The Fire Last Time

The horror: a French voter reacts to Le Pen's victory

To-day marks the second anniversary of Jean-Marie Le Pen's greatest ever political triumph. Let's remember it with the gravity that such an event deserves because the papers sure aren't. I can find no mention of it in the press save for this article in le Parisien. Since that day, the Front National has continued to put down roots in the French political landscape.

Yet, while, when taken together, all the far-right parties got 16.61% of the vote in the regional elections last month, the FN itself only got 14.7%, or 300,000 votes, a 0.5% drop over its surprisingly strong showing of 1998. The FN has not seen the advances it had hoped for and now has fewer regional elected officials than it did in 1998. It's strongest showing this year was in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (where Le Pen was not personally able to run: he's registered his home address elsewhere for tax reasons). In the first round, the Le Pen list got 22.95% — a drop of 3.5% from 1998 — and two points less in the second round. The only successful FN candidate who wasn't already an incumbent was Marie-Claude Bompard who now heads the regional council for Vaucluse, Orange-Est. Her husband Jacques has been mayor of Orange-Ouest since 1995.

Yet it's not all good news. The FN has again had convincing success in the previously left wing Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The FN's second best showing was in Picardie and the party also did well in Oise. And it has confirmed the trend of rising support in areas outlying urban centers and in rural areas: Centre, Normandie, Champagne-Ardenne, all of them areas that went against the Maastricht treaty in 1992. The FN also picked up voters in Midi-Pyrénées and Poitou-Charentes, Limousin, Auvergne and Pays de la Loire. However, in the Paris region, Le Pen's daughter Martine had an embarrassing night: 10.11% (12.26% in the first round) in a region where her party had received 16.5% in 1998 and where her father got 14.45% in the last presidential elections.

Seeing the expression on the face of the man above, I am reminded of the words of Farid Laroussi — a Franco-Algerian professor of literature at Yale who has recently taken us citizenship — in an editorial published last December in Le Monde, the subject of my first post at LOTF. He wrote

...while there may always be things to be criticized, they are less decisive, less cutting, than suffering the judgment of more than five million of my former compatriots who, during the last presidential elections, told me by voting for the far-right candidate that they would never want me around.

Unemployment, Finances, Sarkozy and Chirac

French unemployment figures have been revised upwards and now officially stand at 9.8% or 2.68 million people, a full percentage point above the eurozone level. In 2003, there were 67,000 fewer employed than in 2002, due in large measure to government cutbacks intended to help stave off a looming crisis in public finances. (The government employs one of every five French workers, meaning that one three French citizens is either employed by the government or dependent on someone who is.)

One hundred thousand government employees were laid off but this was off set by an increase in hiring among so-called fixed "contractors" (i.e. temps) — which would indicate that the number of unemployed may rise still further when such contracts begin to expire if contractor hiring isn't maintained or itself off set by hiring in other sectors. However, the FT quotes Jean-Louis Mourier, identified as an economist at Auriel Leven Securities, as saying that companies should start hiring again in the latter half of the year, thereby increasing consumer confidence.

In news related to this post: data leaked from the finance ministry indicate, also according to the FT, that the government no longer believe they can reduce the deficit (which is greater than $11 billion) to less than 3% of GDP (a Maastrict treaty requirement) for the next fiscal year.

The AFP is now reporting that newly appointed Finance minister Nicholas Sarkozy has announced an even larger freeze in public spending and requests for spending cuts to be made individually to every ministry, including an €800 million cut for Defense.

Some have remarked that, given the herculean and thankless task of fiscal reform, it's no surprise that Chirac gave the Finance ministry to his newest and brashest political rival following last month's cabinet reshuffle (see also this realvideo segment (1:10) from the BBC). Obviously, the assignment is a poisoned chalice.

My post of February on LOTF quoted Sarkozy on his intention to run for prime minister: "I will run for leader of the UMP and no one can stop me!" During a heated telephone conversation, the right honorable minister Sarkozy added, "I'll be the candidate because I am the best. I'll run against [prime minister] Jean-Pierre [Raffarin] if I have to and, what's more, I'll win." Many people think this is simply a political rivalry, however I made sure to include the following paragraph:

This is not the first time that Sarkozy and Chirac have battled over the PM's seat and, of course, we have reason to suspect that there is more to this than meets the eye. In his book (published last year and to which I have referred before), editor Guy Birenbaum writes (p. 98) about "political disputes and other internal frictions that are experienced by all parties and which, most of the time, are 'sold' to the public as so many battles among men and women, mechanical clashes, conflicts of trends, if not of ideology when, at the outset, they cover over banal personal matters. [...] How much longer [did] we have to wait to learn that the waring between Nicholas Sarkozy and the Chirac family was not in fact rooted in the 1993-95 betrayal when the current minister of the Interior supported Edouard Balladur in the presidential elections, but rather in the break-up between the former mayor of Neuilly [Sarkozy] and the president's daughter [Claude Chirac]? [...] In February 2003, when the tensions between the Elysée Palace, Bernadette Chirac and the minster of the Interior [Sarkozy] seemed to be rising again, only Eric Mandonnet of the magazine L'Express would describe the real cause of the dust-up: 'I will never forgive him because he has penetrated my privacy,' he quotes Chirac as saying crudely [... Eric Mandonnet, "Chirac-Sarkozy: la guerre froide," L'Express, 30 janvier 2003]." [emphasis added]

Picasso Espied, Spurned

The Paris Police Museum is exhibiting 40 years worth of documents from police spying on Pablo Picasso. The documents were stolen by the Nazis and then from the Nazis by the Russians only to be unearthed and returned in 2000.

Among the documents' revelations: Picasso applied for French citizenship in 1940 (moments before you-know-what) and was rejected on the grounds that he had Communist sympathies. The police began spying on Picasso when he arrived in Paris in 1901. (Here that, John? You weren't the only one!) One report "painted the 19-year-old artist as a rebel who 'sometimes stays out all night.' It said his concierge had never heard him express subversive opinions but that Picasso's French was so bad that he was hard to understand at all."

NYT, Reuters, WP, ABC, VOA, et al All Come Before Fox...

A filler compiled from wire reports in the San Antonio Express News states that

The New York Times is the Web site most often used as the first source for Google News' stories.

Reuters, the Washington Post, ABC News and the Voice of America filled out the top five on a list prepared by Newsknife.com. ...

"According to our research, the sites at the top of our rankings are highly relevant at the top of our rankings as credible news sources that present major news promptly," said a message on the site. In other words, "They're good sites currently doing a darn good job.

Et alors? you may ask. And so?

Only this. If French news media are to be believed: the only thing Americans watch all day long is Fox News; there is no other expression for Fox News than "rabidly extremist"; and all that all media outlets engage in all day long is French-bashing of the type that is on Fox News.

As it happens, Fox News isn't even on the top 12 media outlets Americans turn to. So will French media change their tune?

Non. Are you kidding?! That would mean putting brakes on their Yankee-bashing with regards to caricaturing Americans as stupid, trigger-happy, and "rabidly extremist". And that, vous savez, won't happen any time soon.

Lire la version française

Saddam Victims in Houston for Artificial Hands

Hello, sorry to have been away so long, but, as Douglas wrote on April 7, I've been traveling through that hell-hole of misery (to quote Arlette), the United States of America, more specifically through Texas for research on a book about the Texas revolution, with the Alamo and all.

As it happens, I'm currently in Arizona (a Comfort Inn motel on Phoenix's Apache Drive), and I won't be back home to Paris before next Sunday, but after that, I'll be back in form (hopefully).

