By way of a warning
These Ephemerides begin more or less the day after the publication of our last issue of Plurielles.
Need I make clear that I have forbidden myself to “correct” the slightest piece of information. I mean that I have left to events their chronological truth even if, in the light of facts that occurred subsequently, I have been able to “read” the news in question differently. Thus at no moment have I wished to “refresh” the state of my reflections, which would have stripped this work of all the interest that, I hope, you will take in it.
May 1999
This month of May, after an April woven of rain and cold, ends in a heatwave apotheosis. This month is also the third of what is beginning to be called the Kosovo war. Yes, in the face of our incredulity, it really is a war — with its train of figures unbearable to our scale of values: the number of the deported (or the refugees — the media have not yet settled on the term), the tonnage of the bombs, and the number of NATO air sorties. The negotiating table, if indeed it is operational, is set up amid the rubble.
All the well-meaning “All-you-have-to-do-is” types are beginning to realize that the solution is not in their pocket, nor, alas, in those of the international community.
May 17, evening: Israel has changed its Prime Minister. One must, one should, see in the outcome of this ballot the expressed will of the Israeli people to be done with war, with the wars that have, for more than fifty years, bloodied this part of the world. Can one read in it this people’s concern to install in its country a form of equity, if not of justice, among the various ethnic groups, the various social strata that compose it? I ardently hope so.
Will Ehud Barak have a policy as rounded, as devoid of sharp angles, as his generous silhouette? A man’s eyes often speak more truly than his words. At times I am afraid of Barak’s gaze. The notion of a Palestinian State has now acquired the right of citizenship. When, then, will it be realized that the real existence of this State is the surest guarantee of peace and life for the State of Israel? In his speech, delivered on Yitzhak Rabin Square, the brand-new Prime Minister spoke of the eternity of Jerusalem, thus placing the emphasis on one of the thorniest points of the future negotiations, but he also announced his intention to return the territories of South Lebanon, currently occupied by the Israeli army.
I always fear politicians when they speak of eternity, for there is something romantic in associating politics, eminently ephemeral by definition, with eternity, eminently transcendent by definition itself.
This is why these two announcements, of an antinomic aspect, gave rise in me to two orders of reflection:
First: romanticism, in a politician, is a dangerous state of mind, but one that can be, at the same time, creative.
Second: realism, for a politician, ought to be the way of looking at reality in a mirror — I mean of letting reality look at you. To do this, one would have to clear away a little of the weight of one’s own ego, in order to make a little more room for this objective reality, this reality that comprises, of course, the world, that is, the immense universe of things, and also others, that is, the immense universe of humanity.
The Cannes Film Festival ended in a kind of ridiculous scandal in relation to the gravity of the events taking place in the world. The fact that films of, let us say, a militant aspect and character were awarded prizes, provoking waves of indignant protest, raises two questions: the first would be that of the very quality of culture, the second that of its content and, thereby, of its purpose. To commit oneself or not — an old problem that is becoming somewhat dusty.
This month of May also saw the International Penal Tribunal (the ICTY) convict Slobodan Milošević of crimes against humanity. Indicted, the Yugoslav president can no longer leave his country. Yet it is with him that the International Community, or at the very least NATO, will have to negotiate if it wishes to arrive at a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo.
June 3
Since that date, the war in Kosovo has turned into a peace in Kosovo, a strange peace that cohabits with a war that persists. The delegations keep meeting at border posts while the planes keep on bombing.
Things unfold in a totally abstruse chaos. One learns, for example, that the Serbian forces are withdrawing. Two hours later, a derisory figure drops onto the teleprinters: 48 Serbian soldiers are still in Kosovo. A little later still, the Serbian delegation has gone to Belgrade to report on the first discussions. Then, back to another border post to negotiate with the British general Jackson, supreme commander of the NATO forces. No one understands anything any longer about the strange cohabitation of this war and this peace. Are there refugees in camps or elsewhere? And if there are refugees, is their return probable? Improbable? Postponed? And will this return be partial or total? No one knows anything. It is already June 6. In fact, we are told that the end of the war nonetheless began around May 30 or 31.
June 7, 1999
The Yugoslav delegation has presented to the NATO representatives a proposal that guarantees neither the security of the refugees nor the complete withdrawal of the Yugoslav forces. Nevertheless, both parties leave the door open to discussions for the time being.
Madeleine Albright has flown off to Germany, where the foreign affairs ministers of the G8 are to meet in Bonn to talk about the Yugoslav affair. In the meantime, in the absence of a complete agreement, the bombings continue. In fact, in this period of intense negotiations, the two parties were not talking about the same thing.
Ehud Barak still keeps silent, today, June 7, the day of the solemn reopening session of the Knesset, about the talks, the negotiations for the formation of a national unity government, a task that seems almost impossible. People are pulling every which way; the right is preparing to jeer at those in its own ranks who would more or less like to take part in the government.
Tuesday, June 8
In Kosovo, peace advances, war retreats. Then war advances again, and of course peace retreats. The great powers, each wanting to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for itself, end up letting the fire devour the chestnuts. And the populations.
It has been 10 days since the dioxin affair broke out. No one in Europe knows what to eat anymore. At the start, there had been talk of contaminated chickens, then it was a question of eggs, then of dairy products, then of beef, then of pigs. An anguish that dare not speak its name filters through the various pieces of information that everyone tries to interpret. In reality, no one really knows anything, and each would like to shift the responsibility for this enormous affair onto his neighbor.
June 9, 1999
It is 10 p.m.: at last, a signature. The peace talks between the Serbs and the NATO representatives have concluded. So true is it that, whatever the number of the dead, wars always end with a few names written at the bottom of a sheet of paper. This signature means, in principle, that the Yugoslav forces must, as of June 10, begin to evacuate Kosovo. This war will have lasted 78 days, each of which will have been marked by bombings. As for the number of the dead, it will remain to be assessed, without ever being able to be specified or proven.
Of course, no sooner had people begun to speak of peace in Kosovo, of the progressive entry of the soldiers of KFOR, the famous peace force, than another sound came to replace the silence of the guns that had fallen quiet: the sound of cash registers. There is talk of billions of dollars, what would have to be spent in a kind of new Marshall Plan to rebuild this country three-quarters destroyed.
It would be normal for Europe and the United States, and in any case all the countries that rose up against the dictatorship and the monstrous abuses of Milošević, to refuse to grant a single dollar for these reparations so long as the current president of Serbia remains in power. A question then arises: how is it that a people who have seen their country three-quarters destroyed, who have seen bombs fall night after night on their cities and their factories, ruining their energy and their jobs — how can this people leave supreme power to the man who is at the origin of what can already be called a veritable humanitarian defeat? This man has subjected his country to four successive disasters, and he is still president. What will the future of this country be made of when the Kosovars find their houses in ruins, when one will have to imagine some new way of making executioners and victims live side by side? What will the street look like, where one building will be inhabited by Christian Serbs, facing another building occupied by Muslim Kosovars? In fact, the real question that arises is: does hatred have a future? Unfortunately, History has often answered yes to this kind of question.
Monday, June 14, 1999
It is the day after the European elections. Europe wakes up with a new parliament that has swung to the right, whereas France, the European exception, wakes up with elections won by the left. One must, however, note the impressive figure, a veritable record, of abstentions: 53% of the French did not go to vote. Which means that out of an electorate of about 40 million French, a little under 19 million went to the polling stations. Of these 19 million, the left comes out ahead: the Socialist Party, with François Hollande, totals nearly 22% (21.9%); the Greens of the left, with Dominique Voynet and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, obtain 9.7% of the vote. The big loser, on the left, is Robert Hue, secretary of the Communist Party, with his somewhat heterogeneous list “Bouge, l’Europe,” which gets only 6.8%. Krivine and Laguiller, for their part, total 5.2%.
On the right, the great defeat is that of Nicolas Sarkozy. Indeed, the list that came in second, (far) behind that of François Hollande, is not his. It is indeed a list of the right, but it is that of Pasqua-Villiers, which obtains 13.1% of the vote. Sarkozy, who is generally said to have been more or less chosen by the Élysée, obtains only 12.7%. His defeat can therefore be read as being also that of President Jacques Chirac.
The list of the UDF, led by François Bayrou, comes off very honorably with 9.3%. The far right, for its part, collapsed. The causes are multiple, but of course the Le Pen-Mégret divorce has much to do with it: the Front National now gets only 5.7%. As for Mégret, he disappears with 3.3%.
In the rest of Europe, let us note the surprise of the rightward vote in Tony Blair’s England, and the rebuff received by the new chancellor Schröder in Germany, with only 30.8%. He manifestly loses these elections to the benefit of the Christian Democrats, who, for their part, get 48.9%.
The salient fact in this European ballot is that France remains the only country where the left came out victorious from these elections.
June 16, 1999
In Kosovo, with the gradual advance of KFOR, mass graves are being discovered, proofs of the massacres perpetrated by the Serbs. In the midst of this end of war, one becomes aware of this simple and horrible fact: one human group attempted to eliminate another human group alongside which it lived. This is called a genocide. And it recalls other massacres that one had believed would be the last.
June 18, 1999.
The KFOR troops continue to take possession of Kosovo. And continue to discover the proofs and traces of the horrors committed by the Serbian soldiers. The mass graves have now been followed by bodies discovered in the open, abandoned under bushes, anywhere amid the deserted villages.
June 24, 1999
After an absence of 6 days, owing to hospitalization, I take up again the course of this “thread of time.”
In response to a new attack by the Hezbollah by Katyusha rocket, in the north of Israel — an attack that left 2 Israelis dead at Kiryat Shmona — one learns that one of the last decisions taken by the former Prime Minister B. Netanyahu was the bombing of an electrical power station some thirty kilometers from Beirut. This bombing, which left 8 dead among the Hezbollah, also plunged the Lebanese capital into darkness. But above all, the result of this absurd escalation is that Lebanon found itself in the state of mind that the famous so-called “Grapes of Wrath” war had triggered. It is the return of the old fears and, of course, the rebirth of hatred. How long, all this?
July 6, 1999
We learn that the Israeli Prime Minister has at last formed his government. It is a very broad government, without the manifest presence of Netanyahu’s party, but with all the components of Israeli political life, including the ultra-religious. This presence is, for the Prime Minister, a pledge of the possibility of acting.
In any case, in his investiture speech, Ehud Barak announced from the outset that he was calling for the peace of the brave, both with Syria and with the Palestinians. For the moment these are only words; the international community awaits the Israeli government’s keeping its word, not only on the letter but also on the spirit of the White Plantation accords, accords that it countersigned alongside the Palestinian Authority.
July 8, 1999
Iran. For several days now, important protest movements have begun to shake the Iranian capital and the provinces. At the origin of these movements: the University, the students. Yet this is not a May ’68. We are rather before the reaction of an entire population, the emergence of what is now called more or less everywhere civil society. And if one recalls that 75% of Iran’s population is under 25, this news takes on an altogether exceptional character. Tens of thousands of young people are taking to the streets to protest against the oppression of the regime, against the rules of private life institutionalized by the Islamic power. One should know that there are already many killed and wounded, and very numerous arrests.
These young people die or are arrested, not in the name of an ideology or a party, but because they demand the right to live, to walk in the street in the clothing of their choice, the right to laugh, to sing, and to love. This exceptional situation was initiated, of course, by the presence at the head of the country of the new moderate president Khatami, who, unfortunately, does not possess the reality of power, which lies in the hands of the all-powerful successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Rasvanjani.
July 11, 1999
Opening of the new OAU summit in Algiers. One was able to hear the Algerian President Bouteflika announce on television, among the program of reforms he intends to propose to his country, his desire to pay a heartfelt tribute to the Jewish community of Constantine. These words, pronounced in the political context of today’s Algeria, are quite simply incredible. They reflect, in any case, the lucid and, so to speak, historical gaze that the Algerian President casts on the deep, and, I recall, plural, identity of his country, and they bring to light the reality of the millennial presence of a Jewish community in the Maghreb.
Bruno Étienne, several days later, would remain the only intellectual to point out, amid the deafening silence of the media on this subject, the symbolic importance of this recognition of the identitarian plurality of Algeria.
