The France-Iraq-Saddam friendship group

Still no credible news regarding the French hostages. On the other hand, the last part of the rocambolesque story of their release turns out to be more interesting than we could have thought.

As one of Valerie's links pointed out, Didier Julia, a French UMP (Chirac's party) MP, is vice-president of the French-Iraqi parliamentary friendship group, a group that already existed under Saddam and that was allegedly a recipient of Saddam's oil vouchers.

And indeed, Mr. Julia is no stranger to Saddam's Iraq. In September 2002, he was one of the three French MPs who went to Baghdad to try and make Saddam change his mind, not to mention save him. At least 2 of them, including Julia, went back to Iraq again in February 2003, just weeks before the beginning of the war, for "cultural reasons" according to Julia. He was of course against the war and signed a petition asking for the liberation of Tariq Aziz. In an article explaining his Sept. 02 trip to Iraq, Julia seems to imply the three men were more than welcome in Iraq, yet talked to their hosts in a "manly way":

Since we were coming on our own initiative, we talked with our heart and told them: "We think you are in a totalitarian regime that we do not approve. But we care about the Iraqi people, and this old babylonian civilization. But Americans want to destroy you to take your oil."

Amazing when in the same article, Julia explains that they went to Iraq thanks to a French consortium, the OFDIC (French Office for the Development of Industry and Culture), that has been working with Iraq for years and "realize[d] not less than a 3.5 trillion francs turnover a year with Iraq." Saddam's Iraq.

And as far as oil is concerned... well, time will tell. We already mentioned the Al-Mada list.

And who is the president of the OFDIC? A certain... Philippe Brett, the man who pretended less than a week ago that he had talked to the French hostages and was going to bring them back. A man also described as "sent to Iraq by 'a Libanese-Syrian business man named Moustapha Aziz, weapons dealer and recently a supplier to Ivory Coast's armies.'"

Europolitica has a very detailed article, based partly on an article by French news magazine L'Express, about Saddam's French network of relations. Below are excerpts I found particularly interesting in regard to the current situation.

And then, of course, there is Jany Le Pen [Le Pen's wife] and... quoted by Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot [our two hostages] in "Les Années Saddam" [Saddam's years], the president of the Front National "was important in this network of political-industrial interests." That's because our two journalists hostages have been there for years and in the know concerning many troubled affairs in the middle east.

And this is precisely those two journalists who tell in their book [Saddam Hussein : Portrait total?] how "one day in November 2000, a Falcon 900 landed at Baghdad airport, reduced to idleness by the air blockade. On board, the creme de la creme of SOS-Enfants d'Irak, including Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme, brother of a pretender to the throne of Spain. . . .

Actually, in Iraq, Le Pen was looking less for money than for a world echo. And he sometimes found it, even if the price was a part of his electorate. His first meeting with Saddam Hussein . . . allowed him, in November 1990, to come back to France with 55 French hostages. A second meeting, six years later, will give [Le Pen] the occasion to denounce the "collective genocide" . . . created by the embargo. "Saddam and Le Pen had both in common an aversion to Jews and hostility towards America," Saman Abdul Majid, the official translator who was there during both meetings, remembers. . . .

Pleading in favor of Baghdad was like failing the imperialism of the United States. "Iraq was supporting Roselyne Bachelot in 1996, then at the head of the France-Iraq friendship group at the parliament, that is a rampart," reminds L'Express.

Seduced by the (illusory) perspectives of the lifting of the UN sanctions, Saddam's era courtesans were sometimes within the limits of greed and ideology . . . . President of the French Office for the Development of Industry and Culture (OFDIC), Philippe Brett was there too. The same Brett who is acting today with Julia.

Philippe Brett was a founding member of the French Office for the Development of Industry and Culture (OFDIC), organization that militated for the lifting of the embargo imposed on Iraq after the invasion of Koweit. In September 2002, while the American intervention was taking shape, it had chartered a plane to carry three members of the French parliament to Baghdad, Thierry Mariani, Eric Diard and Didier Julia. Close to the far-right according to Le Monde, Philippe Brett would have been the driver and bodyguard of Bruno Gollnisch, [Le Pen's] Front National's #2.

As for Didier Julia, 70, UMP member of the Parliament for 37 years, he has always been close to Baghdad's former regime. Unknown from the public at large, he's "on national television" after his trip to Baghdad at the head of the team of "pieds nickelés" who started, just before the lethal meetings of the UNSC, some kind of "saddam rescue" operation as ridicule as vain.

To be continued...

UPDATE: French Media in disarray. Who did what? (Emphasis mine)

French media, many of which have been publishing a daily vigil for the hostage journalists, were scathing of Julia's supposed operation - but also at the seeming "impotence" of the government.

They additionally highlighted curious developments that suggested Julia may have had a measure of official support.

Chief among those was the reported involvement of Laurent Gbagbo, the president of the former French colony of Ivory Coast.

Gbagbo's plane was used to transport Julia to Baghdad on September 5, Le Monde reported. Another newspaper, Le Telegramme de Brest, said the plane was again used to fly a Moroccan man carrying a ransom to Amman.

Le Monde said, according to undisclosed sources in Paris, Brett had been a go-between for arms shipments to Ivory Coast, where a civil war broke out two years ago.

It also reported that France's ambassador to Syria, Jean-Francois Girault, held a long meeting with Julia early Friday, before the deputy affirmed that the hostages would soon be freed.

Le Journal du Dimanche speculated that Julia had been manipulated by the Syrian intelligence services as part of a plot by Damascus to punish France for backing a UN resolution condemning Syrian involvement in Lebanon.