Vinocur III: Zapatero's Rewards for Rejoining "the Community of the Just" Are Hardly of the Earthly Kind

I remember very clearly what a Spanish socialist party official said prior to the bombings in Madrid, when it seemed clear that José Maria Aznar would win the Spanish elections. What had Spain gotten from its role alongside Uncle Sam and Britain? Miguel Angel Moratinos (Madrid's future foreign minister) asked rhetorically. His own answer: "We've gotten nothing."

Anytime a national leader follows U.S. policy (whether it's Blair, Berlusconi, or whoever), it seems that opponents always ask what good the nation got out of it, suggesting that whatever the case might be, it is nothing or at least nothing tangible. The implication is that U.S. leaders are a criminal lot, or that their policies are at best misguided, and anybody following them have sold out (hence, the ubiquitous poodle/vassal charge).

As it happens, one country did get something out of its support, and although it may not seem like much, it — along with the simple knowledge of living up to one's obligations to one's friends (i.e., fraternal nations) and being in the right along with them — fills some Danish hearts with pride (albeit of the quiet kind).

What nobody ever seems to ask is what leaders who follow those opposed to Uncle Sam get out of that.

Still, the International Herald Tribune's John Vinocur provides an answer in his weekly Politicus column (which will probably start becoming a mainstay on this weblog).

The detoxed Spain of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, it was pledged, was going to rush back into the family-like warmth of the European Union, and rush home its troops from Iraq. In a whoosh, it would rejoin the community of the just, and end what the new Socialist government called the country's miscast role as superpower-adjunct of the Americans.

Promise keepers, the new guys did what they said they would in their first full week on the job. For which they got something short of an international standing ovation.

The big hello from Europe on Thursday in Luxembourg was an EU decision that overrode the self-characterized Good Spain's vote in favor of subsidies and blocked scores of millions of euros in potential payments to support Spanish production of cotton, tobacco and olive oil.

The big embrace from the forces of global moral leadership was mostly silence — and a statement from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace saying it did not share the thinking behind the new Spanish government's decision to begin immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.

The big show of understanding and solidarity from John Kerry, the man Zapatero said he would go to America to campaign for, was a comment marking disapproval of the pullout and noting that European countries with a view on Iraq needed to share in the risks and burdens of its stabilization. For good measure, if the difference between U.S. Democrats and Zapatero Socialists wasn't clear, the Democratic candidate for president described Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders as justified.

Beyond Spain's borders, for all the government's rhetoric and its lionizing by Spain's leftist press, there was no novice's state-of-grace for Zapatero. Instead, his government learned of its non-hero status in cash-conscious EU give-and-take, and seemed at least to some to fall over itself in haste to get out of Iraq before the United Nations might complicate its cover story for not staying.

Interestingly, it fell to the Vatican to point out first in Europe one of the troubling things about Zapatero's withdrawal. While Germany, which clearly did not approve, chose the coldness of declining to speak to the issue at all, Renato Cardinal Martino, president of the peace council, commented, "The new Spanish government is trying to keep its electoral promises, but there's a time for fulfilling them."

No stooge of the Americans, having accused them of humiliating treatment of Saddam Hussein after his capture, the cardinal insisted that leaving Iraq implied abandoning it to civil war, and possibly to an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Then he stuck the needle in. He said, "It isn't wise to rush the United Nations, knowing that it won't assume its responsibilities for the Iraqi situation before June 30."

That appeared to be exactly the Zapatero government's problem. A diplomat who served for four years in Spain said that it appeared the UN Security Council would pass an enabling resolution, that it would get a key role in Iraq, and that Spain saw an onrushing embarrassment in the new circumstances because they resemble those Zapatero set out for his troops to stay on — UN political and security control of Iraq after June 30.

Indeed, Zapatero's pullout announcement came on April 18, a Sunday. Two days before, the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, had unveiled a plan to establish a caretaker government to replace the Iraqi governing council. ...

Although they are no longer talking the same language, Kerry and Zapatero appeared to get snarled in the same predicament: George W. Bush's new willingness to offload large parts of the United States' burdens to the United Nations.

For Kerry, this pre-empted a chunk of his argument that the best means for America to deal with Iraq is through internationalization. For Zapatero, it forced him to keep an election pledge in a way that raised questions about how acute Good Spain's sense of responsibility was going to be as an international grown-up.

