Saakashvili Takes Paris

A president and an intello walk into a Left-Bank bar...

Paris As an exercise in diplomatic deployment, Mikhail Saakashvili had his French trip planned to near perfection. The French like you more if you've published a book. Check. Even better if the book is originally in French. Check two. And most of all if you've written the book with a card-carrying member of a dynasty of Nouveaux Philosophes. Check three. Thus it was that last Wednesday night, I was yakking away, glass of red in hand in approved Left Bank form, in a crowded Georgian restaurant at the heart of Saint-Germain des Prés, waiting for the president of Georgia and his co-author Raphaël Glucksmann, who in equally approved form were both late. Piles of Je vous parle de liberté (Hachette Littératures, 2008) awaited inscribing under the watchful eye of two Hachette publicists. Nobody was checking invitations. There was no visible security among the modish crowd jostling for spicy canapés inside the bar and only a small police van parked at the corner of rue du Sabot and rue de Rennes down the block. You could not have better telegraphed that Saakashvili--who, as he reminded everyone regularly during his 48-hour-trip, spent a year studying in Strasbourg and there met his future wife--felt at home in France, in the Sixth Arrondissement, and with this crowd. Saakashvili eventually arrived and gave a short, graceful speech in very good French--more family reunion than formal declaration--particularly saluting his co-author's father, André Glucksmann, the bowl-cut coiffed author of The Master Thinkers and famous as the reuniter of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron (over the fate of Vietnamese boat-people in 1979). Glucksmann père floated above the proceedings looking like a gaunt but rather healthy mummy. He had read him while a student, Saakashvili explained, marvelling that someone understood the Soviet evil so well. He had not even known if Glucksmann were still alive, much less could he have imagined that he would one day meet the philosopher's son in a muddy park in Kiev during the Orange Revolution, that the two would become friends, and would write a book together. Everyone in the overcrowded room was smiling. After all, one could hardly do better in terms of well-connected tourisme engagé. (The French don't play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but Six Degrés de Jean-Paul Sartre.) It was a perfect moment, one of the best of Saakashvili's whole tour. He was in France to make the case that Russia had violated the terms of the imperfect cease-fire agreements negotiated by Sarkozy in the name of the European Union on August 12 and September 8, and urge firmness. Saakashvili had even cadged an Elysée invite from Sarko just a day before the EU-Russia summit began in Nice with the French in the seat of the rotating EU presidency. Throughout his whirlwind tour, Saakashvili was careful to give credit to the Sarkozy-led EU intervention, but it was felt at the time that the Europeans had conceded too much, especially in treating as a fait accompli a Russian military presence in the two seceding Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Today, Europe is split between the established "engagement with Russia is necessary" line, peddled by Commission president José Manuel Barroso among others, and a resistance front let by the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, and a somewhat wobbly Gordon Brown, who argue that there should be no resumption of talks on EU-Russia commercial partnership before Russia pulls back the 8,000 soldiers she has on the ground --some as close to Tbilisi as 30 miles. Overall, the engagement line is winning. Nowhere could this be more strongly felt than on France Inter, the state radio, bright and early Thursday morning as Saakashvili sat in the studio as the guest of the 8 A.M. news program. We French still get our hard news and spin from radio throughout the day, only switching to television at night. France Inter is a kind of mass-market NPR, with a relentlessly po-faced liberal line that has only ever pleased, or sought to please, the Quai d'Orsay--as France's foreign ministry is known (the mandarins, not the minister himself, whose ideas are largely seen as irrelevant by his administration). They were awaiting the Georgian aventuriste loaded for bear. Introducing the guest, Bernard Guetta, the morning foreign affairs moderator, reminded us that Saakashvili's calling Europe's possible abandonment of Georgia a "new Munich" had "the support of the American right." Having painted the Neocon cross squarely on Saakashvili's chest, Guetta continued. Georgia had "provoked" Russia, which felt threatened by the suggestion of an "unnecessary and unfeasible extension of NATO" to Georgia and Ukraine, but "thankfully" the United States "had not moved" to defend its ally. Common sense and world stability dictated that Europe and the United States should abstain from "pushing Russia too far" and should instead consider her "offer of cooperation." Nicolas Demorand, France Inter's news editor, then brought out "independent evidence" that Georgia had attacked first. Even the listeners during the phone-in segment were hostile. Saakashvili, though, gave as good as he got. The OSCE monitor who gave the supposed "independent evidence" has since been fired, he countered. "There wasn't a single Georgian soldier on Russian soil at any time. It was our towns which were bombed, our territory which was invaded, our population which was pushed out or killed by the thousands, even after the EU agreement was signed." A town called Akhalgory was even renamed Leningory: "This in the 21st century." His hosts were dismissive and urged him to reconsider. Joining NATO was a pipedream. "America's support for Georgia weakens and will weaken even more under President Obama." In vain did Saakashvili quote the president-elect's words from the debates, or note Senator Biden's trip to Georgia during the summer war. "Don't you feel how the wind is changing in Washington?" he was admonished. The rest of the day, save for his 40-minute meeting with Sarkozy, Saakashvili spent giving print interviews, taping more television segments, and, finally, joining Raphaël Glucksmann on Le Grand Journal, a one-hour early evening news program on Canal+, France's premier pay-TV channel. This could have gone for or against Saakashvili. Glucksmann's presence and the duo's practiced, if slightly smug, allusions to their youth, clinched it. The Le Monde-quoting Saakashvili (with one more reference to meeting his wife in Strasbourg) was anointed as cool by both the studio audience and the show's regulars. These had decided to use the occasion to bash Sarkozy, always a well-received exercise. ("He campaigned saying that Putin had Chechen blood on his hands, and now they're best buddies! All he answered last summer when Putin said he wanted to have you 'strung up by the balls' was 'You can't do that, do you want to end up like George Bush?' ") Saakashvili smiled at the show's famous political puppets, at the generously décolletaged weather girl, and even during the short video segment showing him coming out of the Elysée meeting earlier in the afternoon and looking a little forlorn on the palace steps when Sarkozy turns away after shaking his hand. The Georgian president demonstrated the required sense of distance accepted as proper manners in the postmodern political discourse practiced by countries where the memories of foreign invasion has faded away. Throughout his French tour, Saakashvili gave his rather impressively sophisticated all and could only hope that it had advanced the cause of his beleaguered country on the European stage. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Sarkozy has been played like a Stradivarius by Putin and Medvdev

November 19, 2008 6:00 AM | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
Journalist; Executive Director, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute
French Lessons For The U.S.

President-elect Barack Obama has lessons to learn from France's Nicolas Sarkozy, but they may not be what Sarkozy intended. When he greeted the visiting Democratic candidate at the Elysée last summer, the French president meant for a bit of Obama's cool to rub off on him (and his dwindling poll ratings.) He also wanted to play the elder statesman, bequeathing the wealth of his foreign-affairs experience on the freshman from far-away Illinois. As it turns out, it's Sarko who's been played, like a Stradivarius, by the redoubtable team of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev and his remote handler Vladimir Putin, at the EU-Russia summit at Nice last week-end.

Sarkozy, who as recently as 2006 peppered his ultimately successful presidential campaign with statements like "I'd rather shake hands with George Bush than with Vladimir Putin - Putin has Chechen blood on his hands," has of late experienced what can be termed a Damascene conversion in more ways than one. Russia, he believes, must be "engaged". (So must Putin himself, it would seem: at his first G-8 last year, Sarko was snapped lending his cell phone to the Russian strongman, so that he, Putin, could share a joke with his, Sarkozy's, wife.)

The French president built his political reputation on his willingness to personally engage any number of opponents. He made the cardinal mistake of thinking that he could successfully bluff his way among the autocrat leaders of an empire stretching over 12 time zones, who cut their political teeth in a totalitarian system punishing thoughtcrime with secret police, tanks, and a prison camp system second to none. Why not? the reasoning seems to have gone. It worked with union picket lines, angry demonstrators, even a hostage-taker threatening to bomb a primary school when Sarkozy was the 28-year-old mayