Now let’s get this straight. A monumentally thuggish North African political regime, that blew up a British passenger plane not long ago and is trusted by nobody, arrests five completely innocent Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, accuses them of infecting 400 children with Aids, who were actually infected by unhygienic hospital conditions, sentences them to death by getting confessions after medieval torturing, throws them in unspeakable jails for eight years, and finally decides it can use them to blackmail the European Union, which reluctantly negotiates an agreement costing 1 Million Dollars per infected child. These depressing negotiations are undertaken by EU officials over the course of a couple of years, and reach fruition during the presidency of Germany. Thus Angela Merkel is ultimately responsible for negotiating the agreement, which leads to the freeing of the six prisoners.
But who is it who shows up in Libya for the photo-op at the liberation of the prisoners? Why it’s none other than Cecilia Sarkozy, newly-crowned first lady of France, who has flown in on her husband’s private jet to revel in the glory at the liberation. Now she has played no role in all this, and neither has her husband or for that matter, France, other than its supposed membership in the EU. France’s former Minister to the EU, Pierre Moscovici, notes: “Sarkozy has taken on the strategy of the cuckoo, the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.”
Ariane Mnouchkine, France’s leading theatre person and the director of the Théatre de soliel, put it this way as she turned down the position offered to her to become the Chaired Professor of Theatre at the College de France, a call that she had received 8 months before, but which needed the approval of the President of France to become valid. When she received Sarkozy’s document, which made it seem like he had annointed her, she wrote the following:
“Nicolas Sarkozy has turned us into collaborators by attempting to curry favour with anyone played up by the media – artists and others. That is unacceptable. Therefore I must turn down the offer of this position, which had pleased me so much…. The whole world saw what happened with the Bulgarian nurses; they tried to make us believe that it was the President of France who had engineered this agreement when every one knows that the diplomats of the European Union had been working at it for years. It’s high time that Sarkozy stops trying to make us believe that he’s the one who makes things happen.”
Oh yes one more thing. On the day after his wife flew to Libya, the President himself showed up there, shared a brotherly kiss with the Libyan leader, and announced that France would supply Libya with a nuclear reactor to be built by French engineers on the coast near Tripoli. It turns out he does make things happen.