WHO IS BRIGITTE GIRARDIN – AND WHY WAS SHE INTERFERING IN SEYCHELLES POLITICS
Last week we were treated to another cynical propaganda emanating from State House in support of the ruling party, this time with the apparent connivance of the French Embassy in Seychelles and the French Foreign Ministry.
While one of the most important constitutional challenges was about to be heard by the Constitutional Court, SBC TV was tuned entirely to the visit of a junior Minister from Paris, whose presence in Seychelles appears to have been timed perfectly to give SPPF some much needed domestic political endorsement in the guise of international diplomacy. And the French junior Minister did not disappoint.
Immediately after she got off the aircraft she endorsed the state of affairs of our country under President Michel virtually before she had a chance to see the greenery of Mahe’s hills up close. On television she was photographed meeting the high echelons of government – read SPPF in disguise – mouthing various platitudes in the typical French bureaucratic manner, patronisingly making outrageous claims about the economy of Seychelles. On Monday the Government owned daily newspaper – Seychelles Nation (which generally serves as a propaganda sheet for the ruling party in Seychelles) quoted the French junior Minister as saying “we are very happy to have relations with a country that works”.
So who is Madame Girardin? According to the French government website, the lady has spent her entire career as a functionary in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She joined the French Foreign Service at the tender age of 23 – the same year Seychelles became independent. In 1977 when the coup d’etat, which overthrew our nascent democracy (in which President Michel took a decisive part) took place in Seychelles she was a lowly functionary, but the following year she became the desk officer responsible for economic relations with Central and Eastern Africa as well as Madagascar. In this capacity she must have had some interest in the diplomatic crisis between France and Seychelles which resulted from the arrest of Jacques Chevalreau (a French police officer seconded to the Seychelles Police) ordered by former President Rene in 1979. Chevalreau was accused of helping the MPR (Mouvement Pour La Resistance) foment a plot to overthrow the one-party state regime. In retaliation for the arrest, Paris withdrew all French technical experts from Seychelles – which included a dozen or so French marines stationed on a converted minesweeper.
Madame Girardin rose swiftly in her career to become a full Cabinet Minister in 2002, albeit responsible for the innocuous so-called French territories, which includes La Reunion island - a French department which relies on subsidy from Paris to survive as a viable economic entity.
It is interesting that while in Seychelles Madame Girardin had little to say about the huge debt arrears the Seychelles has with France which, according to the French Government web-site, had reached 29 million Euro as at 2004. The same website also says that France has stopped giving financial aid to Seychelles since 1997 as a result. And if she had asked around she would have been told that since then the economic situation in Seychelles has deteriorated even further, especially over the last three years since Mr Michel has been President.
Interestingly, the French Government website indicates just how relations between France and Seychelles have been frozen since 2004 – at least in the context of Paris and Victoria. The website continues to state that Seychelles has accepted an IMF restructuring programme as well a Paris Club rescheduling plan in 2004, even though it is not and never been a fact. This may just be the promise Mr Michel has been making to the French Government since he took office in 2004. It will not be entirely wrong to assume that in private Mr Michel has promised Madame Girardin that as soon as the National Assembly elections are over he will definitely call in the IMF. In the meantime French diplomacy with Seychelles, apart from the visit by Madame Girardin, will remain between the Queau de Quincy and the Ciotat buildings at Mont Fleuri, in other words within shouting distance.
According to the state controlled media, one of the agreements Madame Girardin is supposed to have signed would give French companies special privileges to repatriate their funds in foreign currency. In economic relations terms it is a bit of an oxymoron. While the French Government cannot repatriate the money our Government owes it because of a shortage of foreign exchange, just how a French company will be able to do so beggars belief.
Seasoned observers of the Seychelles political scene see the visit of Madame Girardin as purely a propaganda exercise by the French Embassy in Seychelles to assist the political fortunes of Mr Michel, if not the SPPF. It is significant that the current French Ambassador in Seychelles cut his teeth in the French diplomatic service around the time Madame Girardin was cutting hers, according to informed sources. He was in the French Embassy in Seychelles while she was at Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. The French Ambassador has been quite explicit in his praise for Mr Michel to anyone who wants to listen.
Meanwhile, Madame Girardin is now in Mauritius where she is expected to sign a framework partnership agreement (which has the French acronym of DCP) which provides for aid amounting to 252 million euros “to assist the programme of economic transition in Mauritius”. Mauritius, where hundreds of Seychellois escape to every week to buy consumer goods not available in Seychelles, has now been downgraded it appears, to “a country that does not work”, and therefore, in need of French aid.
It is said that a diplomat is one who is paid to lie for his or her country. Now it appears that French diplomacy has one-up on the rest of the world: diplomats are paid to lie for another country with which it wants to keep fraternal ties.
