Tag Archives: France

Re-Christianise to fight genocide!

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Europe must re-Christianise to resist terror!

A Roman Catholic nun has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Theophister Mukakibibi was jailed by a traditional Rwandan court for helping ethnic Hutu militiamen kill Tutsis hiding in a hospital where she worked.

Mukakibibi is the first nun sentenced by a Rwandan court for crimes committed during the genocide.

Two other Catholic nuns were found guilty by a Belgian court in 2001, and male priests have also faced trial.

Theophister Mukakibibi worked at the National University Hospital in the town of Butare during the genocide.

Protection

According to Jean Baptiste Ndahumba, president of the local gacaca court in Butare, the nun selected Tutsis sheltering in the hospital and threw them out for the militias to kill.

He said she did not spare pregnant women, and was also accused of dumping a baby in a latrine, the Reuters news agency reports.

“She used to hold meetings with militiamen and had an army officer as her escort during the killings,” Mr Ndahumba said…

Posted, as they say, without comment.

Power failure

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In more ways than one. On Saturday night, between 2230 and 2300 local time, a huge chunk of the European power grid fell over, affecting supply from northwest Germany, through Holland and Belgium, and mostly in France. Further afield, small areas of Austria and Italy lost power, and the Spain-Morocco interconnection was shut off to prevent the trouble spreading. Fortunately, power was restored speedily.

At the heart of the whole thing, meet the cruise liner Norwegian Pearl. This floating gin palace was recently completed by the Meyer Werft shipyard on the river Ems in northwestern Germany. Now, Meyer’s shipyard is a long way up the river. To get a ship the size of the Pearl out, you have to wait for a spring tide. But there’s a catch – just downstream of the yard, a 400 kilovolt transmission line belonging to the German utility company E.ON crosses the river. And the more water there is in the river, the less clearance there is under the wires. So, on Saturday night, when the weather and the tide were perfect for Captain Thomas Teitge to take the ship down the river, E.ON switched the wires off. And then the troubles began.

Update: She sailed today without further trouble.
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No to Non-Euro NATO Bureau

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For some reason, there is hardly ever any NATO coverage on this blog, despite the fact it’s the other pan-European institution. The Euro-Atlantic alliance is having a summit next month, to be held in Riga. Now, one of the main topics for this gathering is the long-running one of adapting NATO to challenges other than that of defending the North German plain from the Red Army. Role-of-the-week is, of course, fighting terrorism. A wider view might point out that the so-called “emerging security threats” predate the War On Terrorism, and that many of the capabilities required for “fighting terrorism” abroad are equally applicable to regional peacekeeping or even expeditionary warfighting.

Anyway, it’s long been thought in some circles that NATO’s radius of action ought to be increased. During the Cold War, NATO was quite intimately connected with other Western allies outside the North Atlantic, both via the Americans and also other multilateral mechanisms. The overlap between NATO, the EU, and other security communities and economic areas has often, then and now, been seen as a sort of “community of democracies” or (as Raymond Aron put it) “world of order”. On the other hand, E.P. Thompson savaged what he saw as a sick complacency in the face of nuclear dread and capitalist exploitation on the part of the “Natopolitans” in an article entitled Inside the Whale, and today’s rabid right wants to have a “Democratic Union” made up of NATO and EU states, Japan, India and Australia – but not France, naturally. NATO, meanwhile, has expanded in Europe and taken on a mission to Afghanistan, which is well out-of-area in NATOspeak.

The latest proposal was supported by the US and UK, and foresaw regular bilateral meetings between NATO and allied states outside Europe, with a shortlist of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. In a sense, it would have brought a sort of “secret NATO” or “virtual NATO” into the tent – the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have separate alliances among themselves and with the US, including the UKUSA, CAZAB and Echelon intelligence cooperation agreements, ANZUK and ANZUS.

So what happened?
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HOWTO Protest with a Tank

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Der Standard reveals all you need to know about driving a stolen tank into the police lines. Apparently, the man who stole an ex-Soviet T34/85 from the 1956 revolution commemorations and used it on the Hungarian riot police has been arrested. He is reportedly a former soldier (no surprise, as Hungary either has or used to have universal conscription) who might conceivably have driven one before.