As usual, I am always amazed at the acts of generosity, even tiny, that perfect strangers are always willing to perform for one another in this country. Twice, while hiking, in Palo Verde canyon and in the Superstition Mountains, I was asked whether I needed water, and offered not just part of a bottle but the entire bottle itself. Not a single second of hesitation, and with an attitude entirely natural. On another occasion, I witnessed a drunk guy trying to pick up a Hawaiian girl, only to be offered a handful of cash so he could get a taxi home. She was insistent he take the money, and not offended one bit.

But let's get back to the raison d'etre of this particular post. In Houston, I picked up an issue of the Houston Chronicle, which published a story that proves my point of view wrong and the Chirac and Zapatero position as being the correct one: Due to their horrifying capitalist system, Americans are arrogant, money-loving, and self-centered, without an iota of fraternal humanity in them, and life in Iraq was much better before those capitalist pigs started their war for oil.
But let's let Eric Berger tell the rest of the story:

Memories of losing his right hand in an Iraqi prison, Qasim Kadim says, are sharpest on very cold nights. The remaining stump feels like a block of ice.

Kadim, a victim of Saddam Hussein's bloody regime, may never have to experience the painful, chilling feeling again. Now in Houston with six other amputees, Kadim will soon receive a $50,000 bionic arm courtesy of several journalists, doctors and hospitals.

After he learns to flex certain arm muscles, the 46-year-old Baghdad appliance importer will be able to curl his fingers, make a fist and perform many of the everyday tasks he now struggles to accomplish. The bionic arm is so advanced, it has "intelligent" sensors that know when to delicately hold a champagne glass or firmly grasp a tool.

As miraculous as this new limb will be, Kadim says, it's just one facet of the six-week odyssey to the United States that he and his fellow Iraqis are taking. The other half is perhaps even sweeter, the gregarious father of seven said with a smile. He relishes introductions to all that Texas has to offer, from chips and salsa to rodeo.

"It is a very beautiful feeling to be here," Kadim said through a translator. "There is nobody who doesn't want to come and see the States. It is a dream come true."

(Poor man: that he doesn't realize the intrinsic nature of Americans and their society. Tch, tch...)

The seven Iraqis' right hands were surgically removed, and a crosslike tattoo carved between their eyes, because Saddam blamed businessmen dealing with foreign interests for the country's failing economy. The regime's punishment was intended to intimidate other business owners looking to trade in international currencies.

Kadim, who traded in foreign currency, including dollars, was importing cigarettes in August 1994 when he and other merchants were rounded up by the Mukhabarat, Saddam's secret police.

For two months, he said, special police beat him and prodded his body with electric rods, seeking information about who his trading partners were.

"I expected to be killed," Kadim said. "Many others were."

After being held by the police for about eight months, Kadim found himself in a courtroom with eight other businessmen who, after a 30-minute "trial," were convicted of working in foreign currency. His defense lawyer, Kadim recalls, never spoke.

After their amputations in March 1995, Kadim says, the men were kept in a prison hospital for three days. Nurses would give them injections for the pain but to no effect.

"I believe it was water in the syringes," he said. "It was part of the psychological torture."

Then the men were released. Kadim says his family brought 10 vehicles to pick him up, threw a party and celebrated his emerging from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison alive.

The Western allure of the Lone Star State, in fact, seems to be most captivating. Among his requests, Kadim asked to meet a real cowboy or cowgirl.

On Thursday, he broadly smiled when introduced to Ashley Guest, a 15-year-old high school rodeo champion from Crosby. After shaking her hand, inquiring about the nature of barrel racing, Kadim offered an unexpected comment.

"That," he said, "sounds very dangerous."

Too bad Kadim, like the majority of the American population, isn't intelligent enough to understand the French viewpoint that in general, American-style capitalism is a devastating system of damning misery and, in particular, that they, the French, "knew that capturing Saddam would solve nothing". Tch, tch...

Court Jester in this Banana Republic	Le Fou du Roi dans cette Ripoublika Banania
Dieudonné in an interview with BlackMap states that the Jewish lobby hates blacks and 'To sum things up, they are still 'busting our balls' with Mein Kampf ...'. Thanks to Eric.	Dieudo lors d'une interview avec BlackMap déclare que le lobby juif déteste les noirs et que 'En bref, ils nous 'gonflent' encore avec Mein Kampf ...'. Merci à Eric.

He's Done It

Spanish Leader Orders All 1,300 Troops in Iraq to Withdraw
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 18, 2004

ADRID, Spain -- Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Sunday he had ordered Spanish troops withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible.

While Zapatero had run for office on a promise to withdraw Spanish forces from the U.S.-led coalition, the timing of the announcement was unexpected.

In an announcement from the Moncloa Palace, Zapatero said he had ordered the defense minister to "do what is necessary for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq return home in the shortest time possible."

Zapatero spoke just hours after the new Socialist government was sworn in.

Reuters also attributes the following words to Zapatero:

"According to the information we have...it is not likely that a U.N. resolution will be adopted that will meet the conditions we have set for our presence in Iraq."

Chirac is "too libidinous..."

American journalist and Paris resident Ted Stanger, author of "Bloody French!", a book explaining American views to French readers, and most recently of "Bloody Americans!", a book that, obviously, explains French views of the US to a French audience, gave an interview to appear in the Sunday edition of Le Parisien and of which the AFP has seen an advance copy:

On the question of whether many Americans view the French as enemies, [Stanger] answers: "It's worse than that: you, the French, have replaced the Soviet, with his teeth of steel, as the villain in the wrestling matches of old." Another question: what of the Democrat John Kerry, president Bush's future rival in the American presidential elections, and for whom the French "feel great affection," according to the newspaper? Answer: "One of his handicaps is being seen in middle America as... French. And that's not a compliment." And Jacques Chirac? "They wouldn't like him in the US: on the one hand, he's too libidinous; on the other, he's too intelligent." Finally, does Ted Stanger believe that the socialist Lionel Jospin will make his return to the French political stage? "The proof that he's been utterly forgotten," says Stanger, "is that he often goes to the US to attend conferences."

Who died and made him Gertrude Stein?

UPDATE: The article has appeared but for some reason it's all lumped together in a single paragraph. And Stanger comes off as rather loopy.

LP: Are the Americans aware of having become the new Satan for the Arab world?

Stanger: The American does not know geography. He is ignorant of foreign languages and the rest of the world. He is therefore incapable of weighing the consequences of the foreign policy of his president. Since September 11, the question Americans — who sincerely believed they were loved the world over — are asking is: why do they hate us? Even in Vietnam, they had the feeling of doing good. George Bush has promised to come to Paris on June 5 and to celebrate June 6 in Normandy, the sixtieth anniversary of the landings... He has made a calculation: the value of the photos showing him on the beaches of Normandy will be infinitely greater than the reports on the anti-Bush demonstrations. And then, at bottom, American opinion feels that our leader has the right to come to France from time to time to receive thanks for what we did together at the time.

LP: The French feel great affection for John Kerry...

Stanger: First, I insist that the cowboy Bush will win. As for Kerry, one of his handicaps is being perceived in middle America as... French. And that's not a compliment. The November election will be determined not by Iraq but by the price of gas at the pump.

[...]

LP: What is your view of Jacques Chirac?

Stanger: I love Jacques Chirac. He's a statesman and a very fine politician. However, they wouldn't like him in the US: on the one hand, he's too libidinous; on the other, he's too intelligent. The only one who would succeed with us is Jack Lang because he has understood that a nice smile is worth infinitely more than reforms. [...]

They got him

Abdel Aziz Rantisi a vécu.