July 14, 1999
The demonstrations in Tehran, which turned into a riot, are now muzzled, for the reformist President Khatami seems to have yielded to the pressure of the supreme leader, heir of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Rasvanjani, who has banned all demonstrations on the public thoroughfare.
July 16, 1999
Jacques Chirac inaugurates the Memory Center of Oradour-sur-Glane. It should be noted that the “Das Reich” division counted in its ranks many “Malgré-nous,” those Alsatian conscripts whom the Wehrmacht had forcibly incorporated into the SS division “Das Reich,” the division responsible for the Oradour massacre.
For his part, Lionel Jospin, accompanied by his Polish-born wife, went to pay his respects at Auschwitz.
July 22, 1999
In the evening, the announcer on Moroccan television announces the death of King Hassan II. His son, henceforth Mohammed VI, succeeds him.
On the occasion of the king’s funeral, one was able to witness on screen a meeting between the Algerian President Bouteflika and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
As the total solar eclipse of next August 11 approaches, a veritable frenzy, if not a psychosis, has set in, in the search for protective glasses. Already, glasses of Colombian and Taiwanese origin, non-compliant, have been withdrawn from sale.
August 5, 1999
Apart from the Jews of Constantine, who remembers the anniversary of the 1934 pogrom? It is thus 65 years today since that pogrom took place, marking deeply, intimately, the flesh of the Jews of my city, and more broadly that of the Jews of Algeria as a whole.
Why such a wound and why for so long? Because this pogrom is the very image of what we thought, at the time, to be an antagonism, an almost biological hatred between two ethnic groups living side by side, between two social groups, between two religions. Since then, the causes, the unfolding, and the very purpose of that terrible day have been analyzed. Of course, the emphasis has been placed on the famine that struck the Algerian people that year, on the promises not kept by colonial France, on the social inequalities. And of course, it must be said, it was Arabs who killed Jews (26, to be exact). But this was done under the eyes of the army of France, which did not lift the slightest finger to save the lives of citizens who were French, it must be recalled. The army stood at ease, arms shouldered.
August 6, 1999
Ehud Barak has just appointed an Israeli Arab, Nawaf Massalha, to the post of deputy minister of Foreign Affairs. Thus, for the first time, an Arab diplomat will be able to represent the State of Israel at all the meetings concerning Foreign Affairs. An important gesture toward the Palestinians and the Arab world, in these times of deadly attacks (2 Israelis have just been wounded in Hebron) and of no less deadly reprisals by the Israeli army.
Another anniversary, perhaps the most terrible there is: on August 6, 1945, a bomb fell on Hiroshima, the first atomic bomb used against humanity, and it made 100,000 victims.
This terrifying decision against an already beaten adversary, almost on its knees — was it taken to put an end to the war? to make an indefensible experiment? or to block the advance of the Soviet armies in the Far East? History has not yet given a clear answer to these questions.
This August 6, at midnight, ends the serial that has agitated the French and European press for several months: the marriage of the BNP and the Société Générale. No shareholder can any longer exchange his shares for others. Results, on August 17.
I become aware that it is almost indecent to place side by side two anniversaries that seem so far from each other in terms of their meaning: the first, indeed, so implacably irreversible, pertains to an attack on ethics, since it is the image of a willed destruction of a humanity. The second, so derisorily ephemeral, is the symbol of that globalization which attempts to erase differences in the crucible of a strictly economic humanity. But that is how it is.
September 3, 1999
This morning’s radio news announces that the negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, despite the efforts of Madeleine Albright, are still at a standstill. Peace is not yet for today, nor even for tomorrow. The negotiations stumble over the question of the number of prisoners to be released and over that of the timetable for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the West Bank.
Ehud Barak wants to hold to a number of 350 prisoners, and moreover, these prisoners must not be members of Hamas. Yasser Arafat, for his part, demands the release of 400 prisoners.
At the end of the day, we learn that the negotiations have finally succeeded: after 8 months of deadlock, Yasser Arafat accepts the number of 350 prisoners to be released, and moreover, an agreement on the application of the White Plantation memorandum has finally been reached. The provisions adopted at White Plantation are to be signed — one should even say countersigned — by Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, as of the end of the Shabbat, that is, on the evening of Saturday, September 4. This signing would take place at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt, in the presence of President Clinton.
The implementation of this agreement should very rapidly thereafter take concrete form in a new military withdrawal from 7% of the West Bank. In parallel, the discussions on the final status of the Palestinian territories should begin. They bear notably on the borders of an eventual Palestinian State, on the status of Jerusalem, the return of the refugees, and the dismantling of the Jewish settlements in the autonomous territories — so many questions that augur new crises and probable ruptures in the Peace Process.
The agreement to be signed on the evening of September 4 sets September 2000, that is, a year from now, as the deadline for the conclusion of a definitive treaty on the final status of the Palestinian territories.
September 5, 1999
Last evening, at Sharm el-Sheikh, the peace process seems to have set in motion again. This new treaty, which will be named the Sharm el-Sheikh treaty, ratifies data slightly different from those of White Plantation. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat signed this treaty in the presence, of course, of Madeleine Albright, but also before the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the new king of Jordan.
The new treaty envisages the restitution of 6% of the still-occupied West Bank territories, whereas at White Plantation, the restitution had provided for 13%. The number of prisoners released remains fixed at 350, and Ehud Barak still refuses the release of prisoners who are members of Hamas.
The signing of this treaty was immediately disavowed both by Hamas and by the new president of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon.
September 5, 8 p.m.
Less than 24 hours after the signing of the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, 2 attacks, the work of Palestinian extremists, plunge Israel into mourning and bloodshed: one in Haifa, the other in Tel Aviv. Probably 3 dead. Peace in daily life is still far off. The real ordeal for Ehud Barak has begun.
September 8, in the morning
Earthquake in Athens. Less severe than that of Turkey, but one that nonetheless allows it to be demonstrated that when cataclysms are natural, solidarity becomes so too, since the Turks came to lend a hand to the Greeks, as the latter had done at the time of the Anatolian earthquake.
