Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  REAGAN [bristling]: I can assure you of the United States’ solidarity. As we did in two world wars, we will intervene if your nations are threatened.

  MITTERRAND: I don’t doubt it. But I have no guarantee . . . Let’s all understand each other. If our adversary has the slightest doubt about our determination and capacity to intervene massively and very quickly against aggression, war is possible. The Russians won’t risk an atomic war if [they know] there will be a massive response. [To Thatcher:] So Madame Prime Minister, if you imagine yourself in a situation where the Russians are at Bonn, it means you have already lost.

  Mitterrand’s views had come full circle. The debate about decoupling was unreal. When Thatcher insisted that ‘the great question for NATO is, as always, the American presence in Europe’, he responded: ‘I don’t agree. It’s not whether they stay or not that’s important. It’s what’s in their heads.’9

  In December 1987, ‘Option Zero’ became a reality. In New York, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, covering non-strategic missiles with a range of more than 500 kilometres. It was the first significant advance in nuclear arms control since the SALT accords fifteen years earlier. Chirac fretted that it would not only uncouple Europe from the US but would undermine another cherished concept, that of using short-range nuclear weapons to deliver a ‘final warning’ to an aggressor before strategic Armageddon occurred. Giraud grumbled about a nuclear Munich and warned that the continent would be Finlandised.

  ‘In France,’ Mitterrand told Kohl, ‘some people still want to believe that nuclear war is like traditional warfare. One can’t stop people being stupid. Nuclear weapons aren’t made to win wars but to prevent them.’

  After five years of championing a hard line towards Moscow and a tough stance on nuclear arms, Mitterrand was once more the voice of reason, a more comfortable position for a left-wing leader and more in tune with the times. With ‘Gorbymania’ sweeping Europe, Chirac and his right-wing allies seemed out of touch – their reluctance to relinquish the doctrines of the Cold War and their insistence on continuing to modernise battlefield nuclear arms, the only category not covered by the New York accords, appearing more and more as a relic of the past. ‘I don’t understand this kind of refusal that’s imprinted on their brains,’ Mitterrand said in December. ‘We either disarm or arm . . . My choice is made. We must disarm and we must refuse the proposals of those who tell us no.’

  Defence and foreign policy apart, the Prime Minister had a virtually free hand provided he respected the forms. Article 20 of the French Constitution lays down that ‘the government determines and conducts policy’. Mitterrand’s role in internal affairs was that of a bystander.

  The emblematic measure of Chirac’s government, the privatisation of the banks, insurance companies and other enterprises taken over by the State, both after the war by de Gaulle and later under Mitterrand, was at first a huge success. The number of small shareholders in France increased from one to six million in little more than a year. The State raised 70 billion francs (£7 billion or $11 billion), a profit of 40 per cent on what the Left had paid.

  But then came Black Monday – October 19 1987 – when the world’s stock markets crashed and the enthusiasm of shareholders waned.

  To align France more closely with the standard-bearers of the liberal economy, Britain and the US, Chirac had cut government spending; reduced income and company taxes; abolished price controls, a holdover from post-war days; and taken measures to make the labour market more flexible and to encourage investment. Other steps, such as the abolition of the wealth tax and an amnesty for the repatriation of capital smuggled out to Switzerland in the first months of Mitterrand’s presidency, which benefited the top 0.1 per cent, were more controversial and the government later admitted that politically they had been a mistake. As the fundamentals of the international economy improved – the price of crude oil fell and exchange rates stabilised – the reforms which Mitterrand had launched in 1983 began to bear fruit. The economy grew by 2.2 per cent in 1986 and 4.5 per cent two years later, and inflation fell below 3 per cent, the lowest figure since the 1960s. Only unemployment stubbornly refused to decline.10

  To try to regain the territory occupied by the National Front, the Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, approved a series of spectacular measures to combat illegal immigration, culminating in a charter flight on which 101 Malians were expelled – a figure which stuck in people’s minds because of Walt Disney’s film about Dalmatians. The far Right applauded; the Left was outraged; middle-of-the-road voters squirmed. Chirac came to see it as an error which compromised the government’s position in an area where it should have enjoyed widespread support. The Socialists had been lax on immigration, particularly during Mitterrand’s first year in power, and public opinion was in favour of tightening the rules. By going too far Pasqua triggered a backlash.

