Saintly Bernard vs. Colonel Gaddafi

Monsieur Kouchner, spare us the sanctimony. The French foreign minister's boss, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, extended a ground-breaking invitation to Libya's Moammar Gaddafi, who arrived in Paris today on a state visit. Faster than you can say bienvenue en France, Sarkozy's secretary of state for human rights publicly warned that "Colonel Gaddafi must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet. France should not receive this kiss of death." Backing her up, Bernard Kouchner chimed in about how terribly pained he personally was, "being a human rights activist," to have to welcome such a man as Gaddafi on French soil.

Without doubt, of course, the crimes with which Gaddafi's regime has been accused over the years, including the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, are reprehensible. But Gaddafi engineered a rapprochement with the West in 2003 that included abandoning Libya's weapons of mass destruction and paying compensation to the victims of terrorism laid at Gaddafi's door. It was an unsatisfying deal for many, from Libyan democracy advocates to the families of the terror victims, but it was a deal endorsed even by President Bush in the interests of regional stability. Sarkozy predecessor Jacques Chirac and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Gaddafi in Tripoli and the U.S. reopened its embassy in Libya. Kouchner quite rightly says that what should most concern us now is the Libya of tomorrow.

So, what accounts for Kouchner's hypocrisy? Let's be blunt about it. Gaddafi is in France on a shopping trip, which could include $4.37 billion worth of Airbus planes as well as billions more for a civilian nuclear power program. Sarkozy has also milked Gaddafi to burnish his diplomatic record as well. His invitation to Gaddafi was extended last summer when he was only too glad when Gaddafi allowed the new French leader to claim credit for Libya's decision to free Bulgarian nurses after an eight-year incarceration over AIDs contamination. The nurses flew out of Tripoli with much fanfare on a private jet under the escort of then-Madame Sarkozy.

Kouchner is certainly entitled to his views on Gaddafi. But do insults and hypocrisy benefit the practice of diplomacy? Would it be good diplomacy, perhaps, if the current Iraqi government invited Sarkozy to Baghdad and then publicly repudiated France over its long-standing support for Saddam Hussein's bloody regime?

I wonder if Kouchner is working up an apology to the nation of Algeria, which France occupied for 130 years? Kouchner says he doesn't forget Gaddafi's victims, but has he forgotten the thousands of Algerian freedom fighters who were massacred by French soldiers for daring to demand their independence? The French National Assembly took a novel approach recently: a law to require school history teachers to stress the "positive" aspects of French colonialism, including in Algeria.

As it turns out, just last week Kouchner's boss had a golden opportunity to help put things right when he paid his first visit to Algeria as president--looking for billions in French contracts, of course. Sarkozy called colonialism "unjust" but equated France's "terrible crimes" with those of Algeria's resistance- the occupier and the occupied, it seems, were equally guilty for that one century plus occupation. Sarkozy pointedly refused to honor a two-year-old Algerian request for an apology for the crimes France committed in Algeria.

If Kouchner finds Gaddafi so repugnant and France so morally superior, then there's a very simple answer: don't invite Gadafy to Paris and don't try to make some big bucks out of it. Maybe it's a better idea to take advantage of Gaddafi's striking transformation, encourage further positive steps in public, lecture him in private and tie diplomatic and economic engagement to tangible progress in democracy and human rights. Perhaps Kouchner's real problem is not Gaddafi but his own personal struggle, between the side of him that loves the moral purity of "being a human rights activist," and the other side that loves power too much--with its moral ambiguities and corrupting influences.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo