by Philip Short
Mitterrand was more lucid later when he said: ‘the only thing that unites them is [the struggle for] my succession . . . They’re all preparing for it . . . Since Rennes, the Socialists have not obeyed anyone, not Mauroy and not me. Each one thinks only of how to come out of it best for himself.’
After the spring of 1990, he was convinced that the Left would lose the parliamentary elections due in three years’ time. It was the same pattern as in his first term – victory; disillusionment; defeat – but with much less reason. Once again, cohabitation loomed. The President described the amnesty as ‘the worst error of my second term’. Rocard agreed. He said later it had cost the Socialists ‘150 seats in parliament and our honour’. But much as Mitterrand might try to blame those around him, the amnesty, like the Socialist Party’s spectacular disunity at Rennes, was ultimately his doing. He had allowed them to happen where he had not actually encouraged them.
This time more was involved than just his habitual reluctance to lay down the law and compel others to obey. Some of his colleagues felt that, where domestic politics was concerned, he had become a spent force. He was disengaging, showing less interest and energy in the battles that would have to be fought to make his ideas prevail. Attali noted that, in contrast to his first term, now, when he criticised government policy, he rarely insisted that it be changed. ‘He lets them do it as they wish,’ Attali wrote. ‘I have the feeling that apart from Europe and [a few other] big projects, all the rest bores him. He does his job as President on automatic pilot, as an observer rather than an actor.’
The two regions outside Europe that continued to hold Mitterrand’s attention were the Middle East and Africa, which, in the French view, formed a unity.25 The Middle East because of Israel, whose future he was convinced could be assured only by a peace settlement with the Palestinians, represented by the PLO; Africa because the raft of French-speaking territories which stretched from Mauritania to Madagascar remained an essential part of France’s claim to greatness. Mitterrand’s old dream of an empire ‘from Flanders to the Congo’ was gone, but ‘Françafrique’, the vast domain south of the Sahara in which Paris exercised special rights and responsibilities, lived on.
Throughout his first term, he had wrestled with a civil war in Chad, where a power vacuum had provided an opening for the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, to extend his influence southwards. Twice – in 1983 and again in 1986 – Mitterrand had sent troops to help the Chadian President, Hissène Habré, repel Libyan incursions. The aim was to show France’s African allies that Paris could protect them. Six years later Mitterrand’s firmness paid off. In 1987, Habré succeeded in quelling the Libyan-backed rebellion in the North. A peace agreement followed.fn3 Socialist France had proved that it was a reliable suzerain.
Mitterrand’s second term opened a new phase. The hopes born of independence had evaporated. ‘Your continent is being marginalised,’ Mitterrand told France’s African partners at Casablanca in December 1988. The problem was bad leadership. But what could be done about it? Early on in his presidency Mitterrand had made timid attempts to ‘moralise’ the relationship between France and its former colonies. The African leaders had hated it. Later he had appointed his son, Jean-Christophe, who had been a journalist in Africa, to the ‘African cell’ at the Elysée. The opposition grumbled about nepotism and the French press nicknamed him Papamadi (‘Papa-told-me’), but the African leaders were content. Jean-Christophe provided a family tie with the French President and that was what they wanted. When their regimes were under threat, France lent them its support. In return they maintained a privileged relationship with the former metropolitan power. Corruption, one-party dictatorship and the murder, imprisonment and torture of political opponents were passed over in silence.
By the beginning of 1990, this paternalistic approach was becoming an anachronism. Africa had watched, mesmerised, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. The execution of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaus̗escu, had shown the African street that people could rise up and kill a tyrant. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela had been freed after twenty-seven years in prison. Érik Orsenna, who had been asked by Roland Dumas to reflect on African policy, warned that France was in danger ‘of cutting itself off from the Africa of tomorrow, that of the rising generation’. Mitterrand, he said, should ask his African partners: ‘What have you invested, Mr President, and you, Mr Minister, in your own country?’ Coming shortly after a visit by Mobutu – who, on being reminded by a French minister that Zaire was tens of millions of dollars behind on its payments, had pulled out a UBS chequebook on a personal account in Switzerland, where he was estimated to have stashed away more than US $20 billion in ill-gotten gains, and asked: ‘Who shall I make it out to?’ – the question did not lack pertinence.
