Above source is in French -- My one year of high school French was decades ago, so this commented report/response is from J. Peter Pham at "The Tank" of National Review Online.
Le Figaro reports that French prosecutors have charged forty-two members of the country's political establishment in connection with an illegal scheme that supplied arms worth some $790 million to fuel the civil war in oil-rich Angola which only ended in 2002. More than 300,000 people died in the conflict.
| Arms companies had to sell arms, after all; people had to eat, workers had to work, shareholders needed dividends. Phwench gummint takes care of their own arms makers even as they cluck about everyone else ... |
Those charged include Jean-Christophe Mitterand, son of the late French president who served as his father's chief advisor on African affairs; Jacques Attali, another senior aide to President Mitterand who is presently a member of the French Council of State; and Charles Pasqua, a former minister of the interior who is currently both an elected senator from incumbent President Jacques Chirac's party and the appointed head of the National Institute for Higher Security Studies (Inhes).
While all those accused have denied wrongdoing, the broad indictment which embraces prominent figures from both major French political currents — the left-of-center Socialists and the right-of-center Gaullists — hardly diminishes the increasing mood of cynicism as the electorate approaches the first round of elections scheduled to take place in two weeks, to say nothing of the skepticism that those abroad might have about the France's role on the world stage after twelve years of its lame duck president as poseur of global conscience even as the French courts now unveil that most of this bloody traffic took place on his watch. |