Jean-David Levitte

"What is at stake now in Iraq is huge," [French ambassador to the US] Jean-David Levitte told students in an address at San Diego State University's Institute on World Affairs. "Because of this, we have to work together, and France is ready to help."

In an interview, Levitte said that once an Iraqi government is elected as planned for June, France will be ready to train and equip Iraqi military police who can help establish and maintain security in the country.

"Security is the main challenge," Levitte said. "There will be no reconstruction without security."

Even so, he reiterated France's opposition to the U.S.-led invasion, saying, "We still consider this war was not necessary."

Levitte said there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States and no evidence linking him to those who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

France does not intend to send its own troops to Iraq, even as part of a United Nations force, Levitte said.

— San Diego Union Tribune 4/17/04

News Flash!!

W. actually likes something from France!

Poverty on rise in France

In 1970, 15% of the French population was officially poor. By 2001, this figure had dropped to 6.1%, which represents 3.7 million people, according to Bertrand Fragonard, president of the National Observatory for Poverty and Marginalization (part of the Ministry of Employment and Labor). But recent news has substantially darkened matters. On April 8, the Observatory released its third annual report which indicated that poverty has been on the rise again since 2002.

Poverty is measured as the share of the population with a monthly income at less than 50% of the median (which was €600 in 2001). One indicating factor in its rise was a 1.4% increase in 2002 of those seeking a form of public assistance complementary to income. In 2003, the increase was 4.9%. This is projected to rise yet again this year due to controversial reforms in unemployment insurance. The report also found that, while there were 85% fewer poor among the elderly than was the case 30 years ago, there were 38% more among employee households, including those who recently had work.

The working poor — persons active for at least six months out of the year and having held down a position for at least a year — number a million but their income has risen following increases in the minimum wage, property tax reforms, universal health coverage, the reform of housing subsidies and employment premiums.

According to Fragonard, the High Council for Employment, Income and Costs (CERC) estimates that one million children are cared for by families living under the poverty line. Without public assistance, the number of households living poverty would rise to 13.1% The income of the poorest 10% is comprised of at least 50% public funds. Yet increases in the various forms of public assistance, particularly housing subsidies, are insufficient to keep up with rising prices, according to the Observatory.

The report was completed prior to Jacques Chirac's announcement that the planned reform to shorten the duration of the "solidarity" premium — paid to those whose unemployment insurance has run out — would be suspended.

Taken together with a malfunctioning health system, sluggish economy, disastrous public finances, reduced productivity, a delapidated military, scientific research starved of funding, ghastly prisons, stagnant population growth, and faltering race relations, it seems there are a great many emergent causes for unhappiness in France at the moment.

He went down

file under this category. Le Monde reports:

As a silent march of a hundred people was unfolding on April 13 before the house of detention in Epinal (Vosges), the family of Erhan Celik, an 18 year-old from Metz who committed suicide on April 3 while in solitary confinement inside this prison, announced their intention to seek official redress before the administrative court of Strasbourg.

"It's plain to see that all the alarms were going off in this case and that the boy's life was in danger," says attorney Dominique Boh-Petit, lawyer for the parents of the boy. "Since his incarceration a year ago for petty crimes, Erhan attempted on seven occasions to end his life. Though transfered four times, he only received two days of psychiatric attention."

In a letter sent January 9 2004 to the regional office of the Strasbourg penitentiary administration, Mr. Tahsin Celik, Erhan's father, stated his worries: "I am very worried for my son. Since his incarceration in Metz, then in Nancy, he has repeatedly attempted suicide. We are suffering from constant anguish." On January 13, the Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle) prison director answered, saying that "both medical and correctional services are available in his area." Erhan Celik, who continued his attempts in the interim, was transfered on March 25 from Nancy to Epinal, after a two-week stay in a psychiatric ward. Several days after his arrival in les Vosges, he hung himself from the bars in a solitary confinement cell where he had just been sent for knocking over a guard. "By locking this boy up more than a hundred and fifty kilometers from his family and placing him in solitary confinement, where the likelihood of successfully committing suicide is seven times greater than in normal detention, the penitentiary administration knowingly increased the risk factors," said François Charlier, of the International Prison Observatory (OIP). "This matter typifies what not to do and runs counter to the recommendations of the psychiatrist Jean-Louis Terra, author of a report on suicide in prison." According to OIP, 120 prisoners committed suicide in 2003.

NB: 71 prisoners were executed in the United States last year, according to AI, versus France's 120 suicides (and given that the US has five times the population...) MiF noted this last year, saying that this was "a death penalty that dares not speak its name."

Chiraq

It is worth remembering that on Chirac's last visit to Algeria in March of last year, the first by any French president since Algerian independence in 1962, he was met by a cheering crowd of somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million people (last November, I attended a lecture by Pascal Bruckner at NYU's maison française: he said the people in the crowd were really shouting, "Visa! Visa!").

Commentators largely attributed his newfound popularity to his opposition to American plans to go to war with Saddam. Indeed, the day after Chirac's visit, president Bouteflika told radio station Europe 1 Chirac deserved the Nobel peace prize for his opposition to war. Among Chirac's critics, was the heroic Cynon Valley (Wales) MP Anne Clwyd (who is also chair of Indict). She wrote wrote that Bouteflika "was perhaps persuaded of the merit of the nomination during a meeting he had in September 2002 with Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, the man responsible for the slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqis. As the French would say, 'plus ça change.'"

Last October, Sa'ad Zaki, a Cairo date seller who and the main supplier to the city's grocery stores, told the AFP that the "the surprise of this Ramadan will the be the Chirac date," which sold for 20 Egyptian pounds ($3.20) per kilo. (The prophet is believed to have broken his Ramadan fast by eating dates and drinking goat's milk). The Chirac was being sold alongside the worst dates which had the same names as last year: the Sharon (10¢ per kilo) and the Bush (15¢). The Chirac was popular, Zaki said, because "the Arabs feel positions taken by Chirac on Iraq and the Palestinian cause are the most moderate." On Iraq, "France opposed the United States, the world superpower." The second highest quality date was the Yasser Arafat (70¢ to $1.50 per kilo).

This was a glaring illustration of France's politique arabe (or "Arab policy"). France has long sought to protect it's strategic, diplomatic and financial interests by adopting Arab causes and Jacques Chirac has been at the central to this strategy since his first days in national politics. On coming to power in 1981, François Mitterrand was desperate to prevent the withdrawal of Arab deposits from French banks. His repeated promises to end the sale of weapons to Iraq and his support for Israel irritated wealthy Arabs and their heads of state who had largely supported his opponent... Jacques Chirac. As it gathered speed, the capital flight risked devaluing the franc itself and Mitterrand was forced to go back on his campaign pledges.

France's famous beneficence toward Saddam wasn't simply a matter of securing Iraqi petrodollars (though that had a lot to do with it). Nor is France's outspoken, and sometimes scandalous, bias in favor of the Palestinian cause. Rather, both arise out of the strategic desire to court the entire Arab world.

During the Iran-Iraq war, France was way out in front of every other Western nation in its support for Saddam against the Iranian mullahs. In 1982, France made considerable sacrifices in order to lend Saddam five (5) fighter jets (from its own operational stocks!). But it wasn't long before they expected something in return. On page 128 of the investigative history Notre allié Saddam, Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier write

[Defense minister Charles] Hernu and [prime minister Claude] Cheysson then begin a series of visits to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, accompanied by a few colleagues and by François Gutmann, secretary general the ministry of Foreign Affairs. The French are delighted by the improvement in their image among Arab nations. In 1982, three quarters of French weapons exports were sent to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

"All the Arabs we met were asking us to give Iraq the Super-Etendard," said one of the diplomats present. "Our policy was informed and well thought-out. Besides, by the end of 1983, after the delivery of those five [Mirage fighter] planes, Cheysson went on a triumphal tour of the Gulf. The principal was the following: to cash in on the credit we had earned in the region. It rained contracts."

This policy lives on to this day, as Jonathan's translation below makes clear. From April 21 to 26, Defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie will be touring the midde-east, visiting the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Jordan.

Since the passage of the ban on the hidjab, France's position in the Arab world has deterioated somewhat.

But I digress: the article Jonathan translates below is revealing, given the current context. Mohamed Benchicou, editor in chief of the Algerian daily Le Matin, and author of Bouteflika: an Algerian fraud, recently said the following during a live chat on lemonde.fr:

Libre: Isn't Jacques Chirac's trip to Algeria an absolute endorsement of the results of the presidential election? In a wider sense, what is the relationship between president Bouteflika and France?

Mohamed Benchicou: President Chirac's brutal visit to Algeria has surprised the Algerians and particularly Algerian democrats, who do indeed see a kind of endorsement in this, not only of president Bouteflika, but of the fraud the returned him to office. Algerian republicans hope still hope that president Chirac's trip to Algiers will serve to relay a message to Bouteflika on the respect for his commitment to democracy, pluralism, and freedom of the press, and [to urge him] to avoid the temptation of Stalinist hegemony that returned him 85% of the vote in the first round of voting and the complete annihilation of the opposition. Let's hope that this message will be borne by president Chirac. As for Franco-Algerian relations, it is obvious that, in diplomatic and political terms, they've seen a fantastic rise, because, over the last five years, president Bouteflika has visited France seven times and President Chirac has visited Algeria twice, which is remarkable and which has brought diplomatic relations to a level heretofore unseen. But such good relations have remained strictly diplomatic. Algerians saw nothing of it. They have had no economic or commercial results, no new investments, nor have they seen the return of French companies to Algeria or the lifting of strict requirements for Algerians obtaining visas. There's just been a recrudescence of relations, of state visits and diplomatic ones.

French 'lobster' alarms US troops

The BBC reports

A newly arrived French commander picked "homard", meaning lobster, as an alias, the newspaper Liberation reports.

He did not realise that it sounds like Omar, the first name of the Mullah who led the Taleban and is now on the run.

hey!

they let him go

The French reporter Alexandre Jordanov, taken hostage south of Baghdad on Sunday, has been released.

Anti-Semitism at the lycée Montaigne

The headmaster at one of the trendiest schools on the planet goes nuts:

"Interrogating 11 year-old students in the absence of their parents, including during class and recess times, threatening them with police action in order to obtain confessions, lying to them by promising to withdraw complaints he could not withdraw, are all methods that the members of the committee find unacceptable, especially in the educational setting," scolds the Human Rights League. Fifteen teachers informed the headmaster of their objections, as did [teachers' union] SNES.

Continue reading "Anti-Semitism at the Lycée Montaigne"

Like it is...

Window in Lebanon has been doing some great blogging recently. Take to-day's post on Orientialism: for instance:

Though rather typical of the way France's salon thinkers think, the analysis entitled Saddam, come back! and published in to-day's Libération is curious to say the least. In this pamphlet, which I presume is written for provocation, Barthélémy Courmont, a researcher at IRIS (Foreign and Strategic Relations Institute) explains that, "as was foreseable, the capture of Saddam Hussein has solved nothing. Worse yet, it may have durably worsened the security situation." Further on, he writes more to the glory of the one he calls the Reïs, a western way of demonstrating his knowledge of Arabic (reïs means leader in Arabic):

The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was entirely damnable. Entirely? Not necessarily. The Ba'th party, guarantor of the secularism and unity (albeit by force) a diverse nation, like the many that Western nations have successfully built, progressively made Iraq into a rogue state, but a state nevertheless. The villain was in power but it was possible to contain him when he got too big, particularly over the Kuwait border: our leaders could sleep with an easy conscience. However, the current situation has plunged the region into a chaos for which no response seems fitting.

It's not easy to realize that some do not want to understand anything and learn nothing with time. One the one hand, the Americans have been waging war the same way for centuries and they must now face problems that are unworthy of their military capacity; on the other, the Europeans like their dictators very well because they're reassuring. And because they've taken the time to learn the dictators' names. And the Arabic surnames one uses in salons, before adding, "I've spent two days in Iraq and I can tell you it was foreseable, the capture of Saddam Hussein would solve nothing..."

Massive Scandal on Horizon

Writing in Insight mag, Conservative reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman, author of the screed The French Betrayal of America, claims to have a scoop:

Among the revelations at the April 22 hearings [in Congress], Insight has learned from investigators directly working on the case, will be new details of oil vouchers allegedly granted to Patrick Maugein, a prominent crony of French President Jacques Chirac, said to total 72.2 million barrels.

Maugein's involvement in the U.N.-approved oil deals is significant, investigators say, because he is believed to be a conduit for backdoor payments to Chirac and his family. It was Chirac who spearheaded a worldwide coalition last year that opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and tried desperately to keep Saddam in power.

When the allegations of backdoor payments first surfaced in a Paris courtroom in 1998, Maugein swept them aside as "pure fantasy." And in a statement provided to Insight, he denies having raised funds for Chirac, his family or his political campaigns. But as more evidence begins to leak from the archives of Saddam's former oil ministry, such denials may become harder to sustain.

The vouchers were assigned to two trading companies, identified in the Iraqi documents as Trafigura and Ibex, both of which were involved in the Essex incident. Investigators say they believe both companies are tied to Maugein, either through beneficial ownership or contractual arrangement. Vouchers for an additional 11 million barrels were granted to Maugein business partner Cabecadas Rul de Soussa, according to the original Al-Mada list. The ties between de Soussa and Maugein were first revealed by Therese Raphael of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Hat tip: Mårten (emphasis added)

Rwanda Revisited II: the Black Box

French troops (right) and Hutu militiamen

"Now that the Tutsi girls are all dead, it's your chance." — RTLM radio advising Hutu women to gussy themselves up for French troops.

Apologies for not getting to this second installment sooner. This is a large and demanding subject so it's tough to find enough free time to put it all together. Also, our friends at blogger had an emotional episode yesterday and I couldn't post.

On Wednesday, I wrote that I would try to put all the latest developments "in one place." I failed miserably, as the length of this followup shows.

