Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  58. Islamic Jihad pretended that the ‘execution’ was in reprisal for the expulsion to Baghdad on February 19 of two Iraqi dissidents, opponents of Saddam Hussein, who had been arrested in France a week earlier. The expulsions were the result of a series of bureaucratic errors. An incorrect report by Amnesty International that one of the two had been executed gave Islamic Jihad the pretext it had been looking for to announce Seurat’s death. Under intense pressure from Paris, and veiled threats to cut off arms supplies, Saddam Hussein agreed a week later to pardon the two men, who were later discreetly returned to France.

  59. A French newspaper report that Mitterrand might resign if the Right won the elections by a large margin also made the Iranians hesitate. It had been inspired by the Elysée to mobilise left-wing voters. But in Teheran it raised questions about Mitterrand’s promise to free the other four members of the commando before the end of his mandate.

  60. In the autumn of 1986, the left-wing newspaper, Le Matin, accused Chirac of having deliberately sabotaged the negotiations in Teheran in March 1986 by sending word to the Iranians that they would get much more favourable terms if they waited until the new government was in place. The reports were based on diplomatic telegrams quoting statements by the Iranian negotiators. Chirac denied what he called these ‘lying allegations’, but after the full text of one of the telegrams was published – having been leaked by Roland Dumas, evidently with Mitterrand’s agreement – the RPR journal, La Lettre de la Nation, retorted on the Prime Minister’s behalf that the Iranians must have considered ‘the leaders of the opposition more credible’. It was an unfortunate turn of phrase, giving the impression that in the final days before the election – and not just in January, as he had acknowledged before – Chirac had indeed intervened. Pierre Joxe insisted: ‘There is proof, and one day it will be made known.’ Mitterrand was more cautious, saying only: ‘It is certain that the RPR sent envoys to Damascus, Baghdad, Teheran and Beirut, but what they said is less so.’ In Chirac’s defence, it should be added that no convincing evidence was ever produced to back up the charge that the opposition had encouraged the Iranians to delay the hostages’ release.

  13: The Florentine

  1. Cited in Favier and Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 2, p. 503.

  2. This claim was questionable. Between 1982 and 1985, the enterprises nationalised by Mitterrand had sold off dozens of subsidiaries to foreign interests. However, Mitterrand could have argued that the sale of subsidiaries was not the same as allowing whole sectors of strategic industries to pass into foreign hands and Chirac would probably have found it difficult to convince public opinion of the contrary.

  3. Attali, Jacques, Verbatim, Vol. 2, Fayard, 1995, pp. 123–4.

  4. An opinion poll published on June 18 showed that three voters out of five were dissatisfied with the government and that Chirac’s own popularity rating had fallen below 50 per cent.

  5. Meeting with Margaret Thatcher, October 16 1986, cited in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 2, pp. 179–83.

  6. Cabinet minutes, March 4 1987, cited ibid., p. 271.

  7. Meeting with Thatcher, October 16 1986, ibid.

  8. Cited in Favier and Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 2, pp. 643–4.

  9. Meeting with Thatcher, January 29 1988, cited in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 2, p. 449. Mitterrand had told her fifteen months earlier: ‘I don’t attach importance to the American presence in Europe. It pushes the Russians to be warlike . . . Everything depends on the Americans’ resolution . . . If they don’t have it, the presence of their soldiers on the continent won’t give it to them.’

  10. According to the French National Employment Agency, l’ANPE, unemployment was 2.4 million in March 1986 and 2.3 million in May 1988.

  11. Cabinet minutes, October 3 1984, cited in Favier and Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 2, p. 277.

  12. The connection between these events was questionable. Chirac had opened a second line of negotiation through Lebanese businessmen in West Africa, through whom a ransom of 10 million francs (£1 million or US$ 1.5 million) was reportedly paid to the hostage-takers. Nonetheless the government took the view that the normalisation of ties with Iran had helped.

  13. A sixth bomb, left in an underground train, failed to explode.

  14. When the Elysée got wind of the DST report in July, Pasqua denied that it existed.

  15. Diplomatic relations were broken on July 17. Four days earlier, the French cargo ship, Ville d’Anvers, had been attacked in the Gulf. It was announced on July 29 that the aircraft carrier Clemenceau would be sent to the area.

