A trip to Tripoli

At first the release of the Bulgarian medics after eight years of incarceration and torture by the Libyan government was greeted joyfully by all believers in the European project and the need for “Europe” to have a common foreign policy. Here is a wonderful example, they chortled, of “soft power” that is sooooooooooo much more effective than the nasty hard power of the Americans.

An article in Transitions Online, a largely Europhile site that deals with Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, breathes a sigh of relief at Europe finally showing willingness to work together and exert pressure as a single entity after a period of discord, what with arguments about Turkey’s possible entry and those cheeky referendum results in France and the Netherlands.

There is also a problem of public perception that is seriously misguided in TOL’s opinion:

It is no surprise then that Brussels has an image problem. The latest survey conducted by the Eurobarometer polling service shows that in some of the 27 member countries, support for the EU has tumbled since 2004, when enthusiastic crowds marked the unification of East, West, North, and South.

The survey shows that fewer than half of Czechs, Hungarians, and Latvians think EU membership is a good thing, ranking citizens in these new states alongside the EU-bashing British and the increasingly anti-EU Austrians. Support for EU membership fell in the Czech Republic (from 51 to 46 percent) and in Latvia (from 43 to 37 percent) in just six months.

Across the EU, 59 percent of those surveyed said their countries had benefited from membership, yet only 40 percent of Hungarians think they have gained. In Bulgaria, public opinion is evenly divided on this front, although the survey was conducted before the Bulgarian health workers were freed.

Never mind. All this can be put behind us. The one thing Eurobarometer seems to show is that the people of all these doubtful member states want to see a stronger and more united common foreign and security policy. It does not occur to the author of the article that the reason might be because that is something that does not concern people directly and so they do not really care.

The freeing of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian born doctor showed that the people were right and the leaders were wrong – united foreign policy can work.

The success in freeing the Bulgarians is a demonstration that the public may know how to wield power better than turf-protecting national leaders. For three years, the EU and its emissaries assiduously negotiated with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, seeking to free the five nurses and a Palestinian-born physician, who were convicted of deliberately infecting children with HIV. (They maintained their innocence throughout their eight-year ordeal.)

Europe’s offer of full economic and political partnership for Libya is a reward for the release of the health workers. It also acknowledges Qaddafi’s cooperation on other fronts in recent years, most notably his decision to abandon weapons of mass destruction. Europe, in turn, gains renewed access to the petroleum-rich country’s resources and an economy ready for investment after years of sanctions.

Actually, most of us would call that bribery. Even TOL is not altogether happy.

Granted, doing deals with Libya is not an ideal example of enlightened foreign policy. Qaddafi remains an absolute ruler, an opportunist who has reopened doors to the West but not to democracy. The economy remains largely under central control and may stymie foreign investors.

Never mind. This is soft power at work. Inevitably that cheerleader for the European project, Andrew Moravchik, who directs the European Union Programme at Princeton, came in on the act with an article in the Financial Times on July 30:

The deal over the freed medics is the fruit of years of negotiation with Britain, France and Brussels. Europe came wielding “soft power” in the form not of enlightenment moralism but tough-minded economic diplomacy.

Colonel Gadaffi received payments for stricken Libyan families, a promise to normalise economic ties with the EU and the affirmation of a French presidential visit, following Mr Blair’s stop-over last month. Bulgaria got its nurses back and French companies received an attractive deal for a desalination plant. Add to that the generous oil and arms deals granted to Britain and a little praise for EU officials, and nearly everyone comes away a winner. At the core of Europe’s success is the premise that if you cannot fight hostile governments, you must “flip” them, patiently negotiating incremental progress. Engagement on these terms is a tough political road. Those who choose it must attend to the complex domestic politics of foreign societies, with all the ethical ambiguities and compromises that entails.

Or, in other words, good old-fashioned bribery.

In fact, the whole story is not really as straightforward as all that. For one thing, the EU or even European politicians were not alone in their pleas or demands that the medics be released. Condoleezza Rice made statements as did President Bush and, even a few assorted international celebrities such as Bianca Jagger. While TOL and the Financial Times cheered European diplomacy, Der Spiegel expressed reservations.

Sarkozy traveled to Tripoli on Wednesday just a day after his wife Cecilia flew out of Libya on a French presidential plane with the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor on board. The French president and Gadhafi signed five key agreements on future cooperation, including deals on defense and civilian nuclear energy.