This is not that likely but is possible. The T34/85 was possibly the best tank of the second world war and remained a mainstay of the Red Army into the 50s, but was already being replaced by the T54 series in 1956. By the time anyone likely to be fighting with cops in Budapest this week would have been serving, the Warsaw Pact armies had long since flushed most of their T34s out of the ranks, and for that matter their T54s. Most of the T34s that avoided scrapping, museums or use as targets were exported to the Third World – as is well known, there’s nothing you can do for poor people that will do them more good than sending guns.

Anyway, the report in the Standard gives some useful hints on how to protest with a tank. You’ll need enough voltage to turn over a really hefty diesel engine. The Hungarians solved this with several car batteries hooked up in series (not in parallel, mark!). You’ll probably find the tank is locked or worse, so bring an angle grinder, oxy-acetylene torch or arc welding set. In Budapest, the tank’s hatch proved to be padlocked – so it was a good job he came with the right tools.

It doesn’t sound likely that the tank would be fuelled up and ready to go, so the wise man would want to bring a jerry can or three of diesel – after all, once you get it started you can always stop and fill up. Given all the equipment, you’ll almost certainly need an accomplice, or perhaps several. But when arrested, remember to say that you acted entirely alone.

Virtual politics and real bullets

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The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the Russian-appointed prime minister of Chechnya, who she was about to accuse of torture. After a week of rising hysteria in the Russian media and state, with a wave of goon-squad assaults on Georgian businesses and the collection of sinister lists of Georgian-sounding schoolchildren – what, pray, is the purpose of this? – this ought to inter any lingering myths of Russian democracy. It is time to grasp that we are sharing a continent with a very large tyranny, in fact, that we never ceased to do so.

Exactly what will happen next is unclear, but the worst must be assumed. The reaction of Europe so far appears to be deafening silence. See the BBC report above for a tasty quote from the secretary of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, suggesting she was killed by “self-appointed executioners”. Self-appointed? I don’t think his Midlands constituents lost very much when they voted him out back in 2004. No Baltic gas pipelines were involved, so German silence is a given, France will presumably continue to find Russian support on the UNSC useful, and Britain will probably shut up – hasn’t Tony Blair prided himself on his personal relationship with Putin? (Personal politics, the great delusion of the last hundred years.)

If you need any convincing, I recommend Andrew Wilson’s book Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. This is a truly impressive march through a morass of deceit and state-sponsored bullshit, whose central thesis is simply that most of Russian politics, as it was marketed both to the Russians and also to the western politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats who funded it through the 1990s, does not exist. Parties do not have members, policies, or constitutions, and do not represent real interest groups. Even when, like the Communist Party, they actually do exist, they are frequently not actually trying to win the elections-sensationally, Wilson quotes a senior Communist as being horrified how close the party came to unwanted victory in 1996.

Instead, parties, movements and politicians are usually prepared from whole cloth for specific political projects, and created in the public mind by a barrage of TV advertising for the mass and outrageous web propagandists for the elite. It is possible to buy an entire political party, tailored to one’s specifications, from $100,000.
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Indigènes

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France is, finally, honouring its North-African war heroes in the wake of the release of the film Indigènes. The film is by French director Rachid Bouchareb and its main cast of five were collectively awarded the Best Actor prize at the film festival of Cannes. The title of the film means “natives” but the official English-language title is “Days of Glory”. From BBC News:

The film is about the campaign from Provence through to Alsace in 1944-45 as seen through the eyes of four soldiers, who leave their homelands in Algeria and Morocco to fight for France.

President Chirac has seen the movie, was moved by it and:

…has announced that the pensions of foreign soldiers who fought in the French army are to be brought into line with those of French ones.

Another interesting quote from the same article:

Many in the audience were themselves of North African origin, and had no idea of this part of French history. “I never saw an Arab or an African soldier in my history books”, says 23-year-old Salima, a student from the Paris suburb of Seine-St-Denis. Her parents come from Morocco and her grandfather fought in the war. (…) “When you go to Africa, people tell us we’re not African. In Europe they tell us we’re not European. We are, and we’re staying. “We’re a bridge that Europe and Africa needs, especially in these times”.

Google news without Belgian news

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The Belgian court of Justice has ordered Google News to remove all feeds of Belgian newspapers and journalists. This news was broken by Chilling Effects:

…to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French – and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and “cache” Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € per day of delay;

The original court order, in French and dating from September 5th, can be found here (pdf). Google News seems to be charged with violating laws concerning copyright (publishing of headlines and first paragraphs) and databases (publishing cached articles after they have been retired by editors). If I understand the Belgian and Dutch press correctly, the court order concerns only publications in French and German as Dutch-language publishers have already had their headlines removed from Google News. It is possible that publishers will use this court order to negotiate, in which case Google News could eventually be forced to share its advertising revenues with the respective publishers.

