Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from the Arabist.

The French news site Mediapart has released another document it claims shows that French President Nicholas Sarkozy and his close associates had maintained backdoor ties to the Libyan government from 2005 to 2011, including a 2005–6 agreement to allegedly funnel 50 million Euros worth of Libyan money into Sarkozy’s campaign chest.

The December 10, 2006 letter in question is said to be an official correspondence between Bashir Saleh Bashir ¹, then-head of the Libyan African Investment Portfolio, the LAP and Moussa Muhammad Koussa, former head of the Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya (the intelligence service) who in March 2011 quit his post as Foreign Minister and fled to the UK. In the letter, Moussa informs Bashir that per the results of the two men’s October 6, 2006 meeting Sarkozy’s chief of staff Brice Hortefeux and the arms dealer Ziad Takieddine, the LAP would be responsible for making payment of 50 million Euros to Sarkozy’s election campaign. The Libyan document released last week is the first new piece of evidence to be presented by the outlet since French terrorism lawyer Jean-Charles Brisard’s walking back of testimony he gave that had described alleged secret 2005 conferences between Sarkozy’s people and the Libyan regime in 2005.

The document is the latest piece of evidence reported by Mediapart in a now 10 month-long investigation into Sarkozy’s alleged ties to the deceased Libyan dictator. Jean-Charles Brisard, a French counterterrorism expert, had previously provided Mediapart with testimony from a French doctor associate of Takieddine and documentation of contacts among French Interior Ministry staffers, Takieddine and members of Qadhafi’s family, notably Saif al-Islam, former director of the Qadhafi International Charity and Development Foundation, and former military intelligence head Abdullah Senussi, who is wanted in France for his alleged role in the bombing of UTA Flight 772 in 1989. Anonymous sources told Reuters last month that the French government is very interested in winning Senussi’s extradition to them because of his contacts with French officials and defense contractors.

This October 6, 2006 meeting would have taken place a year to the day following an alleged October 6, 2005 meeting between some of the principal players in this drama. That 2005 contact reportedly took place during Sarkozy’s only known official visit to Libya. The 2005 meeting recorded by Brisard is said to be where the 50 million Euros payment was first discussed with Hortefeux, with the option of using a front company in Panama and a Swiss bank account to conceal the transactions. Mediapart did not note how it came into possession of the 2006 memo; the outlet’s 2005 sourcing come Brisard, who has since sought to distance himself from the materials of his cited by Mediapart by stating that the testimonies he has gathered “have no probative value” and that Mediapart was misrepresenting his research.

For the record, Sarkozy’s official campaign spending for the 2007 election was approximately 20 million Euros, just short of the maximum spending ceiling for candidates.

Takieddine, according to Mediapart, was the primary fixer between Sarkozy’s team, in particular Hortefeux who made the 2005 visit, as well as Claude Guéant (who replaced Hortefeux as Minister of the Interior last year) and Thierry Gaubert , Hortefeux’s predecessor and a confidant of Sarkozy’s. Takieddine reportedly sought to advance his own agenda of securing sweet deals for French firms with him as the broker through these get-togethers. Amesys, a French IT firm, has also been implicated in these dealings, having sold “Internet-interception equipment” to the Libyan government in 2007, which until early 2011 the regime used to monitor dissidents. Takieddine is thought to have helped broker this agreement, and earned a cut of US$500,000 from the deal, which after Qadhafi’s fall became hugely embarrassing for the telecommunications firm. Takeiddine also reportedly tried to make arrangements for Sakrozy’s 2005 visit by getting to discuss refitting contracts for the Libyan Air Force, now no by the UN from making orders to European defense majors, outside of the purview of the French Defense Ministry.

The arms dealer denies being present at these meetings, but says he believe that this agreement is authentic, claiming to have spoken with an irate Saif al-Islam in March 2011 about the funding and having seen documents he thought Gaubert would fear becoming public. Takeiddine says he is not sure whether the transaction actually went through or not in the end, but Saif al-Islam told him it did and actually went on TV last spring to accuse Sarkozy of “stealing” from the Libyan people.

Takieddine’s testimony is suspect, of course, because he is currently being investigated by a French court for his possible role in a scandal over kickbacks and money-laundering from the sale of warships to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia going to French politican Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential campaign. Sarkozy acted as Balladur’s spokesman during that campaign, and Gaubert was investigated last September over his alleged role in securing kickbacks for the 1995 campaign. Takieddine is thought to have maintained contact with the Saudis to secure further kickbacks under Sarkozy’s watch. The Pakistani ties are currently being investigated as a possible motive in a 2002 terrorist attack in Karachi that left 11 French nationals dead. This isn’t the first time key Sarkozy asosicates have come under scrutiny for alleged financial wheelings and dealings: at least two of his associates have been investigated for influence peddling.

Sarkozy denies the allegations, as do all of his associates from the Interior Ministry. It is not clear what effect this election year scandal has had on Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential campaign, but he is widely expected to lose his reelection bid to the Socialist candidate François Hollande, coming in second to him in the first round of elections. The second round of voting, and expected Sarkozy defeat, will take place on May 5–6.

