Word: fabius
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Then it was the turn of French Premier Laurent Fabius. After an hour-long chat with Gorbachev, Fabius recounted that he had handed the Soviet leader a list of ten pending human rights cases that are of special interest to the Mitterrand government. Said Fabius: "We had a very live conversation." Gorbachev's response came during the speech to the National Assembly in which he called for separate nuclear arms negotiations with Britain and France. "The Soviet Union attaches the most serious importance to ensuring human rights," he declared. But he added that "it is only necessary to free this...
Instead of putting the matter to rest, the Premier's admission further aroused public indignation. Three days later, Fabius again went before TV cameras to answer the explosive question: Who had actually ordered the attack that caused the death of a Greenpeace photographer, provoked a diplomatic crisis with New Zealand and tarnished the moral authority of the Socialist government? The answer, according to Fabius, was former Defense Minister Charles Hernu, who had resigned five days before, and Vice Admiral Pierre Lacoste, the cashiered intelligence chief. "It is at their level that I place the responsibility," Fabius declared...
...blaming Hernu, a close friend and associate of Mitterrand's, Fabius was attempting to distance both himself and the President from what French newspapers were calling the "Underwatergate affair." But after repeated denials of official involvement, Fabius' reversal provoked widespread skepticism. A Sofres-Le Figaro poll taken just before the Premier's midweek TV appearance indicated 52% of the French people believe that Mitterrand and Fabius knew beforehand about the plan to blow up the Rainbow Warrior. Fully 78% condemned the decision to sabotage the ship...
...controversy centered on the Defense Ministry, Fabius was aware of the need to reassure the armed forces. In his midweek TV appearance, he stressed that the army "is absolutely not to blame in all this." He chose a respected military man, Army Chief of Staff General Rene Imbot, 60, to replace Lacoste at the head of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, France's overseas espionage agency. Imbot's first assignment was to reorganize the DGSE. The housecleaning had begun with the arrest of four agents suspected of leaking information on the Greenpeace case to the press. They were...
...little chance the agents who actually carried out the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior will ever face trial in New Zealand. French law forbids their extradition, and the Mitterrand government, so far at least, refuses to name them. But in the arena of French politics, the prosecution of Laurent Fabius and Francois Mitterrand may have just begun. At week's end DGSE Director Imbot issued an ominous warning: "There has been a plot to destabilize and destroy the intelligence services. I have now sealed off those services. From now on, anything you hear in the press does not come from...