1..2..3..And They’re Off – The Left

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On the other side of French politics, as I promised, the internal conflicts are if anything stronger. To start with the most important ones, the Socialist Party is about to do something quite rare in its history – have a contested primary election. The only other was that of 1995, when Lionel Jospin beat Henri Emmanuelli to succeed Francois Mitterand. Before that, the candidacy normally went to the party’s first secretary, who was usually Mitterand anyway. (Before 1971, when Mitterand set up the modern PS, the various splinter-groups from the old SFIO that made it up of course had their own arrangements.)

Since the disaster of 2002, though, this looks like it’s going to change, chiefly because there’s a strong external candidate. Ségoléne Royal, the head of the Poitou-Charentes regional government, has been campaigning vigorously all year with some success. The success can be measured, in fact, by the frequency with which she is being accused of “Blairism” by the rest of the possible candidates. This looks like being the content-free insult of the campaign, in fact, as could be seen with the PS official quoted by Libération who remarked that he didn’t want Royal to “come back from London and abolish the social security” – after all, everyone knows that the UK provides no social security whatsoever, right?

It would be more accurate to place Royal on the soft-left. (If anyone’s Blairite in this game, it’s Nicolas Sarkozy – this speech is a classic of early Blairite rhetoric circa 1997.) She is no more “neoliberal” than Lionel Jospin was in government, for example, or for that matter Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and is closer to the Greens than some. She is given to vaguely conservative speaking, but it’s harder to discern where a concern for civisme, secularity and Republican values (in the French sense) stops and where a rather stern law-and-order politics begins in a French context.

However, it looks more and more as if the rest of the party is gearing up for an “anti-Blairism”, stop-Sego campaign. And policy doesn’t matter very much in this sense.
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1..2..3..And They’re Off!!

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Well, with the summer party universités d’été done and everyone going back to work, the run-in begins in earnest to the French presidential election. This shows every sign of being very interesting indeed. After all, it’s the biggest direct mandate for any politician in Europe and the second-biggest in the whole democratic world (I exclude Russia because whatever it is, it ain’t democracy), so it ought to be worth watching anyway. This one is especially interesting, though, as everyone has a lot to prove.

The Socialists are desperate to recover from the disaster of 2002 and regain some power. Whether they can do this, and how they do it, is going to be a bellwether for the Left throughout the world. Inside the party, there is a whole world of bitter conflict to work out. The extreme-left is desperately trying to unite, in the hope of capitalising on the victory against the CPE and eventually getting some tangible results from their combined 12-15 per cent of the first round vote. After all, whatever they hoped to achieve, you can be sure that a Chirac-Le Pen runoff wasn’t it.

On the Right, there is an even more savage internal struggle in progress. The blue-eyed boy, Nicolas Sarkozy, is lining up for the final straight with his bid to bring something eerily like Tony Blair to France – free markets and mass surveillance – whilst Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin still hopes to seize the succession to Jacques Chirac. This overlays the old distinction between the Gaullists and the “classical right”. But what’s this?
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Maybe the hour of Europe is at hand

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…this time? The signs do appear to being pointing to a possible employment of European forces in Lebanon, not least with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and others expressing a preference for “EU countries” or NATO – which is mostly the same thing, especially militarily – to supply troops to any peacekeeping/peace enforcement mission there.

The reason why particularly EU forces might be wanted is that the experience with UNIFIL, the existing UN force there, is not great. As what could be termed a “classic” UN force – blue helmets, white AFVs, no Chapter VII authority, and often drawn from neutral and third world armies – it never had a chance of keeping the PLO or Hezbollah out, and neither did it have a chance of standing up to the Israelis. For their part, the Israelis would obviously like any international force sent to the Litani to be effective. And if it is not effective, it won’t protect the Lebanese from the Israelis either!

Unfortunately, effective international forces for this job are in short supply. The US is out of the question, even if it could spare the troops. British armed forces are frantically overstretched. It seems unlikely to say the least that India would get involved, Pakistan would not be welcome, neither would Turkey for different reasons. Vladimir Putin has said that Russia would support a peace force, but its deployable forces are small, and a dose of the Grozny approach to peacekeeping would do everyone a power of bad. That doesn’t really leave anyone else.

Update below the fold.
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