The French even agreed to help the Libyans develop a nuclear reactor to desalinate water. But critics in Germany and France have questioned the wisdom of promoting atomic energy in a country that until 2003 had been trying to develop a nuclear weapons program. The Libyan leader has since renounced terrorism and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but many German commentators and politicians argue that the country is still a dictatorship and so its promises should be viewed with caution.

So, what we have here is a complicated deal negotiated by President Sarkozy with the help of Mme Sarkozy between France and Libya, which will, one assumes bring in money to France (who else will build that reactor?) and help Libya to build up defence structures up to and including nuclear power (to be used peacefully, of course). Errm, where is the money coming from?

Libya, of course, has oil and may well be able to use income from its sale to pay for all those French developments. But, let us not forget, that as part of the great European demonstration of soft power, Libya has also been offered various financial inducements. Are these going to be used in the deals signed by Presidents Sarkozy and Gaddafi?

There is also the question of Mme Sarkozy. She went to Libya twice to discuss the fate of the imprisoned medics with Gaddafi, sidelining the EU negotiators and, according to some sources, offering various amounts of money.

What a wonderful idea, having the wife of the President become involved in tricky international negotiations. Imagine if the First Lady of the United States did that. What would be the reaction of the ultra-sophisticated European media?

In the deal, the EU paid €9.5 million to improve conditions at the childrens' hospital in Benghazi where the medics had worked. EU Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had settled a deal before the EU summit in June, according to SPIEGEL's Berlin sources. But on her first visit to Tripoli, Mrs. Sarkozy reportedly offered funds to modernize yet another hospital -- which gave the Libyans a reason to hold out for more money.

The centerpiece of the negotiations was the so-called Benghazi Fund, set up to help families of the infected children. The goal was to pay $1 million (€724,000) in damages per child. The first $44 million came from Bulgaria in the form of debt forgiveness. The Libyan government contributed $74 million, while the EU promised only the money earmarked to clean up the hospital.

Naturellement, none of this is ransom paid over for the nurses. Would the EU or France, who seems to have done well out of the deal, do such a thing? Jamais.

The story did not stop at everybody congratulating everybody else. On August 1, Le Monde published an article, which quoted Colonel Gaddafi’s son on the subject of what had been negotiated.

Saïf Al-Islam Gadhafi cannot be called a reliable source but, nevertheless, what he is supposed to have said is very interesting. According to this scion of the ruling family, there were two unmentioned aspects to the agreement, which brought about the release of the medics – an arms deal between France and Libya and an undertaking on Britain’s part to release the supposed Lockerbie bomber, imprisoned in Scotland.

This, as Nidra Poller, writer and journalist who resides in Paris and is a supporter of Nicolas Sarkozy, points out, has been exercising the French media, who do not seem to be over-impressed by the whole story.

Why do critics on the Right and Left feel it necessary to jump to the conclusion that there is a dirty deal to be revealed and Sarkozy is the guilty party? Because they don’t think he could have liberated the unjustly imprisoned Europeans any other way. They don’t think he could have outsmarted Muammar Ghaddafi. The French president’s brief 25 July stopover in Tripoli would reinforce this impression. The preliminary agreements signed that day have become fully developed contracts in the public mind. And the revelations of the dictator’s son, conveniently poured into the ear of Le Monde, confirm what everyone knew had to be true.

But if it is true, if that is the deal, why would Ghaddafi’s son embarrass France’s president by exposing it for all the world to see? Does that augur well for future military cooperation? Why not remain discreet, and let things happen naturally as a result of gradually improved relations between Libya and the European Union? Why did Sarkozy have to liberate the nurses and doctor before signing contracts and agreements that had been under negotiation for years, while the prisoners endured “fictional” tortures in Libyan jails? Was the fake exploit just sugar coating on a bitter pill— stupendous military dealings with a pariah state—that European citizens would be forced to swallow?

If so, the sugar coating is gone. In humiliating the French president by exposing the deal he was desperately trying to hide from his gullible citizens, Saif al-Islam has sabotaged the supposed PR benefits accrued by Sarkozy’s showy show of concern for the fate of the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor.

And what if Sarkozy did outsmart the Libyans, father & son, daughter & all? Tricky little guy, convincing them that the nurses and doctors would rot in Bulgarian jails that are almost as bad as the Libyan ones, and from there on in it would be a Franco-Libyan honeymoon? Might they want to get revenge? By spilling the beans, even if the beans are fake?

