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In what has been dubbed the trial of the decade, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France will face charges of allegedly plotting to tarnish the name of his former rival and now the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. France's state prosecutors ordered Villepin, a protégé of former President Jacques Chirac and longstanding political rival of the incumbent French president, to stand trial in a four-year-old scandal known as the Clearstream affair. The scandal dating back to 2004, started when a list containing the name of businessmen, celebrities and politicians among them Sarkozy, leaked to the media. The document...

France labeled as unacceptable a Rwandan report accusing French leaders of being involved in the 1994 genocide in which as many as 800,000 Rwandans died. The 500-page report released by the Rwandan Justice Ministry accused 13 senior French politicians, including President Francois Mitterrand and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, of supporting the preparation and execution of the genocide, The New York Times reported Thursday. The report, issued Tuesday, said French soldiers in Rwanda joined in with genocidal forces in the systematic killing and rape of minority Tutsi refugees by the Hutu majority. France supported the Hutu government in a...

Paris With Nicolas Sarkozy's precipitous slide in the polls finally reversed thanks to a carefully calibrated spin campaign and an unexpectedly successful state visit to Britain, there are long faces to be seen on the left--but even longer ones inside the president's own party. Call the French inconsistent. They objected to their new president's perceived flaunting of his private life. But give him a picture-perfect trip to England, complete with horse-drawn carriage ride into Windsor next to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, gala evenings, a speech before the Houses of Parliament, and a new commitment to a French-British alliance equal...

Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who faces criminal charges over a smear campaign targeting President Nicolas Sarkozy, hit back Thursday with a charge that Sarkozy has manipulated the scandal. Villepin, who was placed under judicial investigation in July, launched the counter-attack in a 23-page note delivered to the two judges who questioned him again on the so-called Clearstream affair Thursday. "What is remarkable is the energy with which Nicolas Sarkozy made himself out to be the victim -- indeed the only victim -- of the affair, and at the same time the speed with which accusations were launched...

PARIS -- Former prime minister Dominique de Villepin Monday warned President Nicolas Sarkozy that it would be a "monumental error" to back US President George W. Bush on Iraq. Villepin, who was former president Jacques Chirac's foreign minister during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, said in an interview with Europe 1 radio that Sarkozy must keep "his eyes wide open" and "remain clear-headed" about Iraq's future. "It would be a monumental error to lend backing, today, to the Bush administration on Iraq and on many other issues," warned Villepin, who served as prime minister from May 2004 to this...

The former prime minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, was placed under formal investigation on Friday in an inquiry into whether he was involved in a campaign to smear Nicolas Sarkozy before Mr. Sarkozy won the presidency. A lawyer for Mr. de Villepin, Luc Brossollet, said Friday that Mr. de Villepin was being investigated for “complicity to make false accusations” after the former prime minister appeared before two judges assigned to the case, Agence France-Presse reported. The scandal involved false documentation that seemed to show large sums of money, presumably bribes, passing through secret bank accounts held by Mr. Sarkozy...

PARIS - Judges filed preliminary charges Friday against former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for his suspected role in a smear campaign that targeted Nicolas Sarkozy before he became France's president, an attorney said. The case stems from an attempt three years ago to discredit Sarkozy, who was a government minister at the time and a political rival of Villepin within their conservative UMP party. Sarkozy and other prominent figures were falsely accused of having secret bank accounts to hold bribes from a 1991 sale of frigates to Taiwan. Villepin was charged with "complicity in slanderous denunciations" and complicity in...

PARIS - Investigating judges plan to file preliminary charges against former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin over a smear scandal targeting Nicolas Sarkozy before he became the French president, Villepin's office said Tuesday. The case stems from an attempt in 2003-2004 to use false accusations of secret bank accounts to taint Sarkozy, who was a government minister at the time and a political rival of Villepin within the conservative camp. Sarkozy and other prominent figures were falsely accused of having secret bank accounts in the Luxembourg clearing house Clearstream, purportedly created to hold bribes from a 1991 sale of frigates...

IN the latest episode of a saga that split France’s last conservative government and threatens to divide the new one, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the interior minister, is to be questioned over what she knew about a plot to smear Nicolas Sarkozy three years ago in an apparent attempt to prevent him from becoming president. A retired spymaster, General Philippe Rondot, claimed last week that he had revealed to Alliot-Marie, who was then defence minister, the details of the alleged conspiracy to blacken Sarkozy’s name. Loyal as she then was to President Jacques Chirac and the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who...

Police searched the home of Dominique de Villepin, the former French Prime Minister, yesterday as judges appeared close to charging him with conspiring to implicate Nicolas Sarkozy, now the President, in a corruption scandal. Criminal charges are thought likely after examining judges unearthed new evidence that appears to put Mr de Villepin, 56, close to the heart of the so-called Clearstream affair. The scandal, under investigation since 2005, involves forged bank records that suggested falsely that Mr Sarkozy and other senior figures had received big bribes in the sale of French warships to Taiwan. Mr de Villepin was serving as...

