French Anomalies (March 2003)
There’s nothing very diplomatic these days about French diplomacy. Not only is Jacques Chirac the main instigator of the unprecedented divide in American-European relations, he’s been causing some discontent on the continent as well.
When a group of Eastern European countries recently expressed their support for American intervention in Iraq, the French president reproached them for having lost an occasion to keep silent. After fifty years trapped in the flames of the hell of the Soviets that kept them gagged with terror, after fourteen years in the purgatory of the waiting room outside the gates of the European Union, that’s all they needed to hear was that they had to keep their mouths shut just to please the likes of Chirac!
French diplomacy skills don’t seem to abound any better in Africa either. The country that taught the world: liberté, égalité, fraternité, now seems to be propagating: concedé, massacré, islamisé. After generating the genocide of the Tutsis in Ruanda several years ago, France recently obliged the secular and democratic government of the Ivory Coast, one of the few African countries that enjoys an albeit relative state of prosperity, to make an accord with its fundamental Islamic rebels, allowing them a certain amount of autonomy in the northern regions. (An experiment that has failed clamorously in Nigeria, where the Sharia is applied in the Islamic provinces and women who are accused of adultery there are condemned to death by lapidation, notwithstanding the fact that such practices are illegal according to federal law.)
As if that weren’t enough, the French also recently pretended to force President Gbagbo to appoint two of the rebels who had attempted a “coup d’état” to head the Ministries of Defense and of the Interior! However, the country rebelled and the French were forced to escape.
In any case, lately the French seem to know no limit when it comes to the despicable. Chirac then invited Robert Magawe, the president of Zimbawe and the most bloodthirsty dictator in all of black Africa, to Paris to participate in a summit for African leaders. He extended this invitation despite the disapproval even of the European Union.
Back in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, they’ve begun to understand that the ones who are acting in their own self interest in Africa are the French and they demonstrated this understanding with actions that spoke loud and clear: by burning the blue, white and red French flag, by waving the stars and stripes of the American flag, and by evoking the aid of President Bush!
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