Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Williamsburg left a bad taste on both sides. But nations’ interests outweigh the exasperation of their leaders. A month later, in a conciliatory gesture, Mitterrand received the NATO Foreign Ministers in Paris for the first meeting of the Alliance Council in the French capital since de Gaulle’s decision to leave the military command in 1966.

  In November, the West German parliament approved, by 286 votes to 226 – the Greens and Social Democrats voting against – the installation of Pershings and cruise missiles. ‘Option Zero’ was dead. It remained only for the US formally to withdraw it. By then, Reagan’s mind was on his re-election campaign. Europe – and France – receded into oblivion. But the administration had drawn the lesson. Vernon Walters, the francophone former Deputy Director of the CIA who became Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN, explained: ‘France is a difficult ally, but it’s easy to reach agreement so long as you treat her as an equal and don’t speak condescendingly.’ A simple enough principle, but apparently too difficult for a superpower to apply.

  In foreign policy, the first thirty months of Mitterrand’s tenure were a success. After a period of mutual testing, France’s relationships with both the US and the Soviet Union had settled into a pattern of wary respect. True, no progress had been made to resolve the problems of the European Community, hamstrung by Britain’s demands for a budget rebate. But in Mitterrand’s view, no agreement with the British would be possible until Mrs Thatcher had exhausted both her arguments and her partners and had her back to the wall. In the meantime, the only thing to do was to wait.

  The one part of the world where things were not going well for him was the Middle East, the ‘complicated Orient’, as de Gaulle had called it, where tensions were not only boiling over – an all too frequent state of affairs – but, much more serious, spilling on to the streets of Paris.

  Mitterrand had come to office with a long record of supporting Israel. In August 1947, he was one of only two French Cabinet ministers to urge the government to give asylum to the Jewish refugee ship, the Exodus. Two years later he visited Jerusalem. From the 1950s onwards, he travelled there frequently, drawn year after year to the biblical landscapes which fascinated and inspired him, forging in the process a firm friendship with the Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres. His elder son, Jean-Christophe, spent five months as a student on a kibbutz in Galilee. Neither his experiences in the 1930s in Paris, when anti-Semitism was rampant, nor in Vichy, where he had written for anti-Semitic magazines, had prepared him for such an affinity with the Jewish State. But views, like circumstances, change. For Mitterrand, as for many others, the revelation of the Holocaust had shown the Jews, and Palestine, in a new light.

  Where de Gaulle had characterised the Israeli people as ‘an elite people, sure of itself and domineering’15 – a judgement which had shocked Israelis but reflected France’s sense of its own interests in the region – Mitterrand called them ‘noble and proud’.

  His sympathies for Israel had their limits. Supporting the Jewish people’s right to a peaceful, secure existence did not mean automatically supporting Israeli policies. Visiting Gaza in the late 1970s he had been appalled by the misery of the Palestinian refugee camps and had urged mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), whose leader, Yasser Arafat, he had met in Cairo in 1974. But he had never been particularly drawn to the Arab world and he resented what he saw as a pro-Arab bias in French policy under Pompidou and Giscard. One of his first acts as President was to revoke a circular issued by Raymond Barre in 1977, authorising French companies to comply with the Arab boycott of Israel, a decision which he was warned, wrongly as it turned out, would earn him the lasting enmity of Arab governments. He told his staff he intended to make Israel the destination for his first State visit abroad.

  However Israel under the leadership of Menachem Begin, the steely, nationalistic chief of the right-wing Likud Party, was not as Mitterrand had hoped.

  In June, less than three weeks after his inauguration, Israeli jets bombed a French-built nuclear power plant in Iraq, killing a French technician. Begin had authorised the raid to galvanise his supporters during his re-election campaign. Mitterrand took it as a personal affront. It soured his relations with the Israeli Prime Minister, whom he came to regard as one of the main obstacles to peace in the region, and marked the beginning of an interminable apprenticeship in the politics of a part of the world torn by racial, religious, sectarian and ethnic hatreds more vicious and opaque than he had believed possible.