Mitterrand was not pleased. Like his right-wing predecessors, he had focussed on maintaining stable relations with the leaders of French Africa rather than promoting the welfare of their peoples.fn4 Jean-Christophe explained his attitude by saying he did not want to be ‘the White boss dictating to the former colonies’.
In June, after a tense meeting with his ministers at which the President had rejected their calls for a change of policy, Jean-Louis Bianco confronted him in his office. For the first time in the ten years they had worked together, he told Mitterrand he disagreed with him. France, he said, must channel aid where it was needed, not where African Presidents wanted it, and there must be more stress on human rights, democracy, pluralism and the fight against corruption.
Mitterrand was furious. ‘You too! . . . It’s idiotic,’ he fumed. But he listened. At La Baule, in Brittany, on June 20, at a summit meeting with African Heads of State, he delivered a speech which he had worked on for days and rewritten half a dozen times. France, he told them, had taken two centuries to achieve a democratic system and was in no position to give others lessons. But he went on,
it is necessary for us to talk about democracy. It’s a universal principle which the peoples of central Europe recently realised was so self-evident that, in a matter of weeks, regimes which had been considered very strong were overthrown. The people went out into the streets and the squares, and those in power, sensing their own weakness, ceased to resist, as though they had already known for a long time that their regimes were no more than an empty shell. And this people’s revolution, the most important since 1789, is going to continue. [It] will go all round the world . . . There are not thirty-six different ways to democracy. [It means] a representative [political] system, free elections, a multi-party system, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, no censorship . . . Some of you will say, ‘we’ve tried that and we know the drawbacks’. But the drawbacks . . . are outweighed by the benefits of feeling that one is in an organised civil society . . . No matter what, that is the direction we must take. It is the path towards freedom on which you will travel at the same time as you travel along the path to development.26
Mitterrand went to immense lengths to avoid offending his listeners. Repeatedly he insisted that France was not interfering, it was merely offering an opinion. Nonetheless the speech raised hackles. Hassan of Morocco, Hissène Habré in Chad, Eyadéma in Togo found terms like ‘democracy’, ‘people’s revolution’ and ‘multi-party system’ unacceptable.
At a news conference afterwards the French President drove home his point. ‘French aid,’ he said, ‘will be lukewarm towards regimes which behave in an authoritarian fashion and do not accept progress towards democracy, and enthusiastic towards those who take the plunge with courage.’
The speech was not the turning point which Mitterrand’s supporters claimed, but it did reflect a changing political climate. In the Ivory Coast and Gabon, there were multi-party elections. In Algeria, President Chadli Bendjedid legalised the opposition but then, two years later, confronted by the prospect of an Islamic fundamentalist victory in the elections, banned it again. In Morocco King Hassan agreed to release a number of political detainees and to make modest changes in hi
s barbaric prison system. In Chad and Mali, dictators were overthrown bloodily, and in Bénin, peacefully. Elsewhere, African leaders either went through the motions of democracy while taking care to do nothing which might curtail their own power, or, like Eyadéma in Togo, refused to make any changes at all.
Mitterrand’s promises of greater rigour, and of making aid conditional on democratic progress, remained a dead letter. Two years later, five of the most corrupt countries in the continent were still among those Paris was helping most.
To some that was a mark of pragmatism: Africa was not ready for democratic institutions; the only answer was to pay lip-service to democratic ideals.27 ‘La Baule?’ Mitterrand said afterwards. ‘It changes nothing.’ To others it was a missed opportunity, the first sign that, in his mid-seventies, Mitterrand was beginning to show his age, losing touch with the way the world was evolving. There had been straws in the wind before. Attali remembered a Cabinet meeting on education at which the President had launched out on a long digression about the qualities of primary schools during his childhood in the 1920s. In the case of Africa, Mitterrand’s ideas had been formed in the 1950s and had not changed greatly since. After La Baule, the ties between France and its former African colonies were still based, as before, on clientelism and patronage. Policy was decided when an African leader picked up the telephone and dialled the Elysée. The ‘Africa of Papa’, as de Gaulle would have called it, lived on. It would contribute to one of the continent’s grimmest tragedies, the genocide in Rwanda.
