Mitterrand's legacy under heavy scrutiny

Emma-Kate Symons in Paris | August 11, 2008

ONCE a giant in the pantheon of French presidents, Francois Mitterrand is suffering a public battering that is destroying his carefully constructed domestic and international image as France's last truly great leader.

From alleged links to genocide in Rwanda to arms deals in Angola, apologies for Soviet repression, shady financial deals, illegal phone-tapping and assorted corruption affairs, the ghost of the man who died in 1996 after 14 years at the Elysee Palace is suddenly once again omnipresent.

The return to prominence spells difficulties for the posthumous reputation of a president who was until recently deemed by 60 per cent of voters to have had a "positive record".

Mitterrand returned to front-page news with a damning report released by Rwanda claiming the president and his government, including ministers, advisers, diplomats and soldiers, were directly implicated and complicit in the 1994 genocide.

The report published last week was based on a two-year inquiry that drew on more than 600 witnesses including victims and those involved in the massacres.

The Rwandan presidential commission of inquiry found France under Mitterrand deliberately armed, aided and trained the majority Hutus who went on to murder 800,000 Tutsis. It is even claimed French soldiers were directly involved in some of the massacres, during the UN-backed humanitarian "Operation Turquoise".

The accusations have been curtly denied by the Quai d'Orsay, the headquarters of French diplomacy.

However, foreign policy analysts in Paris said France must answer the claims, which build on comprehensive reports already published by groups such as the French NGO Survie.

Blanket media coverage of the report revealed that, thanks to Mitterrand's much-discredited African policies, he and his soldiers were clearly on the side of the genocidal killers rather than the victims in Rwanda. And although French troops were on the ground during the genocide, and France knew what was about to happen, they did not stop

the killings.

In a shift away from their usual reverence for the late president, former media fans of Mitterrand at Le Monde and the left-wing newspaper Liberation demanded answers.

Liberation said France's role under Mitterrand in the genocide was "not clear" and Le Monde declared France had a "duty to tell the truth" about Rwanda's genocide.

Before the massing of evidence over his role in the Rwandan bloodbath, Mitterrand's legacy was already heavily tainted. Throughout his political career he deliberately concealed his ties to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime before he turned towards the resistance in World War II.

In 2005 his former spy chief revealed Mitterrand had personally ordered the bombing of

the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.

Yet the enigmatic giant of the French Left is still revered by many on the Left in France. Despite his lies and secrecy he has until now been remembered as more "presidential" than his successors Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

This is changing with frequent commentary and criticism of Mitterrand's disturbing legacy as a constant defender of repressive regimes.

As the world mourned the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week, the French press recalled Mitterrand's contemptuous dismissal of The Gulag Archipelago's damning testimony of the Soviet prison system.

When the book was published in France in 1974, Mitterrand was all too mindful of the alliance between the Socialist Party and the then-powerful French Communist Party, still a defender of the Soviet system. Instead of re-examining the Left's support for a discredited ideology he tried to look on the "bright side" of Solzhenitsyn's indictment of Soviet totalitarianism.

"I am persuaded that what is most important is not what Solzhenitsyn says but that he could say it," Mitterrand said.

Le Monde writer Yves Mamou was scathing towards Mitterrand and his contemptuous dismissal of the author's work.

"(Mitterrand's assertion) was extravagant when one considers that the manuscript of Solzhenitsyn passed to the West by clandestine routes and that because of its content the author was risking his life or his liberty."

Elsewhere Mitterrand was remembered for his lionisation of Mao in the 1960s as a "humanist". An unrepentant Mitterrand in 1989 even resisted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent reunification of Germany, preferring the stability of the Soviet-backed Eastern bloc to a post-communist world.

Mitterrand's reputation is also under fire as a series of scandals dating back to his presidency feature in prominent court cases.

"Angolagate", a shameful affair involving corruption and support for dubious African regimes by Mitterrand's coterie, is also about to rear its head again.

The arms dealing imbroglio involving Mitterrand's disgraced son, former diplomatic aide Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, will be the most high-profile court case when France returns from summer holidays.

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