  Instead of Israel, Mitterrand’s first State visit was to Saudi Arabia. Compared to the rest of the Middle Eastern minefield, it was almost neutral territory. The Saudis provided half of France’s oil and had 30 billion francs (£3 billion, or US $7 billion) on deposit in French banks, the withdrawal of which would have been disastrous at a time when the franc was under constant attack. He assured Crown Prince Fahd that France would continue to back Iraq in its war against Iran, which had broken out the previous autumn, that the staunchly anti-communist kingdom had nothing to fear from a left-wing government in Paris and that French policy in the region would remain ‘balanced’.

  What Mitterrand meant by ‘balanced’ was made clear six months later, when, on March 3 1982, after having delayed his journey to Israel a second time in protest against Begin’s announcement of the annexation of the Golan Heights, he finally arrived in Tel Aviv.

  He was the first French Head of State to travel to the Holy Land since the crusader king, Louis IX, seven centuries earlier, and, apart from the Pope, the first leader of any European country to visit Israel since its foundation. That day Mitterrand went out of his way to be conciliatory. When Begin angrily ruled out any possibility of a Palestinian State and denounced the PLO as ‘a gang of killers’, the French President gently reminded him that Arabs and Jews were ‘by definition descended from the same father’. He reserved his main statement, however, for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, the following afternoon. He sat up much of the night, writing and rewriting it in his suite at the King David Hotel. It was the speech of a man walking on eggshells, determined to convey, politely but clearly, ideas his hosts did not wish to hear:

  The most [fundamental right], it seems to me, is that each of us has the irreducible right to live. That right is yours . . . It is also that of the peoples who surround you. In saying this, I am thinking, naturally, of the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank . . . France recognises no forbidden topics. Its duty is to speak one and the same language, everywhere and at all times . . . Why do I wish the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank to possess a homeland? Because one cannot ask anybody to give up his identity. It is for the Palestinians, as for others, no matter where they come from . . . to decide for themselves their own fate. Dialogue supposes prior mutual recognition of the other’s right to exist. [It also] supposes that each party can take that right to its logical conclusion, which, for the Palestinians as for others, can mean, when the time comes, a State.16

  The fatal words, ‘Palestinian’ and ‘State’, had been uttered and, what was more, in Jerusalem itself. No matter what oratorical precautions Mitterrand used – noting that the PLO, which ‘speaks in the name of the [Palestinian] fighters’, could not expect to take part in peace talks so long as it denied Israel’s right to exist; and warning both sides against ‘any unilateral act which might delay the coming of peace’, a reference to Israel’s evident desire to invade southern Lebanon – the speech was explosive.

  Begin, speaking from a wheelchair, to which he was confined with a broken leg, reacted furiously, comparing the PLO to the Nazis. The Arab States complained that Mitterrand had not gone far enough. Washington kept silent. The Europeans applauded.

  Three months later, on June 4, while the G7 leaders were meeting at Versailles, the Israeli Air Force bombarded PLO refugee camps in southern Lebanon and West Beirut, ostensibly in retaliation for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, the previous day. Argov’s shoot
ing, as the Israelis well knew, had nothing to do with the PLO. It was the work of Abu Nidal, the most feared and ruthless of the leaders of the so-called ‘Rejectionist Front’ which called for total war against the Jewish State and opposed any form of contact between Palestinians and Israelis. Abu Nidal and Menachem Begin were on opposite sides but, in certain respects, had similar objectives. Both rejected the peace process and both wanted to destroy the PLO, the only Palestinian organisation capable of accomplishing it. That the PLO should be blamed for Abu Nidal’s work suited each of them very well.

  On June 6, 20,000 Israeli troops crossed into southern Lebanon. Begin told Mitterrand that it was a limited operation and that his soldiers would not advance more than 25 miles into Lebanese territory. A week later it was clear that, far from being limited, Israel, with Reagan’s backing, was bent on the PLO’s destruction. The US vetoed a French resolution in the Security Council calling for the neutralisation of Beirut. By the beginning of July, 10,000 people had been killed during the Israeli advance. At that point, Reagan began to waver. But it took another five weeks before he agreed to put pressure on Begin to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force of Americans, French and Italians, which would separate the two sides and protect the departure of Arafat and 15,000 of his fighters to a new base in Tunisia.