Paris - Two French magistrates investigating an attempt to smear President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday searched the Paris residence of former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who has been implicated in the affair by a former espionage official, France-Info radio reported. The search by judges Jean-Marie d'Huy and Henri Pons followed testimony by a former senior official in France's counter- intelligence service, General Philippe Rondot, that Villepin was behind the attempt to implicate Sarkozy in an affair involving illegal payments into foreign bank accounts. According to the internet site of the daily Le Monde, Rondot told the two judges...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the United States should pull out of Iraq within one year and work with Iraq's neighbors and Europe to resolve the crisis. Villepin, in a speech Friday at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on Friday, said the United States' true strength "isn't its army." The United States in the 20th century constructed an economic and cultural model "and forged an ideal of modernity that inspired the admiration of the rest of the world," he said. "For us you represented the camp of freedom. You were the guarantors of...

PARIS (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Friday he had been the victim of "calumny and lies," as he emerged from 17 hours of questioning by magistrates over an apparent smear campaign against a political rival. Villepin was heard as a witness, not a suspect, in the so-called Clearstream affair, which revolves around faked bank accounts and hushed-up government probes. But commentators said the prime minister's image had suffered. The marathon session, interrupted only by lunch and a break in which media said Villepin did some push-ups, ended at 3 a.m. (0200 GMT) on Friday. The...

When an anonymous letter-writer exposed corruption in France’s defence industry, a sinister drama unfolded, involving the Russian mafia and a chain of unexplained violent deaths. And the trail leads all the way to Chirac himself. The twilight years of Jacques Chirac’s France have not been easy for the French state. It has endured economic decline, ethnic tension and vicious infighting among its political elite. Now the electorate is gripped by a political and financial scandal, with potentially grave if not cataclysmic consequences that may stretch as far as the Elysée Palace. At the heart of the scandal is an anonymous...

A day after Mr Chirac denounced the so-called Clearstream affair as a "dictatorship of rumours", Le Monde newspaper published notes of General Philippe Rondot that pitched the 73-year-old President into the centre of the scandal, which continues to blow the lid on the way power is exercised in the dying days of his inglorious 11-year presidency. Mr Chirac and his protege, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are accused of covertly instructing a French intelligence official to secretly investigate their internal party rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in an apparent attempt to ruin his chances of becoming president. ............. General Rondot...

President Jacques Chirac was further drawn into a dirty tricks scandal rocking the French government on Thursday, with the publication of leaked evidence showing he knew of a secret enquiry into his political rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. - Le Monde newspaper printed excerpts of hand-written notes kept by spy-master Philippe Rondot, which it said "Demolish" denials by Chirac and his ally, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, that they ordered an investigation into Sarkozy's alleged secret bank accounts...." "...But De Villepin's political future remains on a knife-edge after he was accused of Lying before Parliament over the affair and the...

France's prime minister said Thursday that military action is not the solution to the international standoff over Iran's nuclear program. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the war in Iraq should serve as a warning against attacking Iran. "My conviction is that military action is not the solution," Villepin said at a monthly news conference. "We have already lived through this type of scenario and we know that not only does it settle nothing, but it can raise risks. We have seen this in the most clear way with Iraq."

UN MOMENT DECISIF By Allahpundit   ·   March 31, 2006 11:51 AM Jacques Chirac is expected to take to the airwaves at 1 p.m. EST and inform France's youth that, no, they're not entitled to lifetime job security by age 26. French auto makers are already bracing for a spike in demand. Stay tuned to this post for updates in case protesters respond with insufficient "nuance." Brussels Journal reports that the issue has made for an odd reversal of political polarity: The French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told his party, the UMP, that there is “no question of withdrawing” the...

Nicolas Sarkozy, a self-declared candidate for the 2007 presidential elections, expressed understanding for the young demonstrators in a speech at a meeting of his UMP party. "Twenty years of mass unemployment, 15 years of mediocre economic growth, 10 years of sluggish purchasing power, seven political changes since 1981 -- how can we blame the young for saying out loud what their parents think?" he said. Sarkozy was clearly seeking to distance himself from Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is also expected to run in next year's election and who held unsuccessful talks with labor union leaders on the row...

THE CURRENT WAVE OF PROTESTS in France is regularly misportrayed as a pale remake of the 1968 student revolt that brought down Charles de Gaulle. The comparison gets it awfully wrong.True, we are witnessing a ritualistic springtime skirmish between students and the authorities. But there is an ironic ideological twist: It is the French government that is advocating change while students on the moral barricades are defending the status quo.As the conflict gathers steam, it offers a historically recognizable ballet--the government confronting student and trade-union demonstrators. This political trope enjoys special legitimacy in France, where factions and interest groups marginalized...