Summary of the previous post on this matter: Following the publication last March of excerpts from the final report of an investigation by the anti-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, well-placed witnesses are now openly stating that Rwandan president Kagame (whose racial views they say discounted the humanity of Rwandan Tutsis — who, unlike himself, had remained in the country after 1959), actively sought to provoke the genocide for his own political gain. Furthermore, the report has badly embarrassed Kofi Annan and called into question his competence during his time as head of UN peacekeeping operations (March 1993 - December 1996) — a failure he now regrets — by unearthing the presence at UN headquarters in New York of the cockpit voice recorder that came from former Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana's plane, which was shot down in the hours that preceded the start of the genocide, an act widely viewed as the genocide's precipitating event. The CVR had sat unnoticed for ten years but was "miraculously" discovered within 48 hours of Le Monde's revelations. Annan has expressed astonishment at the find and claims that he actively participated with Bruguière's investigation though Bruguière's assistants assert that the opposite is true. Furthermore, the report brings to light the fact that both the UN and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda failed to investigate, going even so far in some instances as to take investigators off the case and bury an official report on atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the leader of which, Paul Kagame, is now president of Rwanda. Annan also refused to testify before a Belgian fact-finding mission and refused to allow General Roméo Dallaire, leader of UNAMIR, to do so either. Annan wrote that UN officials have "immunity from legal process in respect of their official acts." Kagame has attempted to divert attention from the Bruguière's findings by accusing France of direct and indirect complicity in the genocide. That France bears a very serious share of responsibility for what happened in those months is not in doubt. A fact-finding mission by the French parliament arrived at very damning conclusions and a book on the matter has just been published that essentially corroborates Kagame's accusations. Nevertheless, this does not alter the significance that Bruguière's findings have in relation to the nature of the man who is now leading the Rwandan government. Rather than a leader seeking to heal his country, the report suggests that its current president actively tried to provoke Africa's greatest ever genocide. It will also color public views of Rwanda's participation in the conflict in neighboring Congo, where local journalists accuse Rwanda of having plundered natural resources to spend the proceeds on the lush redevelopment of Kigali where, among other grand buildings, a five star hotel has been completed that charges prices few Rwandans, many of whom are struggling to eke out a living from farming, could ever afford. Furthermore, it makes the current Belgian government appear rather novice: in his eagerness to demonstrate Belgium's newfound repentance and virtue, prime minister Verhofstadt may have rushed into a situation the cynical reality of which escaped him. When Le Monde published Bruiguière's findings, Kagame was on official visit to Belgium, meeting with Verhofstadt and King Albert II. Neither of them can have been too pleased to appear at joint press conferences with a guest who faced questions of this nature. New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch's outraged book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families also relied heavily on accounts provided by Kagame, making Gourevitch appear somewhat credulous in retrospect.

Last Thursday, Rwandan authorities held ceremonies in Kigali to mark the tenth anniversary of the genocide.

As part of a week long commemoration of the genocide, President Kagame spoke to a crowd of 65,000 inside the Amahoro ("peace" in kinyarwanda) national football stadium. The Belgian government has built a national memorial on a Kigali hilltop where survivors gathered on the 7th to bury 20 coffins holding the remains of hundreds of victims recently excavated from mass graves. Kagame then lit a flame that will burn for 100 days (the duration of the genocide) outside the newly built Kigali National Memorial Center.

The commemorations started with burial ceremony. Survivors draped in violet, the Rwandan color of mourning, sang in memory of the dead while their remains were lowered into the gigantic crypts of the memorial. Sobbing became increasingly audible in the stadium.

In the middle the packed crowd, someone shouted. "It was our neighbors. They killed us! They killed us all!" A woman overcome with emotion attempted to hurl herself down the steps and rows of chairs collapsed. She was removed with some difficulty. Similar dramas broke out in the stadium. "Who among us didn't shudder on hearing the cry that pierced our assembly?" asked African Unity president Alpha Oumar Konaré.

EU representative Brian Cowen, who is Irish minister for Foreign Affairs, was present at the ceremonies as was Belgian prime minister Verhofstadt and his 200 person retinue. "We failed in our most basic duty," said Verhofstadt. "Our duty of intervention and humanity."

Though he had been invited by Rwandan authorities, French undersecretary for foreign affairs Renaud Muselier decided to cut his trip short following president Kagame's accusations of complicity in the genocide.

Rwandan President Kagamé took the opportunity to berate France yet again: "they knowingly trained and armed the soldiers and militias who were to commit a genocide and they knew they were going to commit this genocide," he said. "The French deliberately saved the killers without protecting the victims." Most explosively, Kagamé also claimed that, during a Paris visit two years before the genocide, when his rebel forces were advancing on Rwanda, he was warned that, if his forces didn't stop their advance, "they wouldn't find any more of their own kind when the got to Kigali." The French "have the audacity to stand there without apologizing," he said.

On Thursday morning, French president Chirac observed a moment of silence for the victims. But following Kagamé's remarks at the ceremony, the MFA released the following statement: "Accusations that are both grave and unfounded have been leveled against France. This is why the decision has been made to shorten the Foreign Affairs undersecretary's stay in Kigali."

And fast and furious developments are continuously arising. The Rwandan government is now fixing the number of people killed, and whose names and places of death have been identified, at 937,000.

This month, British author Linda Melvern published a book that contains information from a transcript of the interrogation of former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda, currently serving a life sentence for genocide. The BBC is reporting that a ICTR prosecutor Barbara Mulvaney flew to London to question Melvern about how she obtained the transcript (Melvern declined to reveal this, of course).

The BBC say that Kambanda's testimony "goes into remarkable detail" about how the genocide was organized. Some remarkable detail:

Interrogator: "Did any Tutsi complain to you?
Kambanda: "I did not have any."
"You did not have any. Do you have any information about what happened to the people whose ethnic origin was Tutsi?"
"They killed them."
"They killed them?"
"They killed them."
"It was the norm, wasn't it? They looted the Hutu and killed the Tutsi?"
"Yes."

The genocide was anything but a spontaneous explosion of violence, as many have long assumed, but rather an operation orchestrated by Hutu extremists from Rwanda's north attempting to maintain their hold on power. Melvern uses this and other documents to demonstrate the meticulous premeditation of the killing, revealing, for instance, Kambanda's testimony on cabinet-level discussions about the genocide. She also reveals that the Rwandan government imported $750,000 worth of Chinese machetes (enough to arm one in every three Rwanda men). Mulvern also discusses arms imports from France and Egypt shortly before the genocide and offers an "insider's account of the roadblocks where so many Tutsi lost their lives." Many of the road blocks were manned by French troops.

However, these revelations merely confirm what has long been known: the UN received a telegram on January 11, 1994 from its local force commander Roméo Dallaire who has since published a book on "the failure of Humanity in Rwanda." Dallaire sought protection for the wife and family of an informant, as well as the informant himself, who told Dallaire of Hutu plans for the Tutsi genocide and of the location of interahamwe arms caches. The informant revealed that all Tutsi in Kigali had been registered by the government and that Interahamwe personnel could kill 1,000 in as little as twenty minutes. Kofi Annan replied the same day telling Dallaire to inform president Habyarimana of the informant's statements — though the president's men were the ones they implicated.

Last february and March, filmmaker Georges Kapler filmed interviews with three Interahamwe militiamen which he presented in Paris. The three men say they were "trained and assisted" by France and one of them, Jean-Bosco Halimana, says that "the French gave us a license to kill. They came to support the genocide in a clear and visible manner."

Continue reading "Rwanda Revisited II: the Black Box"...

Smoke gets in your eyes

Rémy Ourdan continues his passage through Baghdad's wistful thinking classes with this report on an aging, chronically depressed Baghdadi pianist who's now planning to emigrate to the US. Samir Peter plays Gershwin for Americans and Brel for the French. He is currently being followed around by BBC documentary filmmaker Sean McAllister. Peter is also old enough to remember the glittering 1960s Baghdad under president Abd al-Salam Aref (1963-1968): "It was fabulous. There were cabarets. The Moulin rouge, The Embassy. Some staged revues from Paris and Las Vegas with their splendid nude dancers. Baghdadi couples went to see them. You could invite your fiancée. When I see Baghdad to-day, these ignorant types and veiled girls..."

Though he may be melancholy and particularly unhappy with the present state of Iraq, Peter says he is "delighted" with the fall of Saddam which is the "most important part" of this American episode. Ourdan reproduces generous portions of Peter's statements about Saddam:

This man was the nightmare of an entire people. He insulted, raped and martyred our country. He killed. He rewrote history. He tried to teach us to love war. He taught our children to hate others and to hate art. He taught them to live only by his so-called "values," those of a pathetic dope and a criminal. ... Saddam became president of Iraq by killing all his friends and then he immediately launched a war. This man worshiped the idea of war. You could read the joy and excitement in his eyes when he brandished a rifle. I was able to avoid the call-up for a long time because I taught at the music school. But, one morning, when I was returning from a party, still drunk, three men knocked on my door. They took me away and forced me to sign a document stating that I was a "volunteer" to fight Iran. After two weeks of training at shooting a Kalashnikov, I found myself on the front, in a trench near Basra.

"We were board stiff in the trenches. So I spent my time sharpening a hunting knife that I'd brought with me, a knife that over the days became sharper than a razor. One night, I was on guard duty. I was thinking about my lot, me, the music professor, the resident pianist for the Sheraton hotel chain, who now found himself in the mud. I was sad. I fell asleep. I had a dream, a nightmare, in which Jesus came toward me. I woke with a start. The moon was shining. I saw some Iranians who must have snuck in through the no man's land while I was asleep, at the end of the trench. I wanted to grab my rifle but it had disappeared in the mud. I grabbed my knife and stood facing them, shouting like a madman. One of them ran off. The other jumped on me. We fought. I ended up finding his throat. I slit it. His blood squirted out on my face. Then he agonized, coughing with a hoarse breath.

Ourdan writes: "Samir is haunted by the face of this Iranian fighter, 'a handsome youth, with a well-trimmed beard.' He will never forgive Saddam Hussein for having made him into a man capable of killing another, even if during an honorable battle. 'I was demobilized soon afterward. A bullet had hit me in the face. And I've been trying to leave Iraq ever since I got back.'" But Peter's luck has been rotten.

I was supposed to get my first American visa in 1990: Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then, two of my daughters married Americans of Iraqi origin in Jordan but, every time I planned to leave, there was a problem. Their mother, my ex-wife, went to live in the United States, but not me. After each marriage, I was interrogated by the secret police when I returned to Baghdad. Why were my daughters marrying Americans? Was I a CIA spy? I was supposed to get my second American visa in 2001: I arrived at the American embassy in Jordan the day after September 11. All the visas were canceled: thanks, bin Laden. That time, I was detained and tortured for 12 days when I got back to Baghdad...

Since he couldn't get out, Peter lived through the two American wars.

I was terrified, especially during the first war. I'll always remember the first night. The planes arrived. I can still hear the sound of these planes. I was very scared but I didn't want my wife to know. And then, boom! The bombs. My wife, who is very pious, prayed the whole night. But I sat on the bed and drank and drank and drank. During the weeks of the American bombing, I think I drank at least 200 bottles of whisky and wine... Then, during the last war, I switched to Valium and whisky, too. The worst part was the ground war, the entrance of the American army into Baghdad. The tanks came, the machine gunners shot up houses, cars, passersby. I was surprised, while taking a bath, by a shell that fell on the roof of my house. There was shooting everywhere. I stayed lying on the bathroom floor for seven hours, naked, wrapped in a towel. I really thought my heart might give out... At last, I rejoiced: it was the end of Saddam. The end of Saddam!

In a few days, Peter is to receive one of his daughters and his American grandchildren who have never seen the land of their origins. Peter is overjoyed that they are coming but worries about leaving behind two other children, a son and a daughter who plan to join him in San Diego.

Their arrival worries me. Right now, Baghdad is only violence, kidnapping and banditry. I tried to dissuade them from making this trip but my daughter wants her children to see Iraq at least once in their lives. ... How is America? Do you think a 55 year-old Iraqi pianist has any chance of finding work? Of success? ... I gave the scores for all these ballads to the women I wrote them for but I think I remember almost all of them. Maybe I could record an album? Or a Jazz album? Or be an actor in Hollywood?

Peter had two names at the music school, "the skirt chaser," given him by the ballet teacher, and "Tom Cruise," because of the tinted aviator sunglasses that he's never without. Ourdan writes:

In the evenings, Samir Peter often disappears into a long silence. An abyss of silence. Who or what is he thinking of? Of Saddam, the Iranian soldier, of the women loved and lost? Of this moth-eaten corner cubbyhole that the al-Hamra hotel gives him and where he spends his cavernous nights? He says simply, with a very solemn air, that he's doing "very, very badly."

Then, a pretty foreign women appears at the corner of the stair case. So his eye perks up. Then, a glass of wine in his hand, a cigarette stuck between his lips, he gets back behind his piano. He plays. He sings. "Because of you... there's a song in my heart...." A song in his heart, Samir forgets everything. He forgets Saddam and the Iranian soldier. He forgets the past and the future, when he has a piano and a woman.

The Proper Perspective

Over at LOTF, I posted a translation of the latest Baghdad dispatch from Le Monde's Rémy Ourdan. You'll remember the astonishment that accompanied another of his recent articles.

I get the feeling Ourdan may be undergoing something of a transformation. This article is even less equivocal in transcribing Baghdadi feelings about the fall of Saddam. And given the current strife, it makes for a somewhat nourishing read:

"When I look at all these faces in my photographs after I've got home, I realize that something has changed..." He looks around the room, all the men sitting on benches, discussing, complaining, laughing.

"The difference is joy," says Nahid. "Before the faces were closed and sad ; today they are open and joyous." The funniest part is that even those who can't stop cursing and predicting a "catastrophe," those who say "it was better before," reveal in Najid's photos a shining face that they did not show a year ago.

"Every Friday, it's a shouting match. Conversations among friends are at once greater and more difficult than before. We've lost our only common ground: life under the dictatorship," says Zuher Radwan. A political analyst and literary critic of Palestinian origin, Zuher, though an Arab nationalist opposed to the United States, admitted in 2003 that he wanted war. "I was right," he said. "The change is wonderful. It was well worth a war..." And Zuher repeats the argument of all his fellow Iraqis who favored the American intervention. "Alone, the Iraqis would never have been able to topple Saddam Hussein."

This makes me think of reconsidering my post below on having the jitters. If a Palestinian pan-Arabist in Baghdad finds it so easy to be optimistic, even in this climate, should I lose heart so soon?

Panic on the streets of...

According to the BBC, this evening the CIA warned French authorities of a bomb threat with actionable details: the Company understood an attack might occur between 7:30 and 8:30 pm. French authorities halted traffic on the RER A (red) line and cleared a few stations, stranding 40 - 50,000 passagers. The alert was lifted and traffic normal circulation has resumed. The tip reportedly came from a "Spanish CIA agent" who transmitted this information to the DST.

Moment of Truth

In addition to this ghastly development, any number of horror stories and nightmares are playing themselves out in Iraq. We haven't had much to say about this and perhaps with good reason. My guarded optimism is growing decidedly more defensive.

I'd be lying if I said I couldn't hear my knees knocking together but, as Andrew Sullivan said, "the reality is so opaque and events so fluid that it's hard to know what to say." The only reaction I feel confident in expressing at the moment is that we cannot escape our problems: we must face them. It may sting now, but not half so much as it will if we withdraw. The priceless Shia Pundit comments: "There is a point at which we will unambiguously have fallen from the grace of our own self-interest, let alone Iraq's (however the two are bound). Muqtada Sadr has taken refuge in Najaf today and he will do his utmost to try and make us cross that line."

Keep your fingers crossed for the Arba'in on Sunday: let's hope it's less bloody than the Ashura. Remember Democracy, Whisky, Sexy? Seems far off now. Spencer Ackerman quotes the LA Times as having reported the following:

Some Najaf residents expressed disgust at Sadr's battle with the U.S. "We can hardly believe that we finally got rid of Saddam after 35 years and could start a new life, and now with this new crisis of Moqtada, everything that we have tried to build is collapsing," said Abu Mustapha, an agricultural engineer.

