Word: warriorism
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...private session with journalists last week, French President Francois Mitterrand described it as "criminal and absurd . . . and stupid." Indeed, whoever blew up and sank the Rainbow Warrior, flagship of the Greenpeace environmental organization, in New Zealand's Auckland harbor last July did not do France or its President any favor. As the usually pro-Mitterrand Paris daily Le Monde and other papers zeroed in on the culpability of the government in the mysterious act of sabotage, the President could no longer remain aloof from what was rapidly becoming one of France's worst political crises in the four years since...
...weeks the French press has steadily stripped away the credibility of the government, which had firmly denied any responsibility for the attack on the Rainbow Warrior, in which a Greenpeace photographer lost his life. In its first hasty search for culprits, the government had appointed as special investigator Bernard Tricot, a respected former chief of staff for President Charles de Gaulle. Tricot's report, completed in 17 days, revealed only a murky picture of French spies trying to learn about Greenpeace's plans for a floating protest against France's nuclear tests on the Pacific atoll of Mururoa this autumn...
...possibility of a cover-up at the highest levels of government spurred the press into action. French newspapers and weeklies vied with one another to dig up detailed and colorful accounts of the operation against the Rainbow Warrior. It was inconceivable, Le Monde claimed, that Vice Admiral Lacoste, the foreign espionage chief, would have acted without orders. Among those who might have authorized the attack or allowed it to happen, the paper said, were Lacoste's superiors: General Jean-Michel Saulnier, Mitterrand's personal chief of staff when the surveillance scheme was conceived; General Jeannou Lacaze, then overall armed forces...
Almost until the moment the scandal exploded last week, Mitterrand's government clung to the findings of the Tricot report. But doubts were already growing within the Cabinet and the Socialist Party. Le Monde, among others, charged that the true saboteurs of the Rainbow Warrior were neither the jailed pair of French agents nor the three-man crew of the spy yacht Ouvea, which allegedly had been sent from the French territory of New Caledonia to back up the operation. The real hitmen, claimed Le Monde, were two unidentified frogmen, probably from France's underwater demolition training base in Corsica...
...feel that their colleagues were sacrificed for political expediency. Yet Mitterrand had little choice, not only for his own government's future but for France's battered image. In New Zealand, Prime Minister David Lange responded sharply to Hernu's resignation. Said he: "France has handled the Rainbow Warrior affair in the most destructive way possible...