  16. After July 1987, six westerners were taken hostage in Lebanon: a UN officer, Lieutenant-Colonel William Higgins, who was later executed; an elderly Briton, Jackie Mann; two German relief workers and two Swiss citizens. In none of those cases could the order be traced back directly to Teheran. The last Western hostages were freed in 1992, by which time, with the encouragement of the Iranian President, Ali Khamenei, the Hezbollah had moderated its revolutionary goals and begun playing a role in mainstream Lebanese politics.

  17. He told Thatcher at the end of that month: ‘The situation is frozen for a long time to come. It could be like the situation of Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest’, a reference to the Hungarian churchman who spent fifteen years in the US Embassy there.

  18. Cited in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 2, p. 372.

  19. After the Cabinet meeting on July 8, Mitterrand told Pasqua: ‘If the dossier against Gordji is as weak as you think, we have not got off to a very good start.’ The Interior Minister replied: ‘We don’t know. It’s difficult to predict what the magistrate will do.’ Gilles Ménage told Mitterrand later that he believed the magistrate had more than enough evidence to prefer charges.

  20. In July 1987, he told Jospin: ‘I’m going to [stand] for one fundamental reason. If anyone can win, it’s me. If I thought that someone else, including Rocard, could win instead and ensure the continuation [of the Left], I wouldn’t be a candidate.’

  21. Claude Estier thought that Mitterrand had set himself a deadline of February 10 to make up his mind. Mitterrand himself said later: ‘I didn’t take any irrevocable decision until the spring of 1988.’

  22. Lacouture, Mitterrand, Vol. 2, p. 278. See also Favier and Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 2, p. 727.

  23. According to Attali, opinion surveys commissioned by the Elysée showed that ‘voters [were] disorientated by the absence of a campaign’ by Mitterrand as candidate of the Left. On April 12 and 13, the President asked both his own campaign headquarters and the Socialist Party leadership to be more aggressive against Chirac and the RPR while continuing to spare Raymond Barre.

  24. ‘Debate between François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac’, April 28 1988, complete transcript in http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/887013300.html

  25. This was the judgement of Franz-Olivier Giesbert. I cannot put it better.

  26. ‘Debate between François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac’, April 28 1988, supra. Mitterrand accused Chirac of having released the Japanese terrorist following a grenade attack carried out by Carlos on the Publicis Drugstore in St Germain on September 15 1974 in which two people died and 34 were injured. In fact the man, 25-year-old Yutaka Furuya, a member of the Japanese Red Army, was flown to Amsterdam on Friday, September 13, after a Red Army commando, in liaison with Carlos, took over the French Embassy in The Hague, holding the Ambassador and ten others hostage. The hostages and the Japanese commando, together with Furuya, were flown to Damascus on the night of September 16. Abu Daoud was briefly arrested and then released in January 1977, by which time Raymond Barre was Prime Minister, Chirac having resigned in July 1976.

  27. Mitterrand and Roland Dumas were convinced that Chirac had also given a verbal undertaking to pardon Anis Naccache and his accomplices if he were elected. Both Marchiani and his Iranian interlocutors confirmed that that had been part of the deal. The Prime Minister denied it.

 
14: The Monarch

  1. Conversation with Maurice Faure, October 6 1987, cited in Giesbert, Mitterrand: une vie, p. 536.

  2. Cited ibid, p. 546.

  3. The opinion polls had predicted that the Socialists and Left-Radicals would do at least as well as in the parliamentary landslide of 1981. In fact they won 35.9 per cent in the first round compared with 37.4 per cent seven years earlier.

  4. The Socialists obtained 275 seats but could count on the support of a dissident, Claude Miquieu in the Hautes-Pyrenées, who had been excluded from the Party for standing against its official candidate.

  5. Favier, Pierre and Martin-Roland, Michel, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 3, Seuil, 1996, p. 42.

  6. Ibid., pp. 102–3.

  7. Meeting with President George Bush, Kennebunkport, May 20 1989, in Attali, Jacques, Verbatim, Vol. 3, Fayard, 1998, p. 241.

  8. The border was officially declared open on September 11 1989. That day East Germans started arriving in West Germany via Austria, after crossing from Hungary, at the rate of two hundred an hour.

