Word: french
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have been a quiet little coup, executed with characteristic French panache from behind the scenes. The successor had been picked, paratroops were at the ready, and when the despised dictator left the country, voilà! "Operation Barracuda" would go into effect. So well, in fact, did the plot come off that when tyrannical Emperor Bokassa I was overthrown in the Central African Empire two weeks ago, it was hailed as a triumph of sanity over murderous despotism. By last week, however, the French connection in the affair was proving an embarrassment, and the all too Francophile new regime of President...
...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...
...subject attempted would present problems to the most experienced and brilliant of film makers. The Judge and the Assassin traces the last years of one Joseph Bouvier, (Michel Galabru) a dismissed French sergeant turned hobo...