assets in general, diplomats and finance officials from the world’s major financial centers are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Lausanne, just a few miles from the Mobutu mansion. ‘One of the questions [the world] will have to face is, “Fine, we’ve frozen, but now what are we going to do with it?” ‘ says Kurt Hoechner, the diplomat leading the Swiss delegation at the conference.”