This cannot spare us the unpleasant task of facing yet another possibility: Nicolas Sarkozy did sincerely and effectively promise Libya re-entry into the cozy world of European finagling complete with military cooperation, arms deals, exploitation of natural resources, credibility, respectability, and Euros for all…in the heart of a Mediterranean Union… from which Israel would be excluded.

Some of the story is being confirmed. As the Guardian pointed out yesterday and the International Herald Tribune today,

European Aeronautic Defense & Space confirmed Friday that it was close to signing two weapons contracts with the government of Libya, which would be the first arms deal with the North African country since the European Union lifted military sanctions nearly three years ago.

Word of the contracts, worth €296 million, or $405 million, by some reports, came just a week after President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his wife, Cécilia, visited Tripoli, visits that contributed to the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had spent more than eight years in prison for supposedly deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the virus that causes AIDS. The case had long strained Libya's relations with the European Union.

The news that EADS - which is 15% owned by the French government - had "finalised" the deal to sell French-designed Milan anti-tank missiles came 48 hours after Saif ul-Islam Gadafy told Le Monde that Libya would be buying the anti-tank missiles from France.

One wonders what else is going to come out about the deal. While, of course, we are all very pleased that the Bulgarian medics are free and back in Europe (the Palestinian born doctor, who had had a particularly bad time because the Libyans dislike the Palestinians, had lived in Bulgaria for some years) we cannot help wondering what will happen next time some tyrannical dictator, such as Colonel Gaddafi decides that he wants to buy some arms and there are difficulties in his way.

One thing is certain. As a demonstration of Europe’s successful soft power the story leaves something to be desired.

Did France betray its principles?

Every country’s, every nation’s view of itself is illogical; every country’s dealings with other countries exhibits quirks and incomprehensible peculiarities. But it often appears that France is the least logical and most quirky of all the European states in its self-perception and its foreign policy.

Some of it is straightforward enough. It is not Britain that has experienced difficulties in finding a role after losing an empire so much as France. The end of its empire was prolonged and agonizing, involving as it did, two expensive and destructive wars that left deep scars on the country. (In the former British Empire the wars came after the British had left, which, one might argue, shows how sensible or, alternatively, how perfidious they are.)

Before that came the French defeat in 1940 and the occupation with all its moral and social problems that have not yet been worked out properly, as we have written on different occasions.

We have also written about French reaction to the political catastrophe of the Suez adventure and the American role in it. This is covered extensively in “The Great Deception”.

So, a good deal of French behaviour can be attributed to a desire to restore the country’s pre-eminent position in at least some parts of the world, a position that was last in evidence in 1814 despite subsequent French colonial wars. Coupled with it is that strong feeling of resentment against les Anglo-Saxes, the British and, particularly, the Americans. In fact, there are times when it seems that the sole purpose of French foreign policy is to annoy the government and people of the United States.

There are, however, complications. One is the European Union, perceived by many of the French elite as the weapon through which France will dominate European politics and become a great power again. Many of its political structures, economic policies and attempts at foreign policy appear to be largely French in their origins. But they are, as it happens, problematic. To a great extent EC rules can be ignored but not totally and France has been suffering economically from her own policies and from those enshrined in the European Union’s legislation. This has contributed to the rather vicious problems in the banlieus, inhabited largely by North African and Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants.

Another complication is French self-perception, at least, as it manifests itself among the political elite (though, as we know in this country, what the elite thinks does percolate down to the people in one form or another). Part of that self-perception is French political superiority because of certain events in the second half of the eighteenth century. No need to argue about that here but, it is worth noting, that many of our ideas of equality and democracy grew out of those events. So the French do have a great deal to be proud of. But have they, themselves, lived up to those great ideals? David Pryce-Jones, the historian, journalist, novelist, expert on the Middle East, thinks otherwise and marshals his evidence in “Betrayal – France, the Arabs and the Jews”.

It seems that France’s pernicious meddling in the Middle East – the responsibility for restoring the late unlamented tyrant and terrorist Chairman Yasser Arafat to the position of leadership after the catastrophe of Black September, rests almost entirely with the French government, though other European ones went along with it – is rooted in more than just a resentment of the United States. It goes back to an older concept of France as “Muslim power” (une puissance mussulmane”), a whacky idea but one to which the French Foreign Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, is addicted to, and has been ever since it was first promulgated as an antidote to the British Empire and its might.

Through anonymous helpers, David Pryce-Jones has managed to have access to numerous documents in the Quai d’Orsay (the only institution in the world that might make me think fondly of our own FCO) and has traced French meddling and politicking in the Middle East, whose result frequently was that any possibility of a peaceful settlement was pushed even further back.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that this view of France is reciprocal and the ferociousness of the Algerian War (something of a surprise to the French, though predictable, given the treatment of the local population during and after the War) has complicated matters apart from landing a very large number of immigrants in France itself, where economic policies and a good deal of visceral racism has made it difficult for them to integrate.

There are two ways of looking at the problem. One is that France has always insisted that all those who come to the country must become French (not for them the follies of multi-culturalism). When this does not happen there is understandable resentment.

There is, however, another point of view (not necessarily contradictory, more complementary) and it is this that David Pryce-Jones describes and analyzes so lucidly. Jews have lived in France for a long time and were the beneficiaries of the early stages of the French Revolution. As Pryce-Jones says, the official French attitude to the Jews was crystallized in those days by the liberal aristocrat, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, who declared in the Constituent Assembly:

Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation and everything granted to the Jews as individuals.

This is perfectly logical from the stand-point of an enlightened nation: on the one hand no individual must be discriminated against because of race or religion, on the other hand, there can be no internal nations within the big one. If this had worked out, French Jews would not have objected.

The problem of strong anti-Semitism remained (the Dreyfus case being only the best known example) as well as a visceral fear of Jews and Zionism on the part of the French establishment. Jews were perceived as agents of foreign power: Germany and Russia at first (an extraordinary idea when one thinks of the way Jews were treated in Russia), then of Britain and finally of Zionism “whose core doctrine is that Jews are a nation after all”.

As against that, the Muslims who came to France, in keeping with the notion of the country being “une puissance mussulmane” (which was largely a glorification of colonization) were allowed to keep their own group identity. Often, they had no choice for the above mentioned economic and social reasons.

Not that they were treated as equals. The North African soldiers who fought in the French army in the two World Wars were not given equal pensions. The few remaining veterans will receive that as a result of Chirac watching a recent French film on the subject, “Days of Glory”. The terrible fate of the harkis, the Algerians who fought on the French side, has been described before.

Nevertheless, the outcome of all these different developments has been the existence of virtually self-governing Muslim communities in France with a combined number of votes that is enough to scare any politician (though some have declared that they are voting for Le Pen, because they do not want any more lay-about immigrants and dislike the degeneration of French society).

To make matters worse, the authorities have turned a blind eye to the growing number of anti-Semitic attacks by many of the Muslim groups, insisting well beyond the time it was possible to do so, that the burning of synagogues and Jewish schools, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, vicious attacks on Jewish children in schools and on others in the streets, were all simply hooliganism. Little punishment was doled out and in some cases the attacks well all but condoned by the authorities.

It was the horrific case of Ilan Halimi coupled with the extensive riots of 2005 that brought some sanity into the discussion. (Though, to be fair, few solutions have been proffered.)

In the meantime, France has been conducting her own foreign policy, which has consistently since the thirties, through the protection of the Nazi-leaning Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the patronage of Arafat, support of Khomeini and, later, Saddam down to the present day, has been anti-Israeli, even contemptuous of that country and of its people. (The one exception was a brief period of support before and during the Six-Day War.) At first this was countered by the Left, which was basically pro-Israeli and, also, pro-Algerian. That has changed. The Left is now more viciously anti-Israeli and, let us face it, anti-Semitic than the old-fashioned Right.

That is the situation, says David Pryce-Jones, that France, Europe and the West has to live with. In France it has caused a crisis:

The natural fulfilment of the historic contempt for Israel as a mainstay of Jewish identity is to call into question the position of Jews in French society. For an almost equal period of time, Arabs have been accustomed to the cajolery of the French state, and the expected privilege that goes with it. These two long-drawn but incompatible approaches have finally come to a head and collided.

Commitment to the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel incites the growing underclass of Arabs first to resent Jews and then to force into the public arena the contradiction whereby the French state claims to be protecting Jews at home while doing what it can to oppose Jews in Israel. Confusion that might have been contained at its origins in the Middle East is therefore exploding in the everyday violence experienced in French cities and towns.

Recently there have been some attempts by the French government to rectify the situation at home but the contradiction imposed on it by the continuing policies of the Quai d’Orsay are harder to deal with. There is also some evidence, says Pryce-Jones that French opinion is beginning to turn against traditional French policy in the Middle East. Both have a long way to go.