  By then relations between Mitterrand and Begin were execrable. Responding to a journalist’s question, Mitterrand had acknowledged a parallel between the Israeli army’s actions in Beirut and events at Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in central France destroyed in 1944 by a Nazi SS division which had massacred all 642 inhabitants. Begin accused Mitterrand of anti-Semitism. Two days later Israeli artillery bombarded the French Embassy in Beirut. The Lebanese capital is not 25 but 60 miles north of the Israeli border. Mitterrand told his entourage: ‘Begin lied to me.’

  The reference to Oradour proved tragically prophetic. Despite warnings from Arafat and Claude Cheysson that more bloodshed was inevitable if the peacekeepers left, the US Secretary of State, George Shultz, insisted that the Marines should withdraw, ahead of plan, on September 10. The Italians followed. Mitterrand, realising that French troops would be in an impossible position if they stayed on alone, responsible for whatever might happen and lacking the force to prevent it, ordered them to leave too.

  Next day, the newly elected Christian President of Lebanon, Bachir Gemayel, was assassinated. With the authorisation of Begin and his Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Army occupied West Beirut on the pretext of preventing inter-communal violence. That night, Christian militiamen entered the Palestinian ghettos of Sabra, Chatila and Borj el-Brajneh, all of which were under Israeli army control. While Israeli troops stood by, they slaughtered at least 800, probably more than two thousand, Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children, who were hastily buried in mass graves.

  The Americans, aghast at their misjudgement, insisted that the multinational force return at once.17 The Israelis withdrew from the city and for the first time accepted the presence of UN observers. Mitterrand concluded that Israel’s responsibility in the massacres was ‘both direct and indirect’. A UN investigation said more gingerly ‘direct or indirect’. In Israel itself, Shimon Peres accused Begin and Ariel Sharon of personal responsibility for the killings, a charge endorsed in Sharon’s case by the government-appointed Kahan Commission, which recommended that he be dismissed and never again permitted to hold public office. Begin ignored the report and Sharon went on to become Israeli Prime Minister.

  For Mitterrand, the Lebanese imbroglio had three immediate effects.

  His relationship with the Israelis became extremely strained. That did not make him pro-Palestinian, but he was increasingly convinced that Arafat and the PLO held the key to an eventual peace settlement.

  Secondly, he concluded that as long as Begin and the Likud remained in office, meaningful negotiations would be impossible.18 The United States had the power but not the will to overcome Israeli obduracy. Mitterrand saw a striking example of that a few months after Sabra and Chatila. Shultz had told Cheysson that the US might be ready to recognise the PLO if Arafat would accept Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinian leader agreed, on condition that France guaranteed that the Americans would keep their word. Two weeks later Shultz wrote to Cheysson to say that Washington could not commit itself unless Israel gave its prior accord to the arrangement.

  The French Ambassador to Washington, Bernard Vernier-Palliez, a leading industrialist with no particular political affiliation (under Giscard, he had headed the French car-maker, Renault), explained in a lengthy telegram to Mitterrand the root of the American problem:

  American actions . . . in everything related to the Middle East are incomprehensible unless one takes into account the extraordinary power of the Israeli Lobby. Its ability to mobilise the Jewish electorate, the extent of its financial resources, the effectiveness of its organisation which blindly serves the interests of Jerusalem, allow it to exert pressure on the Administration and to control Congress better than the Administration itself can. [It acts] not only to deter the Administration from adopting . . . positions unfavourable to the Israeli government, and to block in Congress actions by the Executive which displease it, but also to promote policies openly opposed to that of the White House . . . When Israel’s interests are at stake, Congress, which very often [in other contexts] acts as a brake on adventurism, is likely, on the contrary, to urge on the Executive, encouraging it to take heavy risks.19

  His conclusion was that progress towards a Middle East settlement would require not only a new government in Israel but also an American president prepared, if not to confront the Israeli lobby, at least to keep it at arm’s length.

  The third effect of the Israeli invasion was for Mitterrand the most troubling. It had reinforced a spiral of terrorist violence which, while hardly new to the region – terrorism had been endemic for decades, first by Jewish groups against the British, then by Palestinians against the Israelis – was about to change its nature, creating a dynamic of hatred against which Western governments in general and France in particular would find themselves powerless.20

  Far from being eradicated, as Begin had hoped, terrorism spread exponentially, acquiring an Islamic as well as a Palestinian dimension.21 Yitzhak Rabin, who succeeded Sharon as Defence Minister, said later: ‘Of all the surprises of the war in Lebanon, of which most were bad, the most dangerous was to see the Shiites let out of their bottle.’22

  Throughout the 1970s, France had been largely spared from Middle Eastern terrorism.23 Giscard’s intelligence services had sealed a Faustian pact with the principal groups concerned: the authorities would turn a blind eye, allowing them to use French territory for logistics and communications, so long as they abstained from attacks against French targets or on French soil. In October 1980 this unspoken truce had been briefly shattered when a bomb exploded outside a synagogue in the rue Copernic, near the Arc de Triomphe, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, killing four people and injuring forty-six. But no further incident occurred and it was treated as a one-off, an unexplained anomaly that did not call into question the basic understanding that France was a sanctuary.

  Then, in September 1981, the French Ambassador in Beirut, Louis Delamare, was driving home for lunch when two gunmen forced his car to stop not far from a Syrian army checkpoint and shot him dead at point-blank range through the car window.

  Mitterrand was convinced that Syria was responsible. President Hafez al-Assad, who regarded Lebanon as a Syrian protectorate, had taken umbrage at France supplying arms to the Christian-led Lebanese government. In retaliation, Mitterrand ordered the DGSE, the French external intelligence service, to track down and kill the men who had carried out the attack and, as a warning, to detonate a car bomb in front of the ruling Baath Party headquarters in Damascus. According to Gilles Ménage, his security adviser, both missions were ‘in large measure accomplished’.

  The following spring, in April 1982, a bomb exploded in
Paris outside the offices of Al watan al arabi, an Arabic-language weekly hostile to Assad’s regime, killing a passer-by and injuring sixty-three others. Two Syrian diplomats were immediately expelled and the French Ambassador recalled from Damascus.

  It marked the beginning of a long and terrible summer.

  In the six months from March to September 1982, seventeen people were killed and 160 injured in nearly twenty separate terrorist attacks in France. Thirteen more died and twenty-two were injured in attacks on French interests in Lebanon.

  The actors and motives varied. The Venezuelan terrorist, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos, orchestrated several attacks to try to secure the release of two members of his network who had been arrested in Paris the previous winter.24 The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, ASALA, a Lebanese-based movement with links both to Carlos and to the Palestinian Rejectionist Front, which targeted Turkish diplomats because of Ankara’s denial of the Armenian genocide, carried out four more attacks. Another group, the Armed Revolutionary Lebanese Fractions, FARL, about which little was known, assassinated an Israeli and an American diplomat.25 In July, Abu Nidal’s organisation, Fatah–Revolutionary Council, shot to death the deputy head of the PLO bureau in Paris. A month later, as Mitterrand was preparing to send back to the Lebanon the French contingent of the multinational force, four masked assailants machine-gunned a kosher restaurant in the rue des Rosiers (Rosetree Street), in a predominantly Jewish quarter of Paris, killing six people and injuring twenty-three.

  In France, as elsewhere in Europe, people grew accustomed to security guards searching their bags as they entered department stores; to municipal dustbins welded shut lest they be used to conceal explosives; buildings emptied and streets sealed off for bomb alerts which were almost always hoaxes but just occasionally were not; soldiers with automatic weapons patrolling in groups of three in airports and stations; and the pervasive fear, on buses and underground trains, that a fellow passenger might be waiting for the moment to leave an innocent-looking bag or rucksack filled with penthrite in a corner or under a seat.26