In East Timor, the anti-independence militias continue to spread terror and to empty the country of its inhabitants. The streets are entirely deserted, black smoke rises from the houses abandoned by their occupants. Last refuge: the UN headquarters. Yesterday, the UN sent a delegation to Jakarta, but for the moment the Indonesian government refuses any deployment of an international force in East Timor. For two days, however, the power there has been confronted with internal protests. The students have begun to demonstrate against the regime and the omnipotence of the military in their country.
Just a few days ago, who knew of the existence of Timor? Better still, who knew that there existed an East Timor and a West Timor? And yet there is already talk of population displacement and even of genocide, although this word is beginning to be used willy-nilly.
Indonesia, which was said to be the most populous country of non-Arab Muslims, is becoming sadly famous for a new, exacerbated nationalism.
September 10, 1999
The Timor affair is truly turning into a genocide. And there is something incomprehensible in the fact that no one in the world has the right to intervene, nor does anyone intervene, in a massacre perpetrated in broad daylight: anti-independence militiamen, therefore Indonesians, are murdering a population that has just democratically pronounced itself in favor of its autonomy from Indonesia. The UN itself is in danger. Its personnel are evacuating the buildings where they sat, buildings that had begun to serve as a refuge for part of the population.
The television screens are obviously flooded with these images of refugees, of population transfers. Already, reception camps are being set up in Australia, the land closest to Timor. International morality is literally collapsing.
Today, September 10, is also the start of the school year in Israel. This start of the year is marked by an important controversy concerning the teaching of the country’s History. It is now a question of “rereading,” so to speak, the History of Israel, especially as regards the birth of the State, the wars that preceded and accompanied this birth, and among others, of course, the Six-Day War, but also the expulsion of the Palestinian populations. It would be a veritable calling into question of all the imagery of Épinal that has accompanied this part of History. There is, it seems, going to be an attempt to exhume the true history of the martyred Palestinian villages, an attempt to exhume the history of the population transfers that took place in the land of Israel.
Monday, September 13
In Jakarta, the Indonesian president announces that he accepts the arrival of an international peace force. It remains that the arrival and installation of this force will require at least two or three days, during which the militias will continue their massacres.
Moscow, for the past 15 days, has had to confront a blind form of terrorism that blows up ordinary residential buildings. This night, a third explosion blew apart an 8-story building. As in the preceding attacks, only corpses were extracted from the rubble. These attacks have already, it seems, left more than two hundred dead. Are we before the terrifying response of the Islamists of Dagestan to Russia’s attempt to “cleanse” this region of the world?
Last evening, at the crossing point between Israel and Gaza, the negotiations concerning the final status of the Palestinian territories began, an essential element of the conflict between the two parties. The compromise, signed 10 days ago in Egypt, provides that, within 5 months, a framework agreement must be reached, and that a final settlement must be attained within a year, to the day.
September 15
This evening will end the referendum organized in Algeria at the initiative of President Bouteflika. The question posed is in reality very simple: are you for or against civil peace and concord? Obviously, a massive yes is expected. But will this yes be a yes to a collective pardon or, more realistically, a plebiscite for the President? In spite of everything, despite Bouteflika’s politically loaded past, the implementation of the reforms he has announced inclines one to think, given the years Algeria has just lived through, that the President’s action could prove positive.
September 17
It is the end of the Algerian referendum, marked by two astonishing if predictable figures:
- Participation was on the order of 75% of the electorate.
- The yes obtained 98.3%.
Of course, while this last figure looks very much like a plebiscite, it is also the reflection of the Algerian people’s desire to be done with the tragedy it is going through. These results reinforce the Algerian President in his taking hold of the reins of power, and, moreover, push into the background the dubious conditions of his recent election, an election in which he was the sole candidate.
What will he do today with this strengthened and legitimized power, but also what will be the response of the Islamists to this outstretched hand?
September 20, 1999
It is Yom Kippur, and it is pouring rain on Paris. And of course, there is no relation between these two realities.
September 21, 1999
A new earthquake in Formosa, which is said to have left more than 1,500 dead.
Timor seems to be arriving at a solution. The first rotations are being made between Darwin, in Australia, and Dili, the capital of Timor. It remains to determine the attitude of the anti-independence militias still present, and of the Indonesian government, which already, through the mouth of its president, is calling for sanctions against Australia’s attitude, judged interventionist.
But a solution already seems in sight.
September 22
For the second time, the experiment of car-free cities. 66 cities are concerned in France and in Europe.
The number of dead in Taiwan increases by the hour (more than 1,700), and more than 3,000 people are said to be still under the rubble.
In Timor, the return of the refugees is happening in chaos, while the anti-independence militias take up violence again.
At the UN, Lionel Jospin meets President Bouteflika. All the dossiers were addressed, including that of Air France’s transport on the Paris-Algiers line.
France today receives the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. On the program, of course, the continuation of the peace process. Essentially, the Prime Minister is going to discuss with President Chirac and with Lionel Jospin the possibilities of reintroducing Syria into the peace negotiations. Yasser Arafat, for his part, has already given a satisfecit to Ehud Barak by recognizing that Israel has applied to the letter the agreement signed 15 days ago at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Ehud Barak is in fact ready to discuss all the problems, in particular that of the Golan, this plateau occupied by Israel after the war of 1967, and annexed in 1981. The discussions concerning this problem had ceased with Syria since 1996. The Israeli Premier is obliged to move very quickly, in any case before an intensive resumption of terrorist attacks, for the establishment of lasting security is the surest guarantor of the region’s economic development.
September 23, 1999
Ehud Barak met Jacques Chirac. The two agreed that a historic opportunity for peace was under way. Ehud Barak set himself a deadline of 12 to 15 months to bring to a successful conclusion the peace discussions with Syria, even specifying that the essential part of the dossier concerned the Golan, a most burning question inside Israel. This question contains, indeed, another underlying and primordial question for the life of this whole region: the question of water. Need it be specified that water, that of Lake Tiberias in particular, remains the wealth coveted by all and sundry, a wealth that demands an equity of use from which we are far today?
In Timor, the tension increases. Australian soldiers were obliged to open fire on anti-independence militias and on Indonesian soldiers.
Sunday, September 26, 1999
This evening ends the perennial and deplorable festival of the Front National, the so-called Bleu-Blanc-Rouge festival. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who would dearly like to regain a little weight in the French political landscape, ends his speech with these remarks: Islam is a religion practiced by more than a billion individuals in the world. Most of them are young, and most are poor. For the decadent Western society that we are, Islam therefore represents a real danger. I have not put these remarks in quotation marks because I have retained only their spirit and not their letter, but they require no further comment.