  The same problem arose over law enforcement, another potential right-wing vote-winner. Chirac’s initial moves – to enlarge police powers to carry out identity checks; to introduce a mandatory thirty-year prison term to replace the death penalty; and to set up a special anti-terrorist court – were welcomed. Subsequent proposals, to privatise large parts of the prison system and to jail drug addicts if they refused treatment, attracted widespread criticism and had to be abandoned.

  The French applauded when the government corrected the excesses of the Left. But each time it tried to go further to win back the votes of those who had defected to the extreme Right, it alienated the mainstream who made up the bulk of its support.

  Mitterrand was not inert. When the Cabinet met each week, he set out his reservations about government policies, which were duly reported in the press. It was a way to remind the public that he existed at home as well as abroad.

  There was trench warfare on secondary issues – principally appointments of officials which required the President’s signature – just as the US President and Congress arm-wrestle over the appointments of ambassadors and judges. Much of it was ‘sheer childishness’, Attali noted in his diary. When André Giraud, as Defence Minister, ignored a letter from Mitterrand proposing that his former Chief of Staff, General Saulnier, be elevated to the dignity of Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur, the President said that in that case he would refuse to decorate anyone Giraud proposed. When Charles Pasqua suggested replacing the presidential security detail, Mitterrand warned him: ‘If you do that without my agreement . . . I will have nothing further to do with your [security] services, I will manage on my own and I will explain to the country why.’

  The President lost some of these squabbles and won others. But on the main planks of the government’s programme, his policy was to stand aside. It was a way to give the Prime Minister enough rope to hang himself.

  In the winter of 1986, one of the coldest in France for thirty years, Mitterrand’s strategy had begun to pay off. Chirac, in his electoral programme, had promised university reform. On paper the proposal was moderate and reasonable: universities would have more autonomy and a bigger say in selecting their students. But coming on top of the crackdown on immigrants, the increased powers of the police and the proposal to imprison drug addicts, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The students, or at least some of their leaders, were itching for a fight. The government’s watchword, ‘selection’, became a synonym for inequality.

  Out of nowhere an inferno erupted. On Monday, November 17, at the University of Paris at Villetaneuse, a few miles north of the city, the students decided to strike. The following weekend, 200,000 people, including Fabius, Mauroy, Rocard and other Socialist Party luminaries, joined a protest organised by the left-wing teachers union, the FEN. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, forewarned by his own experience twenty years earlier, alerted the student leaders: ‘Be careful. This is going to get out of hand.’ Four days later half a million young people marched through Paris and dozens of provincial towns in the biggest student demonstrations since 1968. The following
Thursday, the same number took to the streets a second time to demand that the reform be withdrawn.

  By then the mood was growing uglier. That evening the Education Minister, René Monory, received a student delegation but offered no concessions. Shortly before midnight, clashes broke out with the police. Cars were set on fire and Molotov cocktails thrown. By the time the night was over, forty-one demonstrators and twenty policemen were in hospital. One boy lost an eye, another had a fractured skull and a third young man had a hand torn off. Demonstrations and clashes continued throughout the following day, when an Algerian student who was on his way home was chased into a doorway by riot police and beaten to death.

  That weekend the government was in an agony of indecision. Mitterrand advised Chirac privately to withdraw the reform. Others, including Pasqua and Chalandon, argued that he must stand firm to preserve the authority of the State. The UDF ministers threatened to resign en bloc unless the reform was abandoned. On Monday, complaining that he was being forced into an act of cowardice, the Prime Minister gave way.

  The President, who had remained silent until then, publicly approved the decision. Politically he had to walk a fine line. He had no desire to help the Prime Minister, whose position had been gravely weakened, but nor could he be seen to be exploiting a tragedy which had left one young man dead and several others severely injured. That afternoon he visited the dead student’s family at their modest council flat in the suburbs. Afterwards he refused to comment further. The episode spoke for itself.

  Chirac’s troubles continued through the winter. A rail strike started just before Christmas, followed by a strike on the Paris underground and sporadic stoppages at power stations.

  But the collapse of the educational reform was a body blow. It marked another turning point, reinforcing the advantage Mitterrand had gained by his refusal to sign the privatisation decrees five months earlier. The Prime Minister knew it: ‘If I withdraw this plan,’ he had told his ministers, ‘everything will fall apart.’ Mitterrand knew it too. ‘I don’t want to get ahead of myself and I haven’t yet taken any decision,’ he said a few weeks later, ‘but if the election was today and I were a candidate, I would be re-elected with my eyes shut.’

  The interplay of President and Prime Minister became inextricable when external and domestic policy overlapped.

  That was the case with New Caledonia, a group of islands the size of Wales or New Jersey, in the south-west Pacific 10,000 miles from Paris, which had been under French rule since the mid-nineteenth century. A third of the population of 150,000 were French settlers, 40 per cent indigenous Melanesian Kanaks and the remainder immigrants from other islands in the region. The settlers owned the nickel mines and cattle ranches which were the mainstay of the economy; the Kanaks were subsistence farmers.

  When Chirac took office, the main Kanak party, the FLNKS (Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front), controlled the three rural regions of the territory while the settlers had a majority in the capital, Nouméa. Other South Pacific nations had self-government. But the Kanaks, being in a minority, found the path to independence closed.

  The root of the problem was the stranglehold the settlers exerted on the administration. Even more than in Algeria in the 1950s, the advancement of the natives had been blocked. After more than a century of French rule, the territory had one Kanak doctor, one magistrate, one army officer, and at the main high school in Nouméa, Kanaks accounted for only 2 per cent of the teachers and 8 per cent of the pupils. Autonomy under those conditions would merely give power to the Whites, as had happened in Rhodesia under Ian Smith in the 1960s. When the minister responsible, Georges Lemoine, told the Cabinet that the FLNKS had sent a group of young men to be trained in Libya, Mitterrand exploded:

  If I were Kanak, I would go to Libya too! [This is] an intolerable situation, . . . an offence to everything France stands for . . . What hope does the local population have for the future of their children? We ask ourselves why [the nationalists] are so intransigent. It’s easy enough to understand them when you look at your figures.11

  After elections which the FLNKS boycotted in 1984, France’s distant sliver of empire was in a state of insurrection. Mitterrand sent a former Gaullist minister, Edgard Pisani, as the new High Commissioner for the territory with a mandate to open a dialogue. When he landed at the airport, his predecessor’s first words were: ‘You won’t get away without a bloodbath . . . You’ve arrived too late.’

  In fact Pisani succeeded in restoring order, and, on January 7 1985, with Mitterrand’s agreement, he announced a referendum on granting New Caledonia ‘sovereignty’, which was described as independence in association with France. Four days later, however, renewed violence broke out. The following week Mitterrand flew to the territory to see what might be saved. A state of emergency was declared. The referendum was postponed.

  In 1986 New Caledonia remained calm. But the gulf between the settlers and the Kanaks continued to widen. Chirac told the Cabinet that the FLNKS was ‘manipulated and financed by Libya and the USSR’. Mitterrand commented to Bianco afterwards: ‘How reactionary they are! They’ve understood nothing. I might as well be hearing people talk about Algeria thirty years ago.’

  It was no longer a matter of expressing ‘extreme reservations’, he told Chirac, but of ‘deep disagreement with the policy being applied.’ The government was making ‘a serious, historical error’ which could only lead to more bloodshed. When finally the referendum took place in September 1987, the Kanaks staged a boycott. Ninety-eight per cent of those voting opposed independence. Shortly afterwards an all-White jury acquitted seven settlers accused of a massacre of Kanaks two years earlier. The stage was set for an Algeria in miniature, half a world away.