Update: Moussa and Bashir (both in exile) deny they had anything to do with the document; conversely, former Libyan PM Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi (also in exile) asserts it is authentic. In Libya, the interim government that NATO helped install last year says it has not been able to verify the letter. The Sarkozy campaign has denied all allegations and is threatening to sue Mediapart. Sarkozy's opponents have not made much of this investigation in their campaigning, instead focusing their criticism on Sarkozy's austerity and immigration policies. The final round of the French presidential election will take place May 5-6.

¹Bashir’s name, and that of other Libyan officials, have more recently come up in reports from the British press on foreign intelligence services abetting Qadhafi’s spies in keeping tabs on dissidents in the EU.  

(Pictured: France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and President Nicolas Sarkozy.)

"The status quo cannot be maintained, things need to get moving... if there is a single chance, it must be grabbed," declared French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé to Le Monde before departing for a diplomatic trip to Israel and the West Bank with the goal of relaunching the peace process. After a layover in Rome where he met with PLO Chair-President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, he flew to Ramallah to speak with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and met Benyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Juppé was hoping to convince each party to come back to the negotiation table at a conference to be held in Paris before the end of July.

The conference was originally planned as a meeting of potential donors to the state of Palestine, but France now wants to expand the scope of the event to a resumption of peace talks toward the two-state solution. "We are convinced that if nothing happens before September, the situation will be very difficult for everybody at the UN General Assembly," Juppé said on Thursday, referring to Mahmoud Abbas's plan to request international recognition of the State of Palestine on the 1967 border and admission as a full member of the United Nations at the September assembly.

The negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization broke down last Fall. Netanyahu's conditions for their resumption include Abbas' break of relations with Hamas and the recognition of Israel as the nation of the Jewish people, while Abbas is requesting the immediate freeze of the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. However, Juppé believes that grounds have shifted significantly enough to hope to revive the process; according to him, the context of the Arab Spring, the Fatah/Hamas reconciliation and Obama's acknowledgment of the 1967 borders are factors that have the potential to create a new opportunity to resume discussions.

The French Foreign Minister further echoed Nicolas Sarkozy's previous statement that France would be ready to "take on its responsibilities" at the UN General Assembly in September, a "strong message," according to Juppé. The innuendo is most likely to be interpreted as a decision for France to recognize the state of Palestine, an option that Sarkozy has already declared to be considering "in consultation with [France's] European partners;'" yet his preference lies in a resumption of peace talks, which would prevent France from taking such a critical foreign policy decision.

Juppé's trip fits into Sarkozy's increasingly prominent will to see France play a larger role in the Israel-Palestine peace process. "Americans won't succeed on their own," he said in an interview in May. But while France is attempting to present itself as an alternative mediator, it is evident that its position does not differ from the United States' in any significant way. In opposition to the U.S., Alain Juppé welcomed the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas as a "positive development." The demarcation, however, stops there.

Indeed, Juppé specified that were the proposed Paris peace conference to take place, it would proceed according to the roadmap President Obama recently outlined. Phyllis Bennis and FPIF senior analyst Stephen Zunes have vehemently emphasized the flaws of Obama's line. "President Obama identified the principles of U.S. diplomacy and Israeli demands as the 'foundation for negotiations.' But he is wrong. The only foundation that will work is that of international law and human rights," writes Bennis.

Juppé further follows in the US footsteps by maintaining a rhetoric which revolves around the security of Israel first and foremost, with no mention for Palestinians' security. His recent statement that "We must drive Hamas to evolve in the direction we are hoping for, which means renouncing violence and recognizing the state of Israel" is representative of the usual double-standard though which demands are made of Palestinians but not of Israelis: Juppé is not demanding that the members of Israel's government who refuse to recognize Palestine do so, nor is he denouncing Israel's crimes against Palestinians. Juppé conveniently chooses to push back the issues of refugees and Jerusalem to the following year, focusing only on the issues of borders and land swaps.

When, in a recent radio interview, Juppé was faced with a journalist who questioned France's potential to be heard, he answered, "Who is heard these days, can you tell me?" implying that the international community was powerless at large to influence the situation. Yet his assessment is incorrect in the case of the United States: it is not that Obama is not heard, it is that he does not speak up. In a recent interview, Phyllis Bennis explained how the U.S. has failed to put proper pressure on Israel: "We never saw real pressure, what we saw from the US president Obama was a series of requests: 'Please stop expanding settlements!' Israel said no, the US continued to request, Israel continued to say no and the US stopped requesting. Real pressure would have meant that when Israel said no, that the US said 'all that 30 billion dollars we're paying you in military aid over these ten years, you can kiss that goodbye.'"

France's leverage is much more limited, revolving primarily around its position as president of the G8 and G20 and the potential moral impact that its recognition of the state of Palestine would have at the next UN General Assembly. Whether or not Israel and Palestine come to the table that is offered to them in Paris, it is unlikely that a safe, secure and sovereign Palestinian state might result from the process as long as the United States do not use their own extraordinary leverage to push Israel to respect human rights and international law.