If you're looking for some good news, that dear soul AYS tells us that

some districts here in Basra came to a great idea, the Sheiks of many tribes held a meeting and decided to sign on papers promising that any person dares to breach the peace in their areas will be arrested or killed immediately and no one will protect him even if he was one of their tribes.. this meeting relieved the people so much…

Rwanda Revisted

Stephen Smith

This post should have come much earlier and for that I'm sorry. I meant to get to it last night but life prevented this.

Tonight, Erik flew in from Paris for a stopover on his way to Texas where he's pursuing a research project and he, Jonathan and I met at the Cedar Tavern for a — hic! — ¡No Pasarán! brain storming session. Now I'm home again and have had a moment to work on this post.

Today marks tenth anniversary of the first full day of slaughter in the Rwandan genocide. There have been a number of astounding revelations about French and Rwandan rebel involvement in the genocide. To cover them, Le Monde let loose its Africa specialist, Connecticut-born reporter Stephen Smith (above right). In a matter of days, his reporting set off a chain of international events and discoveries that have profoundly altered the state of public knowledge on the genocide and I thought I'd do the world a favor by putting them all in one place.

The world already knows that, since 1959, Rwanda's Tutsi minority had been the subject of periodic pogroms on the part of the country's Hutu majority. On 04.06.94, the private jet belonging to then Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, a Falcon 50, was shot down, touching off in a matter of hours the most intense genocide ever recorded: almost a million people were killed in 100 days.



Recent developments began on March 9 when Le Monde published excerpts of the final 220-page report by the crusading anti-terror investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière following his six-year investigation in the airplane crash of Habyarimana's plane at the request of French nationals also killed in the crash. A firestorm of recrimination and scandal has followed the publication of this article.

Bruguière's report names former rebel leader and current Rwandan president Paul Kagamé is the main organizer of the attack and puts him at the top of a list of high-ranking rebel accomplices, members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).

Bruguière's investigation collected hundreds of accounts, filed dozens of letters rogatory, required numerous missions abroad in collaboration with other investigators and included testimony from anonymous FPR dissidents under witness protection, of which one was a member of the "network commando," a clandestine group allegedly under Kagamé's direct control and allegedly responsible for carrying out the assassination.

This witness explained a hypothesis according to which Tutsi rebels sacrificed Rwanda's "interior Tutsis" (Tutsis who remained in Rwanda following the end of minority Tutsi rule in 1959) by provoking the Hutu into killing them so that the rebels could exploit the situation by seizing power: "Paul Kagamé had little care for the interior Tutsis who were almost assimilated to the Hutu in his eyes," says captain Abdul Ruzibiza. "The interior Tutsis were potential enemies that had to be eliminated, just like the Hutus, in order to take power, Paul Kagamé's main objective." Though under protection, Le Monde's sources claim Ruzibiza has received death threats.

Continuing Reading "Rwanda Revisited"...

Our, No, Their Man in Port-au-Prince

In its editorial on the drug antics of Haiti's former president (Aristide the Godfather), Le Monde cannot resist taking a potshot at Uncle Sam.

For a long time, the United States closed its eyes, showing consideration for he who had become its man in Port-au-Prince.

I have nothing against detractors taking on Washington. However, you might expect the critics to show some consistency rather than double standards. You wouldn't guess it from this extract, but the policies of both America and France are described extensively in the editorial. Yet, America alone bears the brunt of the paper's finger-wagging and head-shaking.

Given the French tendency to always laud the ties between France and the francophone countries, isn't it kind of odd that les Français should not make more out of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's ties to Paris? And concerning the cynical "our men in (place)" observation, isn't it strange, also, that the newspaper of reference should adopt a much softer attitude (not to call it entirely conciliatory towards the powers that be in Paris) about, say, France's man in Ivory Coast. (Not to speak of this fellow.)

Free-Marketers Enter Raffarin Government

According to Le Monde's Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon, a number of free-marketers in the Alain Madelin vein have entered the new government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. (In France, "libéral" means exactly the opposite of "liberal" in the U.S.)

antifascisme oblige

Some time ago, the great Norm pointed out that the higest ranked page on Google under the search "Jew" is an anti-Semitic site. At his suggestion, we are — albeit belatedly — posting a link to another page related to Jews in order to bring this one up to first place (currently 3rd).

Norm is periodically updating his list of "jooglers."

On another note: stay tuned to-night for a post on the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide: a round up of lots of information relative to France.

Reform Is Perceived as a Universal Threat in France

John Vinocur is back for the second installment of his new Politicus column in the International Herald Tribune. He writes that France and Germany find reform doesn't get any easier.

Is it possible for France and Germany to reform — despite the word's new certification as both terrifying and a vote-loser — and stop what is seen in some places as their decline as poles of allegiance and emulation in Europe?

The presumptive answer is mostly yes, say the countries' most aggressive heralds of decline, depending on the price in comfort the two societies and their politicians are willing to pay. But as President Jacques Chirac of France acknowledged last week (he could have been speaking for Germany, too), a national undertaking that requires leaving a cozy, risk-averse, statist couch for a more open, more competitive, more growth-oriented world is a very awkward business.

In Chirac's case, this statement followed a sharp defeat in regional elections that was mostly a protest vote against his government's tentative jabs at reducing the enormous cost of the French public sector's overhead. …

All [that is proposed under the r-word] is far, very far, from the kind of grand, bold politics and dramatic change that is being demanded by the German and French critics who describe their countries as being locked in decline.

This week, the fastest-rising book on the main German nonfiction best-seller list, at No. 5, is called, in rough translation, Germany, the Decline of a Superstar [by] Gabor Steingart … It follows a spate of books in France last fall that focused on the argument that the country was a diminishing force in Europe. Now, Nicolas Baverez, the author of the most notable of the French books, France in Free Fall, has returned to his theme with new intensity in two major articles …

Baverez (La France qui Tombe), an economist, historian and lawyer, who is sometimes described as a French nationalist, attacked Chirac in time for the elections for avoiding the most urgent reforms, and in a long, separate article in the current issue of the review Commentaire said the failure of the French-German couple signified the eventual "takeover" of the EU by Britain.

Baverez believes Germany's situation is a more positive one than that of France, an idea that Steingart — who has not read Baverez — shares to the extent he thinks the critical role of the press in Germany is far stronger.

The essence of France's current negative exceptionalism, Baverez contended in a recent telephone conversation, was in its homogeneity. That meant "a political class, left or right, that is completely fused with the highest level of the bureaucratic establishment. It's a total monopoly and it extends to culture and the media."

Extrapolating from Baverez's view, this signified that most change in France was perceived as a universal and indiscriminate threat because virtually everyone's self-interest, through unions, state benefits and the vast public sector, was wired into the system. …

And that, malheureusement, includes the nominatively independent press.

Le Monde to Viggo: Make No More Films in the Arabian Desert (Unless It Is an Anti-Bush Political Statement)

Did I leave anything out? The French just can't keep themselves from giving other nationals lessons, especially Americans. Even in their film reviews, they have to vent their sourness. Reviewing Hidalgo for Le Monde, Florence Colombani (who is she? Jean-Marie's daughter? the newspaper director's wife?) writes:

Cruelly deprived of any political message, but filled with clichés (the taste of liberty for the American, perseverance and cunning for the Arabs), Joe Johnston's film would probably have benefitted, in the current context, from taking place in another region of the world.

Excuse me? Hollywood should refrain from making movies in (or concerning) the Middle East? Until the last G.I. leaves Iraq? (I suppose because every American citizen should feel a black veil of shame over his or her shoulders? At least until someone lording over them naturally — like Florence Colombani — tells them they have been punished enough and it's alright to lift their heads again.) And Viggo Mortensen and Omar Sharif should refuse to accept a role unless it is to make a political message? Really? Do we have enough things under Florence's control yet?

