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Good thing President George W. Bush didn’t stick around to listen to French President Jacques Chirac’s speech at the United Nations on Sept. 23, even though it came right on the heels of his own call for greater international cooperation in the fight against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He might have had second thoughts about meeting Chirac later.
 President George W. Bush shakes hands with French President Jacques Chirac at the Hotel Royal, venue of the G8 summit in Evian, France on June 1, 2003. |
“No one can act alone in the name of all,” Chirac intoned, “and no one can accept the anarchy of a lawless society. There is no alternative to the United Nations.”
French diplomats were quick to point out to reporters that Chirac had aimed his remarks squarely at Bush, and that the “lawless society” was the United States.
“Chirac Defends the U.N. Against Bush,” ran the headline in the gray lady of French journalism, Le Monde. “The United States [was] placed in the box of the accused,” the story said on page 2. Here readers learned about Bush, “the man who started a war without the U.N.,” who had the nerve to appear in the same time slot as “three advocates of multilateralism,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Chirac. Cheeky, indeed.
Guided by Chirac’s spin doctors, the French press pointed out that Chirac had nothing against the American people, just a bone to pick with their man Bush. In phrasing that echoed U.S. policy toward Iran, a founding member of the Axis of Evil, Le Monde wrote that Chirac “has taken care constantly to make the distinction between the policy carried out by George Bush and his administration and the American people, friends for 225 years toward whom he made many gestures of closeness and affection.”
The conservative daily Le Figaro chewed on the same bone, quoting a source close to Chirac who said the French president considered Bush and his administration “the most reactionary administration” he had ever seen.
There was comic relief in the wretched reporting, such as this gem from a backgrounder in Le Figaro: “Not long after the election of Bush the father, Jacques Chirac was the first French leader to meet him even before [French president Fran?ois] Mitterrand during a trip to the United States in May 1989. A trip during which the former French prime minister [Chirac], who had just been beaten in the presidential election, met everyone who counted for anything in American society at the time: from the president of Disney, Michael Eisner, to film stars Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, Farrah Fawcett and Sidney Poitier.”
That’s it, no omissions – right down to the sentence fragment. The French, who pride themselves on their sophisticated worldview, still have a hard time seeing beyond Hollywood and Disneyland.
Chirac also called for an immediate transfer of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, a ploy dismissed as “unreasonable” by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush, who argued that the United States had no intention of leaving the Iraqis in the lurch before they could build lasting representative institutions. Seeing as the French had rejected the creation of the interim Iraqi government in the first place, there no doubt will be those who find this a curious twist coming from the president of a nation that prides itself on logic and consistency.
 U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan meets with French Minister for Foreign Affairs Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin prior to Security Council meeting. |
For neoconservative politician Alain Madelin, a former minister in Chirac governments who opposed him in the first round of last year’s presidential elections, “French diplomacy today continues to consider Iraq as a cake to be divided and not as a democracy to be constructed. One of the demands of France is that there be an authority over Iraq’s economy that is not under American control to handle contracts.” In other words, with the United Nations in and the United States out, the French hoped to win reconstruction contracts.
But beyond all this, the persistent claim made by the French that war is only justified with U.N. approval is belied by their own actions. When French leaders, including Chirac, have felt their own interests at stake, they have not hesitated a heartbeat to send in the troops, whether it be to the Ivory Coast, Chad, Republic of the Congo or Kosovo.
Often, the definition of French interests had nothing to do with the security of France or the safety of French citizens, and even less with a French “vision” of a more moral world order. As a spate of corruption scandals that rocked the French political establishment during the last eight years has shown, more often than not the interests the politicians seek to defend are the Swiss bank accounts and slush funds they control in their own names or on behalf of their political parties.
One example, revealed in the U.S. press by Ben Barber of the Washington Times in October 1998, involved French government support for a coup d’?tat in the Republic of the Congo that successfully restored to power former military strongman Gen. Denis Sassou-Nguesso. With French help, Sassou-Nguesso succeeded in tossing out democratically elected president Pascal Lissouba and murdering thousands of his fellow countrymen in the process.
Why did the French conspire with the dictator of the Congo? “They said it was an unfriendly act” to offer oil-drilling contracts to Exxon instead of to the French national oil company Elf Aquitaine, Lissouba told the Washington Times.
Loik Le Floch-Pringent, a former president of Elf who was indicted and served time in one of the many corruption scandals in France in the late 1990s, explained in a memoir how Elf controlled Sassou-Nguesso despite his flirtation with the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War. Congo “for a time became Marxist, but was always under Elf control,” he wrote.
Chirac has a long history of involvement with Elf and with Sassou-Nguesso. When he served as prime minister in a government of “cohabitation” under socialist president Mitterrand, he overstepped his authority and ordered the French military to provide a military-transport aircraft and intelligence support to Sassou-Nguesso to crush an internal rebellion. Mitterrand adviser Jacques Attali describes the incident in his “verbatim” memoirs of the Mitterrand years in an entry dated Sept. 16, 1987. “The question of the French Transall [military-transport aircraft] sent to Sassou-Nguesso finally came up. Through a [diplomatic] cable that went astray, we learned that it had been sent pursuant to an agreement directly between Sassou-Nguesso and Jacques Chirac. The aircraft, with doctored markings, was put at the disposition of the Congolese military to crush an internal rebellion! The president was never informed of this.”
Under the cohabitation agreement, the French president retained his authority as commander in chief, while the prime minister had day-to-day control of the government. When Mitterrand challenged Chirac on his behavior, “he never batted an eyelash,” Attali wrote. According to the Congolese opposition, some 3,000 civilians were murdered in cold blood in the French-sponsored counterattack.
And the Congo is just one example. The French government under former Chirac ally Edouard Balladur arranged for the shipment of $500 million in weaponry purchased through intermediaries from the former Soviet bloc in 1993-1994 to the government of Angola, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo. A top aide to then-interior minister Charles Pasqua was indicted on charges of funneling kickbacks from the scheme into Gaullist political coffers. The main intermediary, Pierre Falcone, was named the Angolan representative to UNESCO in mid-September, giving him diplomatic immunity despite the fact he is a French citizen. His appointment was denounced by the new head of the opposition UNITA party, Isaias Samakuva, during meetings with Angolan exiles in Paris on Sept 23.
In an interview with Le Monde that appeared on Jan. 7, 2001, Pasqua adviser Jean-Charles Marchiani acknowledged that the Angola arms deals were part of a larger French policy. “We, that is, I on behalf of Charles Pasqua, negotiated publicly with [Angolan] president [Jos? Eduardo] Dos Santos to obtain the political and economic aid of Angola for French action in this part of the region, which took the form of sending troops to both Congos [the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo].”
When pro-French governments in Gabon or the Ivory Coast are threatened with democracy, or by their neighbors, or by new leaders who refuse to pay up after the old ones die, the French have never hesitated to send in troops, without even a word to anyone, let alone the United Nations.
In 1996 in Chad, according to left-wing Chirac critic Fran?ois-Xavier Verschave, Chirac’s government “transformed a compulsive criminal into a legitimate head of state” by organizing and financing a massive electoral fraud that swept French prot?g? Idriss Deby to power. In some pro-Deby districts, Verschave reported, “the official voter-participation rate reached 120.9 percent.”
One year after Deby’s election, Amnesty International found that “the practice of torture has intensified. The regular massacre of civilians in Chad is largely due to the total impunity accorded those responsible for the killings.”
Madelin tells Insight he frequently has had “lively discussions” with Chirac. Madelin believes that French policy toward Iraq and Chirac’s current war on the United States are driven by deep policy differences, starting with a totally different perception of international law. Chirac and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin “constantly argued [against the war] in the name of international law, but international law was against Saddam Hussein.”
True, the role of money also was important, he concedes. “Huge sums of money were put into circulation as a result of these pro-Arab policies. Kickbacks on those contracts often were greater than 5 or 10 percent. That is the hidden face of these policies. We’ll know it one day, perhaps.”
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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