  9. Five days earlier Mitterrand had warned that German reunification would force Britain, France and the USSR to react and that ‘war would be certain in the 21st century’.

  10. Mitterrand was still saying that reunification was ‘not for tomorrow’ in mid-October 1989, less than a month before the Berlin Wall came down.

  11. Cabinet minutes, October 18 1989, in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 3, pp. 322–3.

  12. Meeting with Gorbachev, December 6 1989, cited ibid., pp. 360–67.

  13. Meeting with Thatcher, December 8 1989, cited ibid., pp. 368–70.

  14. Shortly before the Strasbourg summit, Caroline de Margerie, who was charged with preparing the visit, advised Mitterrand to cancel. On December 9, to test the waters, the President told Helmut Kohl he was wondering whether to maintain the trip. According to Kohl’s adviser on European affairs, Joachim Bitterlin, the Germans were not in favour, but ‘it was impossible for [the Chancellor] to tell the President directly: “It’s not your trip, Tintin, it’s mine.”’

  15. The only version of his talks with the East German Prime Minister, Hans Modrow, to have been made public is from the former East German archives. The French transcripts were sent directly to the National Archives in Paris and no French or German historian has been allowed access to them. According to the East German version, Mitterrand stressed the need to take reunification slowly and to do nothing which might upset the existing balance in Europe. During the visit he signed five cooperation agreements covering the period 1990–94 and spoke of the two countries ‘still having much to do together’, adding that East Germany might yet have ‘an important place’ in Europe in the future. It is hard to believe that he would have done that had he not believed – like most of his partners – that the regime would survive, perhaps not for five years, as Vernon Walters had predicted, but at least for a few years more.

  16. Kohl said later, ‘I had an immense problem of internal politics which people like Mitterrand could not imagine.’

  17. The term was first used by Gorbachev’s spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, during an appearance on Good Morning America in October 1989.

  18. Baker acknowledged in his memoirs that his decision to visit East Germany on December 12 – a week before Kohl and eight days before Mitterrand – was ‘in order to show American leadership by going there first’. The Bush administration wanted NATO to be the main player in future pan-European relations because American influence in the alliance was preponderant.

  19. Hubert Védrine said Mitterrand felt that ‘the military alliances were losing their raison d’être’.

  20. Cited in Jean Musitelli, ‘François Mitterrand, architecte de la Grande Europe’ in http://www.mitterrand.org/​Francois-Mitterrand-architecte-de.html.

  21. Agreement was reached to set up the EBRD in May 1990. The bank opened for business in April 1991 with 36 members, including Australia, Egypt, Japan, Korea and Morocco from outside the CSCE area. Four other non-CSCE states, Israel, Jordan, New Zealand and Tunisia, joined later. As of 2013, the bank had 57 member countries.

  22. On March 28 1990, Kohl proposed that the Twelve should convene an intergovernmental conference on political union. Three weeks later he and Mitterrand suggested a parallel conference on monetary union. On April 28, the Dublin Summit called for the conclusion of Economic and Monetary Union by the end of 1992.

  23. Forsne, Christina, François, Seuil, 1997, pp. 225, 228 & 232.

  24. Normally it would have been up to the Interior Minister, Pierre Joxe, to decide whether or not the investigation should proceed. However, given the political sensitivities surrounding the case, it is hard to believe that Mitterrand was not informed. The Socialist Party in Marseille was split between Pezet’s supporters and those of Robert Vigouroux, who had succeeded Gaston Defferre as the city’s mayor upon the latter’s death in 1986. The Party leadership in Paris backed Pezet. Mitterrand’s sympathies were with Vigouroux, who he thought had a better chance of being elected. Did the rivalry between them play into the decision to allow the investigation to continue? Whatever the reason, it soon became clear that it was a seriously bad idea.

  25. In this, as much else concerning Africa, French and British attitudes differ. The French, whose possessions included Arab territories in North Africa – notably Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – recognise a continuity between the Arab and African worlds. The British, whose possessions were all in sub-Saharan Africa (except Egypt and Sudan, which had condominium or protectorate status), regard Africa and the Middle East as being essentially separate regions.

  26. Mitterrand, Speech at La Baule, June 20 1990, in http://www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles​/037/article_20103.asp.

  27. Jacques Chirac, who insisted that Mitterrand did not understand what he called ‘the African mentality’, said in a speech in Abidjan that year that ‘the multiparty system is a political error,. . . a luxury which these countries do not have the means to offer themselves’.

  28. Two months later, George Bush nicknamed him ‘Mr No’.

  29. Meeting with Yasser Arafat, May 2 1989, in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 3, pp. 226–30.

  30. The Palestine National Council did not formally confirm the nullity of those parts of the Charter which rejected Israel’s right to exist until April 24 1996.

  31. Minutes of Cabinet committee discussion, August 9 1990, cited in Attali, Verbatim, Vol. 3, pp. 556–61.

  32. Meeting with King Hussein, September 3 1990, ibid., pp. 584–6.

  33. Transcript of conversation with Bush, November 18 1990, ibid., pp. 637–9. It was a pattern repeated in Afghanistan, where the Americans armed the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Army only to find that they had nurtured the Taliban who provided bases for al-Qaeda.

  34. Meeting with President Bush, April 11 1991, transcript in CHAN 5AG4 CD75, dossier 1.

  35. Mitterrand did not use the term ‘double standard’, but made clear that was what he meant. ‘I ask the United States,’ he told Cheney, ‘to adopt comparable positions towards all the problems that arise in the Arab world.’ The meeting took place after Mitterrand had just spent a year trying to save a Lebanese Christian General, Michel Aoun, whose forces had rashly challenged Syrian suzerainty. It was the last time France would try to play a significant role in Lebanese affairs. Describing France’s problems with Syria over Lebanon, he later told George Bush: ‘For [Assad], the Lebanon is part of Syria, Israel is part of Syria, Jesus Christ was Syrian.’ The US President commented: ‘That’s not bad!’

  36. Meeting with President Bush, March 14 1991, Martinique, in CHAN 5AG4 CD75, dossier 1.

  37. In 1988, French GNP grew by 4.3 per cent, in 1989 by 3.9 per cent and in 1990 by 2.4 per cent. In 1991, growth was forecast to be almost 2 per cent but actually came in at 0.8 per cent. From mid-1990 to mid-1991, unemployment grew by 8.3 per cent, from 2.5 to over 2.7 million.

  38. Adler, Laure, L’année des adieux, Flammarion, 1995, pp. 110–12.

  39
. In June, 49 per cent of those questioned approved of Cresson’s performance and 35 per cent disapproved. A month later the proportions were reversed. Her popularity declined steadily until, by the following summer, 78 per cent were dissatisfied with her and only 22 per cent approved.

  40. The weakening of the links between Moscow and the republics did not occur tidily. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990 and Latvia in May, but neither was recognised internationally until the following year. Estonia had declared itself sovereign in 1988 – the first Baltic country to do so – and from 1990 onwards progressively rejected Soviet control. But, like Latvia and Armenia, which announced its secession in August 1990, its independence was not recognised until the autumn of 1991. The Russian Federation and Moldova declared themselves sovereign in June 1990, followed by the Ukraine in July, marking the beginning of a jurisdictional dispute with the central Soviet government which then spread to other republics. Georgia declared independence in April 1991.

  41. Meeting with President Bush, July 14 1991, cited in Favier, Pierre and Martin-Roland, Michel, La décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 4, Seuil, 1999, pp. 50–51.

  42. The flaw in Mitterrand’s reasoning – which, I confess, at the time, I shared – with much less justification than he had because I had recently spent two months in Moscow – was his failure to realise that the coup leaders lacked the confidence to take decisive measures against their opponents. It is true that it was an extraordinary turnaround: that the KGB, whose Chairman, Kryuchkov, was among the plotters, would prove reluctant to crush opposition, flew in the face of seventy years of Soviet history. Even after five years of Gorbachev’s reforms, it seemed inconceivable that the Soviet State would be impotent in the face of an unarmed crowd, all the more so since, two years earlier, in June 1989, the Chinese leadership, facing a similar situation when protesters occupied Tiananmen Square, had sent in troops who opened fire leaving more than two thousand dead. To Mitterrand (and to me), it seemed obvious that Gorbachev had gone too far, the inevitable reaction had ensued and there would now be a breathing spell while the new Soviet leadership worked out how to proceed. We both misread the situation completely.