What should the political message have been? I wonder? Oh yes, I get it. The American should have been ashamed of his country and leadership, while someone like a Le Monde journalist or intern should have dazzled everybody with her humanitarianism, her lucidity, her militancy, and her boundless love for equality and human rights. Wow. I can't wait to read the screenplay.

Lire la version française

Desde la caverna neoliberal

A warm welcome to readers from la caverna neoliberal, especially to the reader who thinks that the image of Che in our banner is 'cojonuda.' Just a note: s/he says: Me la voy a guardar para ponerla de firma en mis correos adoctrinantes. If you do, please include a link to our blog, muchas gracias.

wtf?

kind of an AFP bulletin is this?

Bourse-Ams Don't be left out From Elinor Cabrera 'VSCUESINUN@aol.com' To Lima 'lima@afp.com' An associate of yours has set
AFP | 05.04.04 | 19h01


you up on a romantic appointment with someone. Click here to accept the invitation: ].ª¹gain de 0,9% à 23,85 €.La compagnie aérienne KLM, qui a annoncé des chiffres de trafic positifs pour mars, a clôturé en progression de 2,7% à 17,45 €. L'offre publique d'échange d'Air France sur KLM s'est ouverte ce lundi.

Who to Blame in the Haiti crisis?

Les Américains, bien sûr! (Why do you even bother to ask?) Underneath his How Jean-Bertrand Aristide presided over Haiti's drug traffic, Jean-Michel Caroit has a box entitled In Port-au-Prince, "everybody knew" (scroll to bottom) and ending with what seems to be his answer to the frank speech of a former American ambassador (bold letters throughout in the print version). Good thing, by the way, that French journalists know they're not supposed to allow American officials to get away with any comment, without adding some sort of wry commentary. They didn't do this for Saddam and his henchmen in Iraq, of course, but that's unimportant.

"'Everybody knew about it', a diplomat confirms. Everybody, and first among them, the Americans. Why didn't they use this case against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as they did against Manuel Noriega, the former Panamian president rotting in a Miami prison since 1989?"

Far more important than Haiti's drug trafficking, or its poverty, or any of its other crises, therefore, is the fact that Uncle Sam is greedy, treacherous, hypocritical. Not only in relation to the Caribbean (and Iraq!) today, but also to Central America 15 years ago. Poor Aristide. Poor Noriega. Poor Saddam. Done in by America's greed, treachery, and hypocrisy. Wow. That's good to know. Thanks for telling us that, Le Monde. Again.

A homogeneous European press

An unexpected event has taken place in the European media: Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, the highly influential Paris weekly, rebuked his colleagues for the manner in which they cover suicide terrorism. "All of the media outlets in France, and there are many, condemn terror and extremist fundamentalism, but the same media report on events in the Middle East with emphases that can only arouse in the reader a forgiving attitude toward terror," he wrote. "The Palestinian case is always presented as motivating - suicide attacks carried out by Palestinian martyrs - and the bloodshed is always depicted as the consequence of Israeli colonialism. This generates a forgiving attitude toward violence. We must end this." — Amnon Rubinstein in Ha'aretz (via Gene, of the excellent Harry's Place)

Le Monde Admits Bush Did Not Lie About WMD...

…and…

…promptly buries the story at the bottom of page 32!

And no wonder: the gist of the article shatters the entire controversy that has been damaging George W. Bush and Tony Blair with regards to their alleged lies when they mentioned Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as a reason for attacking the butcher's régime.

More…

Sheikh Yassin, False Martyr, Real Malefactor, by Pascal Bruckner, Iannis Iannanakis and Michèle Tribalat

LE MONDE | 03.04.04 | 15:23  •  UPDATED 03.04.04 | 19:56

While our president was at the sides of Madrid's victims at a solemn gathering, how were we to understand why his representative at the United Nations Security Council was authorized to vote for a resolution proposed the next day to condemn the assassination of sheikh Yassin by Israel? One might have thought, after Madrid, that Europe would grasp the scale of the terrorist war declared on September 11, 2001.

However, far from leading to an awakening of the conscience, this event reassured our diplomats in the conviction that this act of terrorism visited on the one of the pillars of the American coalition was the inevitable sanctioning of an unjust war.

The doubled contempt of Europe that refuses to see this as a new provocation of democracies, whichever they may be, and that commits the same error as George W. Bush in linking terrorism to Iraq. Thus the victim is once more responsible for his lot: the West is necessarily guilty and, convinced of being so, deserved it!

The death of a terrorist leader who called for the murder of "the Jews," who manipulated a national struggle (itself legitimate), who, without the least moral objection, urged his own children to commit suicide in order to kill other children and who diverted charitable donations to fund his all out war, has been transformed in official European parlance into an "unacceptable and unjustified" (Jack Straw) murder of a spiritual leader of a movement some described as "political." Miguel Angel Moratinos, the future head of Spanish diplomacy, said that, at this rate, "there will be no more Palestinian interlocutors."

Did Sheikh Yassin — the charter of whose movement calls for the "total destruction of the Zionist entity" and not for a simple retreat to the 1967 borders — ever participate in a single negotiation? Do we in Europe desire a democratic Palestinian state or an Islamic republic from the river Jordan to the sea? One can wonder with good reason about the European goal of a pacified Middle East. In the heaven of "spiritual leaders," can one believe that the "paraplegic old man" will join the ranks of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King? He will rather go to his strange heaven, that of the shahid, those "phony matyrs" that he armed spiritually...

It is striking and worrisome to observe that in Europe compassion for victims, fed by post-colonial guilt, has lead to an equalizing martyrology that, in the same sincere lamentations, confuses the victims and their murderers. A few exceptions are nevertheless noteworthy: tears dry up for the Israeli victims, the soldierly American woman or her Iraqi "collaborators"...

In his time, Spinoza enlightened us about the perverse duo, remorse and resentment. The Islamists have succeeded in deriving political and cultural gains from the European propensity to self indictment. Convinced that it must make amends for a mistake, Europe turns the other cheek. It does not see that such resentment has only fed hatred for a model of society — albeit imperfect — in which freedom and equality among citizens are established. This declaration, death to its essence, has not been heard, and we can even fear that, the more it is struck, the more Europe will be convinced that it's its own fault.

This is why Europe must "attack the roots of Evil" that are "injustice, resentment and frustration" (Dominique de Villepin), not combat but "seek to understand" the enemy, for "to understand the other is fundamental" and "the use of force leads nowhere" (Mario Soares). This effort to seek out the rational in criminal deliria continues to obsess Europe despite the lesson of the totalitarianisms taught in its midst.

So what are the foundations of our collective memory? What of history have we retained today to see war criminals portrayed as political actors? Is this to prepare the pacifist public opinions of democracies for a new, bipolar order? Is the contemporary world, united under American ægis, so anathema to us that sharing our planet with a new totalitarianism would be preferable? First the Zhdanov doctrine and nuclear deterrence, then the charia revised and corrected by jihadis and the deterrence of indiscriminate terrorism? But is "peaceful coexistence" with the devout enemies of life desirable?

The insuperable strength of our democratic model is the genuine political power of its public opinion. Citizens have the power and the duty to lead their elected representatives and to take stock of a reality that sometimes eludes diplomats. And when terrorism strikes, in stead of accusing our leaders of being the "real guilty parties," it is urgent that we unite to avert the worst: the collapse of our system under the effect of violent internal and external pressures.

Pascal Bruckner is a writer. Iannis Iannanakis is a political scientist and Michèle Tribalat is a demographer.

• ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 04.04.04 EDITION