Posted on 07/28/2003 6:21:02 PM PDT by saquin
A BUNGLED secret French attempt to rescue a Colombian politician held hostage in the Amazon jungle has enraged the governments of Brazil and Colombia and embarrassed President Chirac.
The bid to rescue Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candididate who has dual French-Colombian nationality, was ordered by Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister. Señora Betancourt is one of his former students.
The operation ended in fiasco, with French undercover agents arrested by Brazilian police and M de Villepin accused of a cavalier approach that has set back hopes of Señora Betancourt’s release.
M de Villepin denied that he had been engaged in discussions on a deal with the terrorists who kidnapped the Colombian senator. His statements have been greeted with scepticism, however, by commentators who recall how M Chirac’s Government negotiated to free French hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s while denying that it was doing so. The affair has also sparked a diplomatic row with Colombia and Brazil.
The Foreign Minister failed to inform either country of his decision to send a French military aircraft to the Colombian-Brazilian border earlier this month. M Chirac also appears to have been unaware of the mission, as was Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, M Chirac and M Raffarin issued a series of rapidly retracted denials when the affair came to light in France this weekend. “This sort of operation would not have happened without me being informed, and I was not informed,” M Chirac said, before being shown a photograph of the French aircraft on the tarmac in Brazil.
Señora Betancourt, 41, a former beauty queen who was dubbed Colombia’s Joan of Arc after launching a campaign against political corruption, was kidnapped by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (Farc), the left-wing terrorist movement, in February 2002. She had been running as the Green party candidate in the presidential election that took place three months later.
She is among the best-known of around 3,000 hostages being held by Farc guerrillas and her cause was taken up by M de Villepin when he became Foreign Minister in May 2002. Señora Betancourt has a French passport from her first marriage and was taught by M de Villepin at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris 20 years ago. The two have been close friends since.
The minister said that he was contacted by Señora Betancourt’s sister, Astrid, on July 8 to say that Farc was prepared to release her in São Paulo de Olivença, in the Amazon jungle. M de Villepin says that he immediately sent a Hercules aircraft to Manaus, on the Brazilian side of the border, to collect her if she was freed. He says that the team on board consisted only of doctors. However, his version has been undermined by evidence that intelligence agents also travelled to Manaus.
The French Foreign Ministry told its Brazilian counterparts that the aircraft was simply stopping to refuel on its way to French Guyana. But the Brazilians became suspicious since this involved a 620-mile (1,000km) detour and sent police to inspect the aircraft. They were refused access by French officials claiming diplomatic immunity.
By this time four of the French team had flown on in a private air taxi to São Paulo de Olivença, where they were arrested by Brazilian police officers who took them for drug-traffickers. Held for four hours, the French agents refused to answer questions, agreeing only to give their address. It was the headquarters in Paris of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French equivalent of MI6.
The Brazilian authorities were infuriated at what they saw as French interference in their affairs. Celso Amorim, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister, said: “As soon as we understood what was the object of this mission, and, among other reasons, because we had not been consulted — which stopped us from consulting the Colombian Government — we asked the plane to leave Brazil.”
Bogotá was also angry at being kept in the dark. “We want these events to be cleared up,” Francisco Santos, the Vice-President, said.
Colombian sources say that if Farc failed to free Señora Betancourt, it was because the terrorists had backtracked at the sight of Brazilian police officers in the jungle searching for the “drug-dealers” who turned out to be French spies.
One Brazilian newspaper said that the Hercules C130 had contained weapons for Farc in exchange for the hostage. Another said that M de Villepin had offered to bring Raul Reyes, the Farc second-in-command, to France for treatment for prostate cancer. Both reports have been denied by the French minister.
Flamboyant Foreign Minister back in the headlines
Paris: Dominique de Villepin, the flamboyant Foreign Minister, had been unusually quiet since leading French opposition to the war in Iraq.
His name had slipped out of the headlines and his face was no longer a feature on the evening news. Had the dynamic M de Villepin, 49, toned down his style? Or adopted prudent, behind-the- scenes diplomacy? The answer came with the publication in a Brazilian weekly of the photograph of a French military aircraft sent to rescue Ingrid Betancourt from the Amazon jungle.
No, the author of Les Cent Jours, an account of the 100 days that led to Napoleon’s downfall, remains committed to the sort of swift, decisive action that swept Bonaparte across Europe.
His campaign to block military action in Iraq won widespread support from French voters. Married with three children, he was tipped as a possible successor to President Chirac. Yet his ambition and often- patronising manner have earned him enemies amid his centre-right coalition. Foremost among them is another possible presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister.
Last week, M de Villepin “forgot” to mention the Amazon operation to M Sarkozy before the Interior Minister made a official visit to Colombia. As a result, M Sarkozy found himself in the middle of a controversy about which he knew nothing.
It isn't easy being green...
/john
I'm sorry, it's mean to laugh since the lady's life is in real jeopardy, but you just can't make this stuff up. When intel ops go bad, they go really bad, and it's just a good thing nobody got killed. We've had our share where people did.
Name a time when French intel got it right. I mean, besides the time they killed the greenies on a Greenpeace ship in Sweden, or Norway, or wherever, and got caught. That does count as a job done half right.
/john
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.