Word: bokassa
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...worst enemy. Last week the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné charged that President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, while serving as Finance Minister six years ago, had accepted a 30-carat tray of diamonds worth $240,000 from Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who was deposed as Emperor of the Central African Republic last month. There is no law prohibiting French politicians from accepting such largesse. The Elysée Palace, in fact, while trying to minimize what it called the "nature and value" of the gifts, did not deny that a "traditional exchange...
...plot first came to light when Dacko, a former President now reinstalled in Bokassa's place, revealed that the French had dreamed up the whole scheme and flown him and 500 French troops into the country to engineer the takeover. "Some countries call upon Cubans," declared Dacko disingenuously. "Why shouldn't we call upon French troops, since they are our friends?" French officials, mindful of criticism about previous interventions in Chad, Zaire and Mauritania, at first denied all, then admitted "helping out," and finally delivered a confession boasting that it was the only coup lately in which...
However happy they were to see Bokassa go, French leftists and libertarians were not about to let French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's government get off so easily. After all, France had supported the Bokassa regime for 13 years and given it up to $100 million a year in aid. Giscard periodically flew off to hunt big game with the dictator and publicly hailed him as "my relative." Scoffed Socialist Leader François Mitterrand: "What do they mean, no bloodshed? Blood was flowing for years, and it was known in Paris. This comic emperor...
...Bokassa, unaware that it had been the French who had manipulated his ouster while he was away in Libya, flew to a military airport outside Paris, where he begged admittance to the country. He argued that since he had served in the French colonial army, even earning the Croix de guerre, he was a French citizen. Government officials said no, and he was flown back to Africa in a French-owned DC-8 to asylum in the Ivory Coast. That decision was deplored by a number of French jurists, who insisted that Bokassa should have been admitted and tried...
Meanwhile, trouble was also stirring back in the Central African Republic, as it had been promptly renamed. Although Dacko released political prisoners jailed during the Bokassa reign, there was resentment when he reappointed many members of Bokassa's Cabinet. At the same time, supporters of former Prime Minister Ange Patasse, a prominent opposition figure who had quit the Bokassa regime in 1978 in protest over its atrocities, staged anti-French demonstrations when his departure from Paris was held up by technicalities. At week's end Patasse castigated Dacko as an accomplice of Bokassa and demanded he resign. Part...