As for the Bush Administration, according to another diplomat, it told Zapatero's foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, that the decision to withdraw was a blunder. The language actually may have been harsher. In a dispatch from Washington on Sunday, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, foreign editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote that congressmen he spoke to last week regarded Zapatero as a modern day Neville Chamberlain.

Zapatero, you silly afrancesado. Don't you realize that the reward for being in the ranks of the just is exactly that? Being in the ranks of the just.

There is no reward for following Paris and Berlin. Being
el caniche de Chiraque is reward enough in itself! It is reward enough to know that you are as naturally intelligent, as naturally peaceful, as naturallement solidaire, as naturallement lucide, as naturally humanistic, and as naturally filled with wisdom as the French lovers of peace.

Vinocur II: Danish Leader Feels the Heat

In his Politicus column, the International Herald Tribune's John Vinocur writes about another Bush ally who "simmers in [the] political stew of Iraq", although he doesn't have to bid for a second term until late 2005.

Your poll numbers ain't great. Unemployment is up. Your troops hunker down in Iraq at the edge of harm's way.

You can bring the boys home. You can goose the economy, loosening the cash taps now, paying later. You can blame the classic midterm blahs. You can even fine-tune a safe, vote-getting issue at home, while going the international statesman route (a speech on world affairs plus photo-op'ed consultations with a global big-hitter.

Pick one from column A, another from column B. Or none of the above. Or just soldier on.

To the extent politics can replicate a board game, these are, very schematically, the current circumstances of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark.

Atlanticist, visitor to the Bush White House, first non-Socialist leader of his country in almost a decade, belligerent in Iraq with 510 combat troops, a pocket battleship and submarine in the American-led war effort, Rasmussen, like Tony Blair in Britain or his counterparts in Poland, has hit a rough patch.

Last week, it got choppier with a fired military intelligence officer saying Rasmussen had lied to Parliament about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — a charge denied by the Danish Intelligence Service, which said the prime minister hewed to its analysis of the weapons' probable existence, yet one held up now as government untruthfulness by the opposition Social Democrats. ...

In one sense, and with fairly heavy irony, Rasmussen's visit to [Jacques] Chirac (they could easily have been joined by Gerhard Schröder) served to demonstrate that European political discomfort hardly discriminates these days between supporters and opponents of toppling Saddam. ...

A visitor talking to Rasmussen between lunch and speech provided the stick and the sand. The prime minister was asked if the example of the defeat of José María Aznar in Spain, a like-thinker on Iraq and America's security role, and the victory of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the new Socialist government chief, scared him.

The answer came out slowly, but three times. No, once. Again, no. And once more, as if to dispel any wisp of doubt, even his own.

Elaboration followed in precise, complete sentences. "I think it's of crucial importance to help a new Iraq government in developing a free, modern Iraq," Rasmussen said.

"We shouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of security problems in the short term. We should remind ourselves that there are a lot of extremists groups which are interested in blocking the process leading to democracy. They fear a situation in which Iraq could be a bright example for the Arab people, a bright example of how democracy could flourish in the Middle East."

No flutter here. Rasmussen did not mention Zapatero by name, but emphasized that the only condition attached to the maintenance of the Danish force would be a request as of July 1 from the new Iraqi political authority — not a United Nations-linked element as is the case with Spain.

Now, wouldn't it be interesting if some journalist carried out an investigation to find out exactly in which ways Zapatero has been rewarded for his valiant and heroic efforts to betray American leaders and rejoin what might be called the community of the just?

Update: Denmark Stands Tall and Walks Right

Vinocur I: France and Germany Turning Down the Heat

In a front-page article in the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur notes that

France and Germany have been strikingly discreet about America's new troubles in Iraq, reflecting what appears to be their judgment that the country's instability threatens any positive development in the Middle East over the long term.

"No one has any interest in an American fiasco," the former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, said Friday. That did not take in the schadenfreude of some French and German commentary, but it had the sound of an operative formula to describe a situation in which Washington's misery did not objectively equal Paris' or Berlin's gain.

In attempting to draw closer to the United States over the past months — the Germans actively, with American backing; the French in a less public mode — the two countries set courses for improving trans-Atlantic relations that would be destroyed by Iraq-related ironies or we-told-you-so's from ranking officials.

Besides, the French and Germans shared an absence of alternatives and an element of direct self-interest. With time, France and Germany's attempt to turn Europe against the United States in the run-up to the war has come to be regarded by strategists in both countries' capitals as a tactical mistake that resulted instead in a majority of the 25 European Union countries opposing the French-German drive for European pre-eminence.

In a Europe greatly weakened by its fractures over the war, and frightened now by terrorism on its soil, the error of trying to turn the Americans into the ultimate villains in Iraq while they are still the ultimate guarantors of European security was clearly not one the French and Germans would repeat.

In Germany, where a poll on Thursday found that 53 percent wanted the Americans to pull out of Iraq, the government had a rather different stance. Weeks ago, Defense Minister Peter Struck, in suggesting that a Spanish troop withdrawal would be unwise, said an American pullback would mean total instability.

Since January, while refusing to supply troops for Iraq, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's government has given its approval to the grand lines of a Bush administration initiative for the Greater Middle East, signed a German-American Alliance for the 21st Century that stresses common goals in the region, and, through Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, defined "Jihadist terrorism" as "the new totalitarianism" that constitutes the greatest threat to global security.

In France ... [Jacques] Chirac's opportunities to maneuver were limited. He is hemmed in by the reality that his surge in popularity at home during the 2003 Iraq debate has dissipated into his current grief-filled domestic political situation.

At the same time, he faces a series of encounters with President George W. Bush and other leaders at four major international meetings through the month of June — with sentiment in favor of righting the situation in Iraq unmistakably outweighing interest in doling out blame.

In a sense, Germany and France's options were also limited by the reality that it was no longer possible to justify countering American policy by the selective demonization of the Bush Administration.

Just as John Kerry had called on the new Socialist prime minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to reconsider his pledge to bring Spanish forces home from Iraq, the Democratic candidate's reaction on Thursday to the worsening military situation hardly let Europe off the hook from its faulty presumption that no unified American view existed on Europe's ongoing share of Iraqi responsibilities.

"No European country," said Kerry, "is made safe by a failed Iraq, yet those countries are distinctly absent from the risk bearing."

Perhaps remarkably, some French commentators appeared to be taking the idea to heart that assisting the Americans, however passively, in Iraq is the best alternative to chaos in the Middle East.

Le Figaro, in an editorial, said that since the United States was not going to clear out of Iraq, "France would be well advised to abstain from diplomatically harassing its ally on the question of the handover of power, and to stop continuously referring everything to the United Nations."

Vinocur's article ends with Le Monde's correspondent in Baghdad presenting a revisionist account of where France's excellent view of its own record stops in explaining how Iraq had gotten to where it was.

Without directly touching on it, the report presaged French discretion on America's grief of the moment.

It said: "Iraqis remain exceedingly critical of French policy. Contrary to what Europeans often think, the fact of having opposed the American occupation does absolutely nothing to boost the popularity of Europe or of a given country in Iraq."

"French policy over the past year is severely criticized," the correspondent continued. "It's impossible to find anyone, apart from a few out-of-work Baathist officials, who support the French position over the Iraq crisis."

