May 12, 2002	Sunday	Safar 28, 1423

PARIS: As revelations are made in Paris, notably in French Socialist mouthpiece Le Monde, it appears increasingly likely that Wednesday’s terrorist attack on French naval employees in Karachi will play a central role in legislative elections scheduled for June 9 and 16.

Already in its issue dated today (May 11), France’s prestigious daily Le Monde, which has become the unofficial mouthpiece for the French Socialist Party, has effectively launched the campaign issue by claiming that in signing its contract with Pakistan for construction of the three Agosta-90B submarines which the slain Frenchmen were building, French authorities engaged in corrupt practices, indeed they are accused of paying off Pakistani authorities, including Admiral Mansour Haq, the newly-appointed Pakistani Navy chief of staff who made his way to Cherbourg in March 1995 to oversee construction of the first submarine.

Le Monde claims in its story that Admiral Haq and three high-level Pakistani Naval officers were paid substantial commissions in exchange for their signing of the contract whose total value is estimated at $730 million. The daily newspaper also claims that part of the bribe payment - which it says totalled at least $60 million - went also to Murtaza Bhutto, the brother of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, as well as to her husband Asif Ali Zardari.

The newspaper does say that contrary to Bhutto’s brother and spouse, Admiral Mansour decided last February to reimburse $6.2 million to Pakistan, although he has claimed that at the time of the signing of the contract he had not yet been named to his position, and would take up his post only three months later.

At the time of the signing, and of Admiral Haq’s visit to Cherbourg, then Prime Minister Gaullist Prime Minister Edouard Balladur was soundly criticised for authorizing the deal, and for a number of reasons, among them that France was obviously taking a loss on the transaction, but also that as part of the deal France would transfer highly secret technology to Pakistan, but also that it had agreed to transfer to Pakistan some Exocet SM-39 missiles that many French politicians of the day felt should not be provided to Pakistan’s then civilian government.

The accusations - which apparently are the first of many that are scheduled to be made in coming weeks over France’s highly sensitive defence and economic relations with Pakistan - could very well take a toll on newly-reelected President Chirac’s chances of getting his much needed legislative majority, of which he has been deprived the past five years, when he had to “cohabitate” with a Socialist-Communist majority headed by Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who was Chirac’s principal rival in presidential elections which he lost, by three percentage points, during a first-round vote on April 21.

Chirac feels that if he is able - at last - to carry out the policies on which he himself was successfully voted back into office on May 5, the newly-reelected President feels it imperative that he be able to have his own working majority. With the revelations already made, and to be made, on the context to Wednesday’s terrorist attack on the French naval employees in Karachi, Chirac might - once again - be faced with another of the uphill battles he has often had to face in his turbulent 40-year political career.