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French atrocities
April 29, 2003
Like many of you, I have been struggling to understand why the French have behaved as they do regarding the United States. As this is one subject fraught with opinion but very little fact, a bit of digging seemed to be in order.
Some of the trail led to Africa, where France has continued its century-long, "sphere of influence" (read as "assumed ownership") of parts of that continent. France has regularly behaved in a such a well-documented, murderous manner that, were it the United States, it would prompt an unheard-of level of universal international condemnation.
You should know that today's actions simply follow the well-established pattern of government actions under DeGaulle's Jacques "Papa" Foccard, who was infamous for his Machiavellian intrigues in formerly French Africa.
The United Nations debate over Iraq has been a most welcome diversion, as France has long managed to support and direct bloody dictatorships, genocide and at-will military interventions across the map of Africa with self-assured impunity.
Take for instance, the latest French military intervention, Operation Unicorn, in the Ivory Coast beginning in late 2002.
A former colony, Cote d' Ivoire was given nominal independence in 1958 while France artfully maintained the lion's share of governmental functions and ownership of businesses. French businesses routinely returned just a quarter of the market value of Ivorian exports to the country, while maintaining French dominance in imported goods.
In a shift of policy from his predecessors, Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo ruled in the French manner by segregating and allocating power within the country's population along ethnic and religious lines with the immigrant workers and Muslim north forcibly kept in thrall to the Christian south.
A failed coup this past September that was outwardly instigated by ousted Ivorian leader, Gen. Robert Guei (killed early in the ensuing ethnic fighting) endangered French business interests and French President Chirac responded in typically Gallic fashion by sending in increasing numbers of the French Foreign Legion's famed Paras. Initially touted as a "peace-keeping" force, the troops were soon authorized to shoot anyone who might obstruct them. These orders are a very far cry from those given to American peacekeepers, but their issuance drew no significant international notice.
The Ivorian government then quickly began to field French-made light armor and Russian-made heavy attack helicopters provided through the good offices of the Belgians, while significant quantities of Russian-made small arms and some armored vehicles came in via the Angolans.
According to reports, the forces of the French-backed government then embarked on a series of murders of immigrants in areas under their control, whilst the French troops kept rebel forces at bay. This is not to say the rebels did not perpetrate the same horrors as well, for the literal eye-for-an-eye is a particularly African custom.
If not for the debate over Iraq, President Chirac might have suffered some embarrassing publicity over such actions. Not that he would deign to take notice.
Another example still waiting to be prosecuted is France's Rwandan Operation Turquoise and its predecessor actions. For those who missed that one, Turquoise was their 1994 military action that assisted in the fully armed escape of the French-backed and equipped perpetrators who initiated the Hutu-Tutsi genocide that eventually claimed 800,000 lives. The French government also provided transport and de facto sanctuary for Agathe Kanziga (wife of the Rwandan dictator) and her entourage that were fully involved in the governmentally instigated genocide.
On Dec. 15, 1998, the French parliamentary committee appointed to examine their own country's culpability in the genocide pronounced themselves wholly innocent … it was the U.N. that did it – but of course. The Rwandans disagreed and, in August of 2002, quoted a 1994 telephone conversation from a top French official to a Rwandan military official discussing the shipment of weapons and who then asked him to stop killing Tutsi people on camera. "Kill them, but do it off camera." Imagine the uproar if an American official had uttered that one.
While briefly reported in America, these French-empowered mass murders have not drawn the ire of our liberal media as they seem to be truly possessed of the ethnic and racial stereotyping they so raucously accuse others of with such strident speechifying. Think on the case of Rodney King for just a moment.
As for the French, their studied policy is to simply ignore the outcry.
This brings us back to just why the French behave toward America in the way that they do.
Gallic hauteur and pride is so universally accepted as part of their national character that its display goes almost without any notice, except for a shrug – even by the French themselves. It is this untoward pride of place along with their own self-awareness of their habitual, almost casual misdeeds that prompt them to malign America. It is because they truthfully cannot tolerate the notion of a country with standards of ethical conduct better than their own well-documented, venerable thuggish, murderously thieving and oppressive behavior.
While we are far less than perfect, pray we never sink to the level of the French.
worldnetdaily.com
France and Algeria unconcerned by revelations of French atrocities.
For more than a year irrefutible new evidence of war crimes committed by French forces during the Algerian war of independence has been surfacing in French newspapers and in memoirs by senior French generals. These men personally directed the atrocities now being revealed, and revel in their grisly stories, confirming in the process the role of French politicians in them. Yet while French politicians publicly deplore the atrocities, the authorities refuse to accept responsibility for them, let alone apologise or offer compensation. Indeed, such is their hypocrisy that, while these revelations were being made, Paris had the audacity to condemn the Algerian government for its crackdown on Berber protesters in Kabyla, saying that it would not stand aside and do nothing while innocents were being massacred. Even more reprehensibly, the Algerian government reacted angrily to French criticism of its Berber policy, but remained silent on the new revelations that set out in grisly detail the atrocities committed against Algerians.
The latest revelations come in a book published recently by General PaulAussaresses, 83, who was in charge of undercover operations during the battle of Algiers in 1957 at the height of the war for Algerian independence. The general admitted — indeed boasted — in his book, and in newspaper interviews, that he and his men had tortured and summarily executed ‘rebels’ as well as civilians, with the knowledge of the French government. According to him, the late president Francois Mitterand, who was minister of justice at the time, was well aware of the atrocities and condoned them.
In particular, Aussaresses admitted in the book, Services Speciaux, Algeri 1955—1957, to personally assassinating two Algerian leaders and to torturing scores of prisoners, saying that he felt no shame because he had no respect for "individual human life", including his own. He has said that torture and murder were justifiable weapons against Algerian ‘rebels’, while he and his men were ‘patriots’. The general added: "The situation was explosive; there were threats of bomb attacks on all sides. I needed information to gain time and I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Torture is very effective. Most people break and talk. Afterwards for the most part we would finish them off."
This is another way of saying that he committed war crimes against people whose lives he considered had no value because they were Algerians who dared to defy the might of France. French politicians were horrified by the revelations not because they disapproved of the acts, as they pretended, but because the general took the lid off the sinister secrets of their state. So they sought to blame France’s war crimes on him personally, and appealed for this chapter of Franco-Algerian history to be closed. President Jacques Chirac, who described the book as "shameful", could only allow himself to call publicly for Aussaresses to be suspended from membership of the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award.
French leaders, like their Algerian counterparts, are not calling for an investigation into the question of war crimes to find out who was guilty of what, since Aussaresses and those who helped him or directed him were acting in the name of the French state. In fact, the French and Algerian authorities have been engaged in a conspiracy of silence from the beginning. As long ago as 1955 a French magazine referred to the French forces in Algeria as "our Gestapo in Algeria", comparing them to the Nazi mass-killers of the Third Reich. But in 1962, when the French and Algerians met to sign a peace treaty, the FLN and Paris agreed to keep details of atrocities secret. As a recent newspaper report put it, "for four decades [since the peace treaty of 1962] there has been a conspiracy of silence, rudely disturbed by Aussaresses’ unrepentant memoir."
In these four decades Paris has succeeded in corrupting successive ruling elites in Algeria, in order to steal the country’s rich resources of oil and gas, and another conspiracy of silence has been established between the ruling elites of both countries. The Algerian military leaders, who rule the country from behind the scenes, are major beneficiaries of the culture of corruption, and will go to great lengths to prevent the lid from being blown off. President Boudiaf, for instance, was murdered because he had spoken of corrupt practices in high places, and vowed to expose them. But corruption cannot be only one-way: French leaders are also deeply corrupt and have strong personal reasons for keeping the lid down.
Allegations of corruption involving French presidents from Charles de Gaulle to Chirac hit the headlines on May 18 as French media and politicians discussed the fall-out from the revelations made in general Aussaresses’ book. A former director of the state-owned (now privatised) oil company Elf-Aquitaine said that the five past presidents had condoned bribery and other corrupt practices. He gave full details of how they used the company to "buy influence" for France in other countries. The current president, Chirac, came to office after Le Floch-Prigent left the company. But Elf’s former director general and president said that Chirac, in his previous positions as prime minister and head of the RPR party, was fully aware of how the company was used as a conduit for bribes and covert policies of the French state. "Jacques Chirac knows all that I know, as Mitterand did, he said.
In this atmosphere of corruption and fear of exposure, neither French nor Algerian politicians or generals will be eager to demand trials and investigations in connection with war crimes. The French argue that in 1968 the French parliament declared an amnesty for all crimes committed during the Algerian war, and that in any case the French statute of limitation for murder is just ten years. Yet only two years ago Maurice Papon, a former civil servant, began a ten-year sentence at the age of 89 for his crimes of collaboration during the Nazi occupation of France.
The Algerians in the 1950s were fighting to rid themselves of foreign occupation as France was in the 1940s , and the war crimes committed against them should also be regarded as crimes against humanity that are subject to international law and conventions, not to French legislation that seeks to limit the scope of international law and norms. Otherwise the only conclusion to be drawn from all this is that conspiring in the murder of French people is punishable, while the same acts against Algerian victims are all right.
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