I find, at this very moment, the precise terms used by Le Pen: “Islam is a religion practiced by more than a billion men, young, generally poor. For our world, materialist and decadent, that is an objective threat.”
October 15
This morning, with a week’s delay on the planned timetable, begins, in Israel, the release of the prisoners, which was one of the most important clauses provided by the agreement signed at Sharm el-Sheikh last month. This delay is explained by the time needed to verify the identity of the prisoners, of whom one had to be sure that they had no drop of Israeli blood on their hands. The first to be released number 151.
October 17, 1999
Médecins Sans Frontières, the NGO that has carried aid and hope to all the fronts where war and the madness of men rage, is the Nobel Peace Prize. This humanitarian organization has made its mark not only for the care it has lavished throughout the entire world, but it has also borne witness, jostling tepid and cautious diplomacy, bringing to light the scandal of massacres and tortures. It has, so to speak, given concrete form to the right of intervention.
October 18, 1999
It may seem a little indecent, a little ridiculous, amid the immense clamor of the world, to note in these Ephemerides the start of the trial brought against Xavière Tibéri over a sum of 200,000 fr. that she is said to have unduly received for a report riddled with spelling mistakes. I mention it, then, for the record.
In the same vein, I also mention the return to the media scene of the prefect Bonnet, of the affair of the burned beach huts, the summer’s serial, and incidentally of the Corsican problem, once again diverted from its real meaning.
A demonstration today of about 4,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank in front of the residence of the Israeli Prime Minister. These settlers are violently protesting against the dismantling of 12 Jewish settlements. But Ehud Barak remains firm in his positions, announcing that these settlements will be dismantled within 15 days. Moreover, the road linking Gaza to the West Bank, which was to be reopened 15 days ago, remains closed. Its reopening has been postponed sine die.
October 19, 1999
Death of Nathalie Sarraute. One of her plays, “Pour un oui ou pour un non” (For No Good Reason), was still on the bill in Paris these last two months. Nathalie Sarraute was a great writer, and, an exceptional fact, her work had entered, during her lifetime, into the prestigious Pléiade collection at Gallimard.
She was born in 1902 in Russia, and was therefore nearly 99 years old. As early as 1933, her work “Tropismes” (Tropisms) created a sensation by its innovation. It was a set of texts bound to one another by no narrative plot. Numerous other books then made her renown, such as “Le portrait d’un inconnu” (Portrait of a Man Unknown), in 1949, prefaced by Sartre, who called it an anti-novel; “Le Planétarium” (The Planetarium), in 1959; “Les Fruits d’or” (The Golden Fruits), in 1963; and many others still, not forgetting her radio plays. She was, of course, one of the surest values of what was called the Nouveau Roman.
October 20, 1999
We learn this morning that the prefect Papon, who was to appear before the court the day before his appeal to the Court of Cassation, will not be present. He has, moreover, disappeared for several days. Papon, in an account entrusted to a newspaper of the south-west, confirms that he does not intend to give himself up to justice. His lawyers immediately began another procedure to delay the application of the April 1998 judgment that sentenced him to firm imprisonment, a judgment that became enforceable owing to his absence before the Court of Cassation.
Also today, in the judicial domain, the opening of the trial of Abbé Cottard, responsible for the death of 4 young scouts and a boater, a tragedy that occurred last year off Perros-Guirec.
October 21
Papon’s flight is turning into a media and even national scandal. Maître Klarsfeld seems to have warned the French government of the possibility, and even the probability, of this flight. Yet nothing was done to prevent Papon from calmly leaving France, without anyone being concerned about it.
Among all the reactions to this affair, that of the president of the Council of State remains the most worthy of attention. Indeed, Maître Badinter explained that trials of the type brought against the prefect Papon are important above all because they make concrete certain facts, certain historical events that had little by little become, in the eyes of the younger generations, abstract words, received images. Thus words like “collaboration,” “denunciation,” or “deportation” now have a face and are no longer assimilated or even assimilable to fiction films. We know today that a mere signature at the bottom of a document can translate into a journey of no return in a train, into a house left with no hope of seeing it again. Even if it were only for these reasons, the Papon trial will remain exemplary.
It must be recalled, for the very small history, for the lamentable small history, that the fugitive not only did not pay the damages owed to the victims, but had taken the precaution, a month before his conviction, of making a gift between living persons, and had distributed almost all his fortune to his children and heirs living today. We are not here before a poor old man in exile, but before a coward on the run, hunted by all the police forces of Europe.
This morning, October 21, we learn that the fugitive, Maurice Papon, has been apprehended in a hotel in the winter sports resort of Gstaad, in Switzerland. He will now have to serve his sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment.
October 25, 1999
The Chinese president’s visit to our country ends with the purchase of 28 Airbuses from France. Jacques Chirac had received his guest at his private property in Auvergne. The red carpet for a man at whom Human Rights point an accusing finger. But economy and globalization oblige.
Presidential and legislative elections in Tunisia. President Ben Ali, who has set up a façade of electoral pluralism (3 candidates ran against him), obtains more than 99% of the vote. This kind of result is not without recalling those that made the finest days of Stalinist power. That said, this campaign was nonetheless marked by President Ben Ali’s will to open up to Europe, and his concern to give it, through the exemplarity of these figures, an economic guarantee: see, he seems to say, the confidence that an entire people shows me! You can therefore invest in my little country.
Since yesterday, Maurice Papon has been incarcerated… in the Fresnes hospital.
October 26, 1999
In Switzerland, the far-right, anti-European party, the SVP, comes out ahead in the elections.
October 27, 1999
Official visits follow one another in France. The Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami, has arrived in Paris. Important security measures were taken by the Ministry of the Interior in the circles of the regime’s opponents living in France. In spite of everything, the president’s procession was the target of various projectiles, including eggs.
October 31, 1999
The wind of the “affairs” seems to be catching up with the Socialist Party: after the party’s chief official in the Bouches-du-Rhône, after the party’s number 2, Cambadélis, it is the minister of finance, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who finds himself implicated in the MNEF affair.
