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John Metzler Archive
Friday, July 27, 2007

'Super Sarko' strikes again: Desert deals with a Bedouin king

PARIS — In a stunning diplomatic triumph, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has secured release of six Bulgarian nurses imprisoned for almost a decade in Libya. The surprise was no less sweet since the President’s wife Cecilia acted first as a secret emissary and then negotiator with Col. Muammar Qaddafi to free the nurses and a doctor imprisoned in the North African nation on trumped-up charges. Yet liberty for the medical workers is but a sidebar story to a major coup by the President dubbed “Super Sarko” by French media. As a perfect finale Sarkozy himself turned up in Tripoli the Libyan capital for a lightening visit to do a little business with the Bedouin ruler.

In a combination of diplomatic aplomb and commercial brashness, France’s new conservative President has engineered a surprising political coup. The case of the six nurses marooned in the desert land and accused of deliberately spreadING AIDS which allegedly killed 400 children was but a backdrop for a bigger deal. After a Libyan kangaroo court slapped the imprisoned medical workers with the death penalty, a mysterious $460 million payment from an “international fund” was made to the victims families. Then as the time appeared right, France’s First Lady made two trips to Benghazi to broker a deal. The workers returned to Bulgaria on the French Presidential aircraft.

First the obvious, freeing the nurses characterized a “typical” maverick Sarkozy performance. The news weekly L’Express added, “In acts and words, the Sarkozy method is based on perpetual praise of pragmatism and will power, and an aversion to theories and those who profess them.”

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The influential daily Le Figaro editorialized, “To pull off this masterstroke, Sarkozy did not in any event hesitate in ushering in a new diplomacy, one both personal and conjugal. A ‘Sarko method’ that is well known on the national stage, combining audacity, discretion, pragmatism, and a good dose of communication.” As President Sarkozy often says, “Baraka (luck) is part of good governance.”

While characteristically quiet (some would say ineffective) European Union diplomacy droned on, Sarko the French action figure came to the rescue! The Presidential couple stole the spotlight and even trumped their own Foreign Ministry, the Quai D’Orsay Moreover the deal done by France, removes a key impediment and opens the way for an overall normalization of relations between the European Union and Libya. Many EU diplomats were not amused by this brash outmaneuver.

Second, While Libya’s long-ruling Qaddafi regime was militarily neutered by the Bush Administration in 2004 when the Colonel came clean over his nuclear program and state sponsorship of terrorism, Libya has still not really fully cashed in on its new non-rogue regime status. France, not surprisingly in the best Gaullist tradition, acted independently to garner a host of commercial contracts with Libya with the usual suspects, oil and mining deals among them. Why am I not surprised?

Far more risky though appears a civilian nuclear power deal with Qaddafi which shall turn sea water into safe drinking water. This can clearly be accomplished with non-nuclear methods.

Le Figaro opined editorially, “ In Africa and the Sahel, France has learned to its cost that Tripoli can, as it chooses, perform either a stabilizing role or a seriously disruptive one.” The newspaper added, “So should we trust Colonel al-Qadhafi, this leader who was long a state terrorist, who endorsed the destruction of at least two Western airliners, (Pan Am Flight 103 and a French UTA airliner) and who is now seeking to rejoin the "concert of Nations?" The utmost caution is necessary. Libya remains a dictatorship, lacking any checks and balances and dominated by an unpredictable man, to say the least.”

The paper adds, “Even if considerable contracts are at stake, even if uranium - which Libya possesses in huge quantities — is a rare prime material that France needs, it must be acknowledged that the seawater desalination can very well be achieved without nuclear power.” So very true.

The saga may have another happy ending for the peripatetic President. Both Nicloas Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia have been estranged — when he won the Presidency in May they were back together again and are now dubbed by the media a new Jack and Jackie Kennedy couple in the Elysee Palace. Still I don’t recall if Camelot’s foreign policy extended to dealing with desert dictators in North Africa.


John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.


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