In the Middle East, progress towards a peace settlement had been blocked since the mid-1980s. The reasons were multiple, but prominent among them were the intransigence of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who had succeeded Begin at the head of the Likud, and the Reagan administration’s lack of interest.
Mitterrand received Shamir in Paris in January 1989 and said afterwards that it had been like talking to ‘a block of granite’. The Israeli Prime Minister said no to everything: no negotiations with the PLO, no elections for a Palestinian administration in the occupied territories, no Palestinian State.28 ‘You say you want peace,’ Mitterrand told him. ‘But if you don’t know who to talk to about peace, it’s not much help . . . You offer nothing. You are denying the Palestinians the right to a homeland, the same right for which you yourselves fought.’ Shamir’s stonewalling convinced Mitterrand that the time had come for him to meet Yasser Arafat. The violence of the Israeli army’s repression of the ‘intifada’ – a mirror image of David and Goliath, in which 120,000 Palestinians were arrested and more than a thousand killed – had dismayed Western opinion. The PLO National Council had for the first time conceded Israel’s right to exist and Arafat had formally renounced the use of terrorism.
When the Israeli Premier learnt what Mitterrand intended, he sent an angry protest. The President did not reply. ‘I am a friend of Israel,’ he told his aides, ‘but I haven’t joined the extreme Right of the Likud.’
Arafat and Mitterrand met at the Elysée on Tuesday, May 2 1989, after much diplomatic hand-wringing over the niceties of protocol. This leader, unlike others, had the right to a red carpet but not an honour guard; to a greeting from the Chief of Protocol but not the Secretary-General. He was, however, allowed a Palestinian pennant, signifying sovereignty, on the armoured limousine which brought him from the airport. The President urged him to go further in making clear the PLO’s willingness to recognise Israel and negotiate a lasting peace:
In 1947, we recognised the State of Israel . . . We recognised a State, not necessarily its policies . . . You have been courageous . . . You have gone nine tenths of the way, the rest will cost you nothing . . . It would be to your advantage to say clearly that the [PLO] Charter [calling for Israel’s destruction], will be abolished when there is peace . . . Israel needs to understand both that France is vigilant in matters affecting its security and that France recognises the right of the Palestinians, a people in exile, to return to their land . . . Historically Gaza has never been Jewish. They never wanted it. Shamir has more ambition than the [Old Testament] prophets.29
Arafat did more than he had been asked. That night he declared on French television that the offending articles in the Charter were ‘null and void’.30 It proved to be a key step in opening the way to an eventual Israeli–Palestinian agreement. But before that could happen, another problem intervened which led for a time to all other considerations being put aside. On the night of August 1 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait.
Iraq had ended its war with Iran with US $70 billion in debts and needing another $60 billion for reconstruction. Kuwait had 8 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, which brought US $16 billion a year to a feudal and obscenely rich pro-American ruling family with little support among Arab states outside the Gulf. Saddam Hussein had calculated that the rest of the world would look the other way.
Next day Mitterrand told Roland Dumas: ‘To make war on behalf of these billionaire potentates will be hard for us.’ But he already knew that France would have no choice. ‘[My] intuition . . . is that this is just the beginning and the crisis is going to get worse,’ he told a Cabinet committee that weekend. ‘All these princes are too rich, they are too fat, they are afraid of losing the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. [But] we must be firm . . . We have to defend international law and solidarity.’
By August 9, the President’s mind was made up.