  While New Caledonia seethed, Mitterrand confronted another issue where foreign and domestic policy were even more enmeshed: the imbroglio of the French hostages in Lebanon and their counterparts in French jails: Georges Ibrahim Abdallah of the FARL, Varajian Garbidjan of ASALA, and Anis Naccache and his companions.

  On March 20 1986, within an hour of Chirac being named Prime Minister, a bomb exploded in a crowded shopping arcade on the Champs-Elysées. Two people were killed and twenty-eight wounded. The CSPPA claimed responsibility and repeated its demand that the prisoners be released. But who did the CSPPA represent? The attacks at the beginning of February had been seen as linked to the Iranians. Was the purpose of this new attack the same? Neither Mitterrand nor Chirac nor any of their advisers had an answer.

  For want of a better idea, the Prime Minister decided on a two-track approach: on the one hand to improve relations with Iran, with a view to securing the hostages’ release; on the other to use the good offices of Algeria, Syria and the PLO to spread the word that France would be more inclined to release the prisoners it was holding if the attacks ceased.

  For six months the new policy of ‘normalisation’, as Chirac called it, seemed to be working. Talks on the disputed loan resumed in Teheran. The Mujahideen leader, Massoud Radjavi, left ‘voluntarily’ for Iraq with 200 of his followers. Two members of the French television crew seized in Beirut in March were freed,12 followed by a third later in the year.

  But in September five more bombs exploded in Paris.13 They had been left in restaurants; outside a department store; in a post office at the Paris City Hall; even, in one case, in the reception area of the Préfecture de Police. Eleven people died and 200 were injured. In Beirut the same week the French military attaché was shot dead outside the main gate of the embassy.

  Chirac believed the FARL were responsible. In July Georges Ibrahim Abdallah had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on charges of using false documents. The CSPPA, the Prime Minister thought, hoped to dissuade the government from putting him on trial on the more serious charge of complicity in the murders of US and Israeli diplomats in Paris four years earlier.

  Others disagreed. Abu Iyad, the head of the PLO’s intelligence service, sent word that the attacks had nothing to do with A
bdallah; the key remained the Iran–Iraq War. The Syrians said the same. So did the Algerians. So did Abdallah himself. A French intelligence specialist told the Elysée that to Teheran, ‘speaking by explosions’ and negotiating were two sides of the same coin.

  By December Mitterrand had reached the same conclusion. That month he told Caspar Weinberger, the US Defence Secretary, that for the bomb attacks, as for the hostage-taking, ‘Iran is mainly responsible . . . There is a link between Iranian diplomacy and terrorism.’

  As the New Year, 1987, began, there were still four French hostages in Lebanon – Carton, Fontaine, Kauffmann and the television crew’s producer, Jean-Louis Normandin. A fifth, a journalist named Roger Auque, was seized soon afterwards.

  But the fog of uncertainty was about to clear.

  In February Abdallah was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the diplomats’ murders. That same month a disenchanted young North African immigrant walked into a provincial police station offering information about a terrorist sleeper network in France. Shortly afterwards the DST arrested Fouad Ali Saleh, a 28-year-old Frenchman of Tunisian origin who had studied at the Islamic Revolutionary University in the Holy City of Qom, in Iran, and three principal accomplices.fn1

  A memorandum sent by the agency to Chirac at the end of April – which the government took care to conceal from Mitterrand – described the mechanism of the attacks.14 A Lebanese emissary smuggled liquid explosives into France. The sleeper network, ‘which [consisted] of North Africans who had lived in France for years, were well integrated into the national community [and led] completely normal lives’ received the explosives and hid them. ‘Those directing the attacks in Lebanon [then] sent teams of two or three men for a few days to Paris to commit one or several acts of blind terror.’

  Most troubling for Chirac was the final paragraph. ‘They belong to the Hezbollah but . . . carry out instructions from Qom approved by certain leaders of the Islamic Republic.’