November 11, 2007	Sunday	Shawwal 29, 1428

LONDON: Six months in office, and Nicolas Sarkozy has not ceased being an embarrassment on the world stage. From his first appearance at the G8 summit in Germany, where he foolishly called for more delay on Kosovo — a move that courtesy forced his new partners to support — to his fawning visit to Washington this week, France’s president is making waves for the wrong reasons.

Take his sudden descent last on Nov 4, on Chad, where a group of French charity workers have been charged with kidnapping scores of children, describing them as orphans, putting fake bandages on some, and seeking to remove all of them from their families for ever. Here is a case that clearly deserves to be tried where the crime was committed. Yet President Sarkozy flies into N’djamena, brightly declaring that he wants the defendants taken to justice in France.

Besides the implication in Sarkozy’s conduct that the alleged kidnappers are as much victims as the abducted children, it is hardly surprising that Chadians see his actions as insufferable imperial presumption. Yet the following day on Nov 5, Sarkozy says his trip shows that France wants a ‘new’ relationship with its former colonies in Africa, one in which they would be treated as ‘equals’.

Of course, Sarkozy and his then wife, Cecilia, had already intervened in Libya to rescue five Bulgarian nurses accused of spreading Aids. But the nurses had already spent several years in jail on evidence that was vague and deeply flawed. There is no comparison with the Chadian allegations — and if Sarkozy thinks he sees a chance for a second ‘success’ in extracting Europeans from the horrors of Africa, more’s the pity.

The visit to Washington — from where he returned on Nov 8, is of a different dimension, though here the Americans are as much to blame as Sarkozy and his entourage for the phoney mood music. They are hyping the alleged shift in French policy as falsely as Sarkozy’s people.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Chirac, was a lifelong admirer of America, spending a gap year there, working in a bar. Sarkozy, by contrast, first visited the US at the age of 31 as the guest of a US government ‘young leaders’ programme — the classic case of an ambitious man who was willing to be wooed.

Chirac’s cooling towards America was not based on prejudice but a principled difference in policy over Iraq — a stance that Sarkozy (to his democratic credit, since few French people would support a turnaround) is not reversing. All that has happened is a shift in symbolism in the war on terror, pushed partly by France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who did agree with the attack on Iraq. France will send 50 military trainers, not to Iraq but southern Afghanistan, as well as letting its Mirage fighter-bombers go into action there. Not much change there.

On some Islamic issues he is certainly closer to Bush than Chirac was. Sarkozy speaks more fiercely against Iran and more warmly towards Israel. On Turkey there is a difference. While Bush sees a western interest in wooing Ankara, Sarkozy feels no such imperative. He wants Turkey kept out of the EU.

At home, Sarkozy’s rush to act first and think afterwards is as notable as on foreign policy. So are his arrogance and bad temper. He demeaned his friend and jogging partner, the Prime Minister Francois Fillon, by calling him an ‘aide’. He shouted at his press secretary, publicly accusing him of being a ‘child’ and an ‘imbecile’.

Where is the dignity of the office? Where is a sense of the responsibilities a president carries? Where is the subtlety needed by anyone who wants to negotiate a new deal with France’s public service workers? Foreign policy was almost absent from the presidential campaign.— Dawn/The Guardian News Service