That afternoon he asked the ministers most directly concerned to give their opinions. One after another, they expressed reluctance to see France join the United States in a war against Iraq. Jospin and Bérégovoy thought French intervention might be possible if the United Nations approved a military expedition. Joxe opposed military action of any kind. The Defence Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, thought that if Saddam fell it would open the way to the spread of Iranian fundamentalism. Rocard agreed. For France to join ‘a war of the rich countries’, led by America, against ‘a populous, poor, secular State’ would be a grave mistake, damaging French relations with the rest of the Arab world. Others proposed that France should have a military presence on standby in the region but ‘give ourselves some distance from the US’ and allow time for sanctions to work. Mitterrand heard them out with ill-concealed irritation:
When you shelter behind those arguments you’re just reasoning in a vacuum! [Of course] we will pursue economic sanctions . . . And of course we must think of our relations with Iraq and with the Arabs. But the problem is this: are we going to let the Americans and the British act alone? . . . The Americans know that the French and the British are the only ones [in Europe] capable of taking action. If we don’t respond, it means we are going to sit on the sidelines . . . If we say no, it means we will not come to the aid of a country that has been threatened . . . We can’t follow two policies at the same time. If we evade that problem, we’ve gathered here to no purpose. People will say France is out of it . . . Iraq is an unscrupulous, bloody dictatorship, which is asphyxiating the Kurds. In certain circumstances we are happy to have the Americans with us. We are their allies . . . In this case we must be clear about our solidarity. If we have to choose, I consider that we must fight against [Saddam] Hussein, whatever the consequences may be. If we don’t, we are false brothers of the West.31
Ten days later he announced on television that ‘as a result of the actions of the Iraqi President, we are in a logic of war’.
In a context of Iraqi aggression, as with Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in 1982 and the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles a year later, Mitterrand’s instincts were sure. However much he might equivocate on issues of domestic policy, or debate with himself over the extent of change in the Soviet Union or in Africa, here he was on familiar terrain. With Saddam it was a trial of strength. From the late summer of 1990, French policy did not waver. To mollify opinion at home, where a groundswell was developing on the Left against French participation in an American-led coalition, and to show the Arab States that France was spar
ing no effort to obtain a diplomatic solution, Mitterrand went further than his partners, notably Thatcher and Bush, in offering the Iraqi leader face-saving ways out. As he expected, they led nowhere. At the end of August, he told Prince Saud: ‘we approve of all these peace initiatives, but we don’t believe in them’. A few days later, at a meeting with King Hussein of Jordan, who had been urging a compromise with Saddam, he vented his bitterness at the Iraqi leader:
Iraq violated the law. Until it says in one way or another that it is ready to leave Kuwait, there will be a state of war . . . Iraq pays no attention to what we have tried to do to save it [from its own folly] and treats us like dogs. Saddam owes us 24 billion francs [£2.3 billion or US $4 billion] and he takes hostage all the French citizens [in Iraq]! It’s an unpardonable act of ingratitude. It’s barbarous! Humanly speaking, in seventy-four years and after fifty years in politics, I have never until now seen a man dishonour himself like that! It’s unworthy! . . . Is there no gratitude, no appreciation, no respect for one’s word in the Arab world?32
Two months later he spoke again of Saddam’s duplicity in a conversation with George Bush. Both lamented that the ally of yesterday had become the enemy of tomorrow:
MITTERRAND: I used to get letters from the Emir of Kuwait and the King of Saudi Arabia [during the Iran–Iraq war], reproaching me for not giving Iraq enough arms!
BUSH: We, too – we used to give the Iraqis intelligence information.
MITTERRAND: We had only one idea in our heads: stopping Khomeini’s Islamic revolution.33
The one faint hope, in Mitterrand’s view, was to establish a link between Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait and a resumption of the Middle East peace process, thus giving Saddam ‘a pretext for yielding’ because he would be able to portray his decision as a means to launch fresh negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. Gorbachev was in favour. Saudi Arabia was not opposed. But the Americans were unenthusiastic and Saddam laid down as a precondition that the coalition must renounce the use of force, which made agreement impossible.