Combative spirit emerges in France

Press, 19 September 1985, Page 26

Combative spirit emerges in France

By

RICHARD BERNSTEIN,

“New York Times” Paris A revealing moment in what has come to be called the Rainbow Warrior affair surfaced in Paris recently when the French Prime Minister, Mr Laurent Fabius, answered questions from a television audience. One caller raised the matter of the Rainbow Warrior, but it was not to ask if French Intelligence agents had sunk the vessel, or whether France had abused its power in the affair. The caller wanted to know whether Mr Fabius did not think it necessary to “combat” Greenpeace’s campaign of interference with French testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. The episode has clearly embarrassed France and the French. It has also provoked a combative spirit among segments of public opinion and among Government officials. Last week, for example, President Francois Mitterrand travelled to the French nuclear-testing site at Mururoa Atoll. The announcement came amid reaffirmations by the Government that the testing would continue in spite of protests and the uproar over the Rainbow Warrior sinking. Mr Fabius, responding to the question posed on television, repeated earlier warnings that “no country or group can dictate French defence policy to us.” This prickly second side

of the French reaction — the warnings to Greenpeace, the refusal to apologise to New Zealand, the restatement of the policy of testing nuclear weapons — suggests the enduring vigour in France of what, in another era, would automatically have been called Gaullism. It reflects the attitude, fostered by de Gaulle, that what he called “glory” can be achieved only by a determinedly independent position in foreign affairs.

This attitude led the General to pull France out of the unified military command of the Western alliance and to develop the country’s own nuclear deterrent. The Greenpeace affair has brought a torrent of press reports on the sinking of the vessel and the arrest by the New Zealand police of two agents of the French Intelligence service, D.G.S.E., who are now awaiting trial on charges of murder and arson.

However, even when a recent report confirmed that French agents had been sent on a spying mission against Greenpeace — the report denied that the agents carried out the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior — the public have remained relatively quiescent.

There have been no demonstrations, no calls for an inquiry, no demands to curb the Intelligence service or to apologise to New Zealand; there were not even any really probing questions during Mr Fabius’ television appearance. “France, this country of

great enthusiasms and bursts of anger, sensitive to human rights and suspicious of power, has kept qiiiet even as its agents are accused of having attacked the Rainbow Warrior in a friendly country,” a sociologist, Alain Touraine, wrote in “Le Monde.” With the country’s economic difficulties, Mr Touraine said, has come a “reinforcement of the idea that the State, the superchief of industry and the military, must be pragmatic and enterprising.” There are other factors in this absence of a strong critical reaction, including the troublesome lack of certainty in the affair. “People are quiet because they are confused,” Mr Alain Richard, a Socialist legislator, said in an interview. They cannot, he said, know all of the facts.

“But secondly,” he went on, ‘“the dominant reaction of the political world is representative of what the French people think, which is that we have to do things like that to maintain ourselves in the world. “If we did it, and I don’t know if we did do it, the political cost will come because of the clumsy way the operation was carried out and not because of the principle involved.” Some people in Paris have questioned the dominant French reaction and the unapologetic warnings of the French Government to Greenpeace to keep out of the zones where testing is scheduled to resume this month.

“Le Monde,” in a recent front-page editorial, said that a prickly reaction to the Rainbow Warrior affair could aggravate what it called a “shoddy sort of Gaullism” that consisted of “arrogance, false Napoleonic superiority, grandeur in the form of isolation, and raison d’etat in the form of a fig leaf.” While some might worry about a virulent and misplaced sort of Gaullism, the Rainbow Warrior affair marks just how tradionalist the attitude of the Socialist Government has been both towards the country’s defence interests and towards the activities of the Intelligence service.

This in itself represents a change for the Socialist Party, which in its days of opposition in the mid-1970s advocated a lessened role for the secret services. These, the party believed, should collect information, but not carry out clandestine operations. The Socialists then were reacting in part to a scandal of the mid-1960s when French secret agents were implicated in the disappearance and apparent killing of a leading Moroccan independence leader, Mehdi Ben Barka. Some Parisians maintain that, in contrast to that earlier suspicion of Intelligence operations, the Greenpeace case reflects a decision of the Socialists, made in the last two years, to strengthen the ability of the Intelligence service to carry out operations overseas.