November 1, 1999
Reopening of the peace process in Oslo. One can see, once again on the screens, President Clinton shaking hands with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. It is to be noted that the resumption of the peace process takes place almost to the day 4 years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
November 2, 1999
With great solemnity, emotion, and reserve, the minister Strauss-Kahn announces to the press his resignation. He is a key piece of the Jospin government whom “the affairs” remove from public life.
The recent Oslo meeting seems to be starting under happy auspices. A very precise timetable was established, and the decision was taken to settle the problem of the territories before September 2000. After 2 days of negotiations, Oslo thus ends. The protagonists, namely Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, and President Clinton, parted on the promise to convene a second summit in mid-February, so as to bring to a successful conclusion the solution, planned for September, of the occupied territories. It is not yet known where it will be held.
Since Monday, November 1, a kind of corridor links Gaza to the West Bank. This fragile road allows Palestinian workers to be able to work in Israel.
November 7, 1999
This morning in Israel, after a period of calm, a new attack arouses new passions and new anxieties throughout the country. The explosion, in broad daylight, in Netanya, of a bomb made of 4 lead pipes stuffed with explosives, left 27 wounded. A Hamas communiqué had announced and predicted “a bloodbath” for Israel. In the street, demonstrators jeer the name of Ehud Barak and chant that of Netanyahu.
November 8, 1999
A new communiqué has just claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack, in Netanya, in the name of Islamic Jihad.
In spite of everything, the negotiations have resumed to prepare the mid-February summit. It is not without significance to note that they are being held in Ramallah.
Night of November 8 to 9, 1999
Preparations are under way for the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This ceremony will of course take place in the presence of the principal architects of that event, in particular Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush, the former president of the United States, and Helmut Kohl. Chancellor Schröder will also be present. Tens of thousands of people are expected at the concert that Rostropovich will conduct at the Brandenburg Gate, in memory of the one he gave in 1989, a concert during which he had spontaneously played a fugue by Bach. This evening, Rostropovich will conduct an orchestra of more than 160 cellists. It will be the high point of this event. In 1989, to the astonishment of the international community, the reunification of the two Germanys had taken place almost immediately.
Let us recall that the Wall of Shame was not just a simple little partition separating two neighborhoods or two groups of buildings: it measured 43 kilometers.
The affair of arms sales to Taiwan: 2 socialist leaders are implicated, Jean-François Cambadélis and the number 1 of the Socialist Party in Paris, Jean-Marie Le Guen.
The presence in Paris of Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, on the occasion of the Socialist International Congress, will allow Jacques Chirac to receive the two protagonists of the peace process, whose negotiations have resumed.
Of course, solutions are not going to be found, just like that, in passing. Nevertheless, Ehud Barak very officially announced that he was set on having the problem of the Palestinian territories settled. As regards the question of Gaza and the West Bank, the question will be more complicated to resolve. But he also declared that in July 2000 the Israeli army would have left the Golan.
The two leaders, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, were thus received by Lionel Jospin, but within the framework of the Socialist International. A very powerful image on all the television screens of these two men shaking hands, then raising them joined, facing the cameras.
The day before, November 8, they had been received separately by the President of the Republic. And there, it was a question of the negotiations, for while the two politicians were in Paris, their negotiators were in Ramallah and had undertaken to resolve the difficult problem of this peace in the Middle East that has been posed for decades.
In reality, the Palestinians are simply asking for the application of the UN resolutions, in particular resolution 242, which stipulates the liberation of the Occupied Territories and the right, for the refugees, to return to where they used to live.
For the Israelis, things are a little less simple: they agree on the application of the UN resolutions, but not as regards Gaza and the West Bank.
Moreover, the Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that something historic was going to be set in place, that the Peace of the Brave could at last be established between Israel and Syria, a declaration that was made on the occasion of the passage through Paris of the son of Hafez al-Assad. In the course of this declaration, Ehud Barak even specified that he was more or less sure of being able, without ulterior motive, to give the order to the Israeli army to return to its international borders in the north of the country, that is, the evacuation of the part of Lebanon still under the control of the Israeli army.
This November 9 is decidedly a date heavy with historical reminders, since the terrible Kristallnacht took place on November 9, 1938, and General de Gaulle passed away on November 9, 1970.
November 10, 1999
This morning, on television, images of the Israeli army moving out, manu militari, the last settlers of Havat Maon, a wildcat settlement in Judea-Samaria, in the south of the West Bank. Several hundred Jews are entrenched there. The Israeli army dislodges them one by one, without brutality, but they let themselves be carried off like parcels, images that are not without recalling those of certain “sit-ins” of the sixties.
In Morocco, the new king Mohammed VI has just dismissed the minister of the Interior, Driss Basri, the most important and most powerful politician for 25 years. He was in fact the éminence grise of Hassan II and, so to speak, the real Prime Minister, since he had control over the prisons, directed the police, signed the expulsion orders, decided what the press, including that of the opposition, could allow itself to write. It was he who, with the King’s approval, appointed the provincial governors, and thus possessed all powers over the administration, which allowed him to redistribute the royal favors.
By this gesture, Mohammed VI sought to mark, on the one hand, the continuity and the strength of power, and on the other, the way in which he intended to set himself apart from his father’s political silhouette.
One should also note the return of Abraham Serfaty, one of the most famous prisoners under the regime of Hassan II.
With the approach of winter, the situation worsens in Chechnya. The Russian bombings continue, as do the declarations of the Kremlin foreseeing the end of the war before Christmas. The populations flee the urban centers. One has seen certain families settle a few kilometers from Grozny, on a railway line, in disused wagons.
November 11, 1999
It is the customary parade on the Champs-Élysées, and the media and television presentation of the survivors of the Great War. Of course, they are pitiful old men, almost centenarians, who totter on their legs and in speeches wrenched from them with difficulty.
November 12, 1999
A culminating point in the affair of British beef. Each side digs in its position, France (as well as Germany, moreover) maintaining the embargo while the deadline of November 16, set by Brussels, approaches.