you're the one for me, fatty

•	Le Monde reported yesterday that a 17 year-old Jew was allegedly assaulted in Sarcelles (Val-d'Oise) on Sunday. At the advice of the mayor's office, the boy's mother filed a complaint at police headquarters for "gang theft with violence and anti-Semitic insults." The events in question reportedly occurred on April 23rd at 7:30 in the evening when a gang of ten allegedly stole the boy's mobile phone/digital camera. On the bus ride home, Maghreban youths insulted ("Dirty Jew, we're gonna kill you") the boy, Alexandre, and held a knife to his stomach, forcing him to exit the bus with them at the next stop. The young boy then called out for help but no one on the 168 bus intervened. Alexandre ran to his aunt's house to take refuge but the group caught up with him outside the building and while some beat him, others rifled through his pockets. He was wounded in the legs, the chest, the neck and the face and has a hematoma on the lips. The mayor, François Pupponi (Socialist), said, "In the last two or three months, we've been noticing tension and an increase in assaults of this kind. We urge [the victims] to press charges." (See here for an account of another anti-Semitic event on the same bus line.)
•	French police raided the workers' council headquarters at France's state electricity company Electricité de France (EDF) today, according to the AFP. Source's say the search was part of an investigation that began in February into alleged embezzlement ("abuse of confidence, fraud, forgery") at the council. EDF controls nearly all of France's electrical supply and its workers council, with 5,000 of EDF's employees, is the wealthiest in the nation, with a budget of €400 million.
•	The French economy grew at a paltry 0.5% in 2003, reports the AP. This surpassed previous forecasts of 0.2%. GDP also expanded by 0.7% in the fourth quarter and the increase in third-quarter GDP figures was revised upwards from 0.4% to 0.7%. These are the weakest growth figures since 1993 and they are far below even those of 2002 (1.2% growth)
•	The AFP is also reporting that a parliamentary office has found that the French populace could reach US levels of obesity by 2020. The report was prepared by senator Claude Saunier for the Parliamentary office of evaluation of scientific and technological options (OPECST). According to Saunier, only 6% of the French populace was obese in 1990. In 2003, the figure was 11.3%. Over the least six years, the number of obese people increased annually by 17%. "We are therefore confronted with a social scourge which we know with certainty will be the cause of a health catastrophe and the financial implosion of national health insurance," said Saunier. "But the progress of this scourge is not inexorable." Saunier says that, at this rate, the French will be as obese as the Americans by 2020 and that this will require expenditures of €14 billion for health insurance alone.

French Chef's Panel Discusses America's 'Food Revolution'

Between April 15 and 21, 2004, culinary leaders of America, France, and the UK came together to celebrate the creativity and influence of American chefs on cuisine, wine, farming, and lifestyle throughout the world.

The United States was already famous for its wines, which have become serious competitors for France

wrote Gilles Brochard three days later in Le Figaro.

These days, the country of fast food announces that la haute gastronomie made in USA exists as well. Five years ago, 80% of the chefs in gastronomic restaurants in the United States were French. Today, 60% are American. ...

Raymond Blanc [the most mediatised French chef and restaurateur in England] has brought together American, English, and French chefs in his Quat'Saisons manor near Oxford to hold debates about the 'American food revolution', along with producers, sociologists, and university professors.

The April 24/25 article, entitled Révolution culinaire aux Etats-Unis, goes on to state that the participants sought to understand what is happening in America, where

a veritable tidewave has started to sweep aside "malbouffe" [junk food], often with the complicity of doctors and nutritionists. This turnabout in consumption, notably with the younger generation, favors a healthier education in the fight against obesity, a scourge which is also hitting Europe.

les gueules noires...

France's last functioning coal mine closed for good last Friday in Lorraine. Long the mainstay of France's Communist Party, the mining industry had been suffering a steep decline for decades.

In 1947, there were 370,000 miners in France. Production peaked at 60 million metric tons in 1958 and declined steadily thereafter. According to the AFP's Franck Iovene, France's first coal mine opened in 1720 and throughout the long history of the industry, its workers were were at the forefront of the struggle for social progress, as was the case in many places. France's first miner's strike in 1884, lead by Emile Basly, was the basis for the novel Germinal by the crusading writer (and one of my personal heros) Emile Zola.

Upon nationalization of the mines after the Liberation, the Communist party gained control over the organization of the mining workforce and coal production became vital to post-war reconstruction.

But the long goodbye started with the arrival of cheap foreign coal and then nuclear power in the 1970s. Recruitment was frozen as early as 1984 and by 2001 there were only 6,823 miners left in France. In 2002, there were just three mines, producing only 1.6 million metric tons at a cost of production far greater than the price of imported coal.

This process concluded last Friday. In a solemn ceremony, the last block of French coal was removed from the La Houve pit at Creutzwald. The ceremony began (see program — PDF; 77k) with the arrival of minister for Industry Patrick Devedjian and the last French miners bid the pit farewell in the presence of their children. Twenty-five hundred guests assembled under a big-top tent and observed a minute of silence in honor of those who had died in the mine. Conspicuously, representatives of the powerful union known as the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) were not asked to speak during the ceremonies.

Hahahaha!

Galloway rolls out barrel (hat tip: Friends of Saddam)

"I've walked about freely in Iraq..."

By MICHAEL MCDONOUGH
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

MANCHESTER, England -- Angry demonstrators emptied a garbage can on the car of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen on Sunday after he spoke in support of the anti-immigration British National Party.

Shouting "Nazi scum, off our streets!" about 100 demonstrators slowed Le Pen's car as he tried to leave a hotel in Altrincham on the outskirts of the northern city of Manchester.

Le Pen, who has been convicted of racism and anti-Semitism at least six times in France, was appearing at two British National Party events Sunday despite some demands that he be barred from the country.

At a news conference in the hotel in Altrincham, the leader of the anti-immigration French National Front party gave his backing to the British party ahead of June elections for the European Parliament.

As Le Pen and BNP chairman Nick Griffin met in a hotel, anti-fascist demonstrators gathered outside, angrily shouting slogans such as "Fascist scum, never again!" "Hitler, Griffin and Le Pen!"

Inside, Le Pen expressed mild surprise at the feeling his visit generated.

"I've walked about freely in Iraq and Turkey, in Malaysia and Indonesia," he said. "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to walk about freely in England."

He said the BNP and his National Front recognized what he said was a threat to Europe from immigration originating in the developing world.

"If this phenomenon is not stopped, our populations will be subjugated," Le Pen said.

When Le Pen's car began to pull away, the demonstrators emptied a large garbage can over the car and kicked and pounded it.

Get Up - Stand Up

The industrious Hak Mao has established a Web page with links and advice, providing information on what you can do to help the forces of progress in Iraq.

Just Noticed

This blog is commemorating the tenth anniversary of each day of the Rwandan genocide. To-day's post on failed peace talks between the RPF and the Rwandan interim government.

Rwanda on their consciences...

When John Lloyd left the New Statesman last April over the Iraq war, he published a final article (excerpted here) entitled "The left has lost the plot" ( — by defending sovereignty in the name of anti-imperialism, opponents of war undermine their claim to champion the oppressed — ). Lloyd mentioned "a Canadian-sponsored report, The Responsibility to Protect" and said it was a "brilliant summation of the arguments for stripping tyrants of sovereign inviolability."

One of the co-chairs of the commission that developed the report was former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, now president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization that seeks "to prevent and resolve deadly conflict."

Along with Stephen Ellis, ICG's Africa director, Evans has just published an essay in Le Monde entitled, "After the Rwanda genocide, memory is not enough."

In future, the international community most be better prepared to respond to such situations when they become explosive. Part of the response consists in dispensing with preconceived notions that have naturally spread far and wide in world where so many have had to fight with every ounce of strength to rid themselves of colonialism. The sovereignty of a state is not a license to kill. It implies a responsibility protect one's own people. Once one deliberately renounces this responsibility or once the state is incapable of exercising it, it becomes part of the larger responsibility of the international community.

The threshold for military intervention must also be raised: loss of human life, real or feared, on a grand scale, large scale ethnic cleansing, real or feared, brought about by forced expulsion or other means. It must always be implemented according to principles that take into account cautious criteria such as well-founded intentions, last resort, proportionate means and a reasonable hope of success during an intervention that will be worth the damage caused.

Focusing the "humanitarian intervention" debate on "the right of intervention," will assure the continuance of the controversy over whether such a right exists. Changing the perspective in favor of that of the victim and pleading in favor of a "responsibility to protect" will create the possibility of a genuine consensus. This may prove to be the most lasting contribution of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, sponsored by the Canadian government, and of which the 2001 report, "The Responsibility to Protect," is gaining ground, slowly but surely.

[...]

A few signs of progress are nevertheless visible. When the UN mission to the Congo had to confront massacres in the city of Ituri, in the east of the country in 2003, France [despite some vexatious snickering] took the lead in an international response by organizing "operation Artemis." This operation secured the city of Bunia and its airport for three months, pending the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force.

[...]

Many nations have Rwanda on their consciences. The path to erasing this stain does not lead through commemorative ceremonies but through effective actions.

Sex Scandal!

Dominique Ambiel, 49, chief spokesman for blowhard prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, was arrested in the presence of a 17 year-old Romanian prostitute in the night of Monday to Tuesday, April 20-21, in the wealthy 17th arrondissement, Le Monde revealed yesterday. He will be tried on 7 June in the 15th Chamber of the Paris correctional court for having "sollicted, accepted or obtained in exchange for payment, relations of a sexual nature from a minor who engages in prostitution, including on an occasional basis," a crime punishable by 3 years in prison and a €45,000 fine, in accordance with article 225-12-1 of the penal code, passed on March 4, 2002, "on resorting to the prostitution of minors or particularly vulnerable persons."

He was arrested in flagrante delicto by a vice squad and he then heaped scorn on the police which got him a second charge for "insulting behavior to police officers."

Ambiel has wasted no time in announcing his departure: "Out of consideration for the prime minister and given my responsibilities, I have decided to leave my post several weeks earlier than anticipated, in order to express myself freely about the malicious allegations that may result from this incident," he said in a written statement to Le Monde.

He came to work for the prime-minister in May of 2002 and was charged with protecting the latter's image. Head of a TV production company, Ambiel had an impressive array of connections which he called on while running the government's communications office.

Toward 2 am, on Tuesday April 20, Ambiel left the prime minister's residence to return to his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine). According to his version of events, he parked his car at home and then realized that he had forgotten an important file that he needed for a meeting the next morning. He says he turned around to go back to the office.

At a traffic light at the intersection of boulevard Pereire and avenue des Ternes at around 2:30 am, a fight supposedly broke out between two prostitutes in a bus shelter. He claims one of them ran toward his car and that he attempted to lock his doors but mistakenly unlocked them. The young woman then supposedly took a seat in passenger side his car, speaking incomprehensibly. Ambiel says he drove onward to help the girl. At the next light, he claims he pulled over and asked her to get out. "I dropped her off less than two minutes later and about 300 meters further down the street to put her out of harm's reach," Ambiel wrote in his statement.

It was at this precise moment that a team from the night anti-criminality brigade (BAC) appeared in an unmarked car. [...]

Continue reading "Sex Scandal!"...

M. l'imam bousiller

We've all been somewhat preoccupied with little matters like work and ¡No Pasarán! hasn't been exactly up to the minute — so you may already be aware that Imam Abdelkader "wife-beater" Bouziane (there must be some mistake! In French, bousiller means "to bust up," or sometimes, "to bump off"), who had been expelled, is now to be permitted to return:

The court suspended the government expulsion order, reportedly expressing "serious doubt" about its legality.

...the government has vowed to appeal the decision with new information.¶ Speaking on a visit to Corsica, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said he would be sending the court "additional elements of information which justify the expulsion".¶ His government has 15 days to provide the court with the new information, before a fuller ruling is issued in a few weeks' time. ¶ In the Lyon court, the lawyer representing the interior ministry, Georges Holleaux, alleged that Mr Bouziane, 52, had called for jihad (holy war) in France.¶ However, this allegation was not made before Mr Bouziane was deported. Mr Bouziane's lawyer argues that his expulsion "violated several fundamental liberties". ¶ Mr Bouziane has lived in France for about 25 years and has left his family - reportedly including two wives and 16 children - behind. [emphasis added]

This is a revealing and embarrassing development. It seems that even French authorities are affected by the anxiety to have done with the problem of Islamism in France and it is driving them to hasty measures such as this. Now the Interior minister is unable to provide justifications; he is only able to provide promises to deliver them. Even the government's lawyer, no doubt well prepared for his appearance in court, can only argue facts that clearly didn't determine the decision to expel Bouziane in the first place. Next time, fellas, use your heads!

Consumer Spending Falls

Some of youmay think I'm being malicious by harping on France's economic woes but I'm not. I think many indicators are pointing to a genuine trend and I'm simply recording them as they appear. For example:

PARIS, April 22 (AFP) - French households curtailed spending sharply in March, reflecting a cautious outlook in the face of unemployment fears, a stance that indicates further spending declines in the coming months, analysts said Thursday.

Consumption of manufactured goods fell 1.4 percent in March from the previous month, according to the national statistics office Insee, compared with analyst consensus expectations of a decline of just 0.4 percent.

What's Healthier, a French Quiche or a Big Mac?

Writing from the heart of Roquefort cheese country, Mort Rosenblum provides an interesting Associated Press article on France's love-hate relationship with McDonald's.

Most interesting of the long article (which I read in the Los Angeles Times) was this sentence:

French nutritionists Jean-Michel Cohen and Patrick Serog report that a Big Mac is much healthier than quiche lorraine. [My emphasis]

Is there anybody who would be kind enough to inform José Bové of this? (And to keep reminding him thereof on a daily basis?)

(More news about the truth concerning America's allegedly terrible food habits)

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"...