November 18, 1999
People are beginning to take stock of the terrible floods of November 15 in the south-west. For the moment, the figure of 30 dead is put forward, as well as that of the damage, expressed in hundreds of millions. The Orsec plan was of course triggered, and the state of natural disaster proclaimed.
In spite of the earthquakes, the floods, the wars, the third Thursday of November saw, as every year, the new Beaujolais arrive. A jubilant crowd celebrated the event all night in the streets of Beaujeu.
November 22
The strike at the radio and the television continues. It has now lasted a week.
November 23, 1999
Yesterday, in Algiers, Abdelkader Hachani, number 3 of the moderate FIS, who had opted for President Bouteflika’s proposals of civic concord, was assassinated while he was in the waiting room of his dentist.
November 25, 1999
For 2 or 3 days now, a big political debate, heavily mediatized, has set in between Israel and the Vatican. At the origin of the dispute, the authorization granted by Ehud Barak for the laying of the first stone of a mosque that is to be built practically at the foot of a great Christian holy place.
One has the right, in this regard, to wonder what the various declarations concerning “the Peoples of the Book” are worth, the grand phrases about the common ancestor Abraham, about that one God whose only fault would be to have several names! How can it disturb Christians that a mosque be built almost opposite a cathedral? I recall that, in my native city, the French, after the occupation of Constantine in 1837, had “annexed” the mosque located near the bey’s palace, to make of it a cathedral. Neither more nor less. It so happens that, since the independence of Algeria, this cathedral has recovered its former identity and has become a mosque again. Prayer should not need clothing.
November 27, 1999
Three new attacks in Corsica, attacks that were meant to kill, in Jacques Chirac’s very words.
November 27 and 28, 1999
In Algeria, at two fake police checkpoints, 27 people were assassinated. Is terror going to resume?
November 28, 1999
Death of Alain Peyrefitte, one of the barons of Gaullism who was also an estimable writer and a respected academician. It would be interesting to know whether, in the years to come, the name of Alain Peyrefitte will remain attached to his quality as a writer or to his past as a politician.
ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, announces that it is putting an end to the truce it had observed for 14 months, and that it is going to take up arms again. Anxieties in the circles concerned, both French and Spanish.
November 29, 1999
We are on the eve of the opening of the summit of the WTO, the World Trade Organization. For several weeks now, the press has been full of news concerning this event.
This meeting can indeed be qualified as an event because of the presence, for the first time, of what has been called “civil society.” Innumerable demonstrations have already taken place in Seattle, where the WTO is to open, demonstrations in which one must note the highly mediatized presence of the farmer José Bové, who has become an emblematic figure of the protest against the globalization of trade.
November 30, 1999
Opening of the WTO summit, but the spectacle is first of all in the street, where all the NGOs gathered in Seattle parade and demonstrate. The agitation is such that the mayor has decreed a state of emergency. José Bové has become a veritable star in the United States, and Roquefort a raw material for the transatlantic press.
Northern Ireland: a miracle! For the first time, a unionist government has seen the light of day, composed of 5 Protestants and 5 Catholics. But of course, London still keeps its grip on Defense and on foreign policy.
December 2, 1999
Scenes of violence in Seattle, under siege for several days. But apparently, the first talks have at last got under way this night.
We learn, moreover, that, contrary to what was believed, the settlements in the West Bank are continuing. Construction work is under way only a few hundred meters from the mosques in East Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat intends to contact Paris and Washington very soon. And the peace process risks being interrupted once again in the coming days.
First meeting, in Northern Ireland, of an autonomous, free, and independent Council of Ministers.
December 3, 1999
Starting this evening, the 13th Téléthon will unfold over 30 hours, that event which comes to the aid of research on genetic diseases.
December 4, 1999
Almost total failure of the WTO summit.
Michèle Alliot-Marie is elected to the presidency of the RPR, defeating Jean-Paul Delevoye, supposed to be the candidate of the Élysée.
December 5, 1999
France loses the Davis Cup of tennis to the benefit of Australia.
December 6, 1999
For the fifteenth consecutive year, opening of the campaign of the Restos du Cœur.
In Chechnya, the battle of Grozny has really begun. The city is totally encircled, and the sanitary and food situation is catastrophic. The population lives buried in basements and cellars.
December 8, 1999
At the council of ministers, this morning, a bill by Jean-Pierre Chevènement on parity, or how to promote the equal access of men and women to electoral mandates and elective functions. It is the implementation of a constitutional revision voted last June.
Strike of the emergency rooms in some of the great Parisian hospitals. This strike seems justified when one witnesses the reception reserved for the sick, the interminable wait on gurneys in the corridors, and when one sees the devotion of doctors and nurses overwhelmed because too few in number.
December 9, 1999
We learn this morning that the peace talks are resuming between Israel and Syria. News that can be qualified as historic when one considers that these negotiations had been interrupted in 1996 by Shimon Peres, then Prime Minister, following the suicide attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
President Clinton is said to have intimated that Hafez al-Assad would no longer make the evacuation of the Golan a precondition. It must be recalled that the Golan, this plateau that overlooks the north of Israel, had been occupied by the Israeli army after the war of 1967, and annexed in 1981.
To observe once again the importance of the United States in the peace process, one need only look at the schedule of Madeleine Albright, who visited Hafez al-Assad last Tuesday before going to find Ehud Barak, not to mention her meeting with Yasser Arafat.
It is the same Madeleine Albright who qualified the resumption of the talks between Israel and Syria as a historic event.
This December 9 is also the first day of the Muslim Ramadan. Is it superfluous to wish that this great festival of Islam not translate, in Algeria, as has been the case for 3 years, into a resurgence of massacres? Unfortunately, it must be noted that since the beginning of November 200 people have already been assassinated.
France has just announced, this morning, that it is maintaining the embargo on British beef, which has, of course, raised a wave of protests in Great Britain, as well as an indignant declaration from Tony Blair.
December 11, 1999
Death of Franjo Tuđman, president of Croatia and father of Croatian independence against the communist yoke.
Grozny continues to undergo the Russian bombings. The famous humanitarian corridor proposed by Russia for the evacuation of the population has curiously remained deserted.
December 12, 1999
An event that deserves to be noted: during a colloquium organized at the Alliance Israélite, in Paris, on the theme of the Jews of the Maghreb and particularly of Algeria, the ambassador of Algeria and a team from Algerian television were seen to arrive.
We are indeed before a concrete illustration of the remarks and promises formulated, this summer, by President Bouteflika regarding the tribute he wished to pay to the Jewish community of Constantine.
For the first time since the beginning of Ramadan, a massacre was perpetrated between Blida and Médéa: in two vehicles, intercepted and burned, 15 people met their death. Which brings the number of those killed in Algeria since November 1 to more than 250 people.
December 14, 1999
Meeting between Lionel Jospin and all the representatives of the Corsican territorial assembly to find a “way out” of the problem of violence on the island, a problem that was one of the big headlines of this summer’s media serial. A timetable was drawn up, a commission created, and working groups constituted.
The United States is preparing to return to Panama the canal they had built 87 years ago. This restitution also includes that of the territorial zone surrounding the canal.
This morning, December 14, the “little affairs” of the Tibéri family continue: on the one hand, the mayor of Paris is going to have to have his budget voted by a (right-wing) majority that contests certain aspects of it; on the other, Xavière Tibéri is to learn today whether her sentence to 6 months’ suspended imprisonment and a 200,000 F. fine, for the grotesque affair of the report, is confirmed.
In Israel, the Knesset has voted the continuation of the talks with Syria. Out of a total of 102 seats, the vote was carried by 41 in favor, 27 against, and 34 abstentions. It remains that the minority opposition demonstrates in a more or less forceful manner in the street. We learn, moreover, that the security forces shot dead 2 Hamas militants in a village near Hebron.
In Algeria, the massacres are becoming almost daily: 11 new people assassinated yesterday south of Algiers, 11 nomads of one and the same family.
For 2 days now, a new risk of oil slick for France. A Maltese tanker, under a flag of convenience of course, the Erika, has literally broken in two off Finistère. An attempt is being made, for the moment, to tow as far as possible from the coast the rear half that has not yet sunk. A slick of very viscous oil threatens the Breton coasts and even the coasts farther south, in the Vendée.
New Russian bravado regarding Chechnya. The Russian generals announce that Grozny will fall within a week or 10 days at the latest. One must remember that at the very beginning of this war, more than 3 months ago, the authorities announced that the “operations to clean out the Chechen bandits” would not last more than ten days or so.
December 15, 1999
Xavière Tibéri was acquitted on a technicality.
This morning, Ehud Barak arrives in Washington. The head of Syrian diplomacy had already preceded him the day before. Although the negotiation promises to be very long, it remains that the talks are going to resume. The problem of the Golan, at the center of the whole discussion, will pose the grave and unavoidable question of the water to be distributed in the region.
December 18, 1999
Appearance in France, for the first time, of what is called in the United States a “serial killer.” Indeed, the corpse of a third young woman murdered in a train has been discovered.
New massacre in Algeria: 12 people assassinated coming out of a mosque, which brings to 70 the number of victims since the beginning of Ramadan. What is the purpose of these massacres? What power, what domination, do those who perpetrate them seek?
December 19, 1999
Today, Macao is once again an integral part of China. The enclave, which had been under Portuguese domination for 400 years, rejoins what is conventionally called the motherland. And already, some commentators evoke the attachment of Formosa to China.
Grozny has still not fallen into the hands of the Russians. Always the same images of old people, of children, living under the ruins, while Moscow announces the holding of legislative elections, elections in which Vladimir Putin, the current Prime Minister, is staking his credibility and his future mandate as President.
The floods in Venezuela are said to have left more than 30,000 dead.
December 20, 1999
It is Monday, the day after the legislative elections in Russia. Great surprise, the party called the Kremlin party, the party of Vladimir Putin, comes out victorious from these elections, even if the results are, for the moment, partial. The outcome of the war in Chechnya is very important for the political future of the current prime minister, a veritable emanation of Boris Yeltsin. Vladimir Putin works essentially in anticipation of the presidential elections planned in 6 months. For the first time since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the Duma will no longer be dominated by the Communist Party.
December 24, 1999
It has been 15 days since the tanker Erika went down off Finistère. It is now certain that the oil slick is going to reach the French coasts, essentially the coasts of the Île d’Yeu, of Belle-Île, of the Île de Ré, perhaps.
Bethlehem celebrates its jubilee, that is, the entry into the holy year, the 2000th after the birth of Christ. The presence is announced, at the midnight mass, of Yasser Arafat, of the president of Guatemala, of the president of Venezuela, of Abbé Pierre too.
A little before Christmas, a terrible storm fell upon France, devastating everything in its path. The regions most affected are Brittany and the Île-de-France.
On December 26, a second storm, farther south, devastated the Gironde and the Center of France. The damage runs into the billions. The number of homes deprived of electricity, water, and heating is beyond counting. The French forest heritage is mutilated.
Yesterday, a military coup d’état in Côte d’Ivoire. The president seems to have taken refuge in the French embassy in Abidjan.
Saturday, January 1, 2000
The great Nostradamian fear did not take place. The bug that the media had made, throughout the year, the emblem of a planetary catastrophe did not occur. The computers of all the banks of the world, those that govern the airlines, the elevators, the roads, the transports of all kinds, calmly continued on their merry way, leading one to believe that the chips were endowed with a timid and protective intelligence.
The spectacle of the celebration of the year 2000 in the principal cities of the world was grandiose and magnificent. But, strangely, the man in the street, that is, you or I, did not perceive this passage into the third millennium as an event that would have come to upset his daily life. Media saturation is sometimes obliged to yield to simple common sense.
Monday, January 3, 2000
Grozny still under the bombs. The forecasts of the Russian generals remain, for the moment, a dead letter. The same exhausted populations continue to hide under the ruins.
The oil slick has really wounded the French coasts. The images of the volunteers gathering up the little black, gluey beads, or trying to save the oil-soaked birds, seem at once extraordinary and derisory. The viscous mass reached this morning one of the jewels of French tourism: the Île de Ré.
By way of a provisional conclusion.
I am well aware that it is presumptuous to want to immobilize time, but one must indeed know how to put an end to a “piece.”
I did not specially choose to stop at this date of January 3; I simply wanted to bring our review into this last year of the 20th century, knowing that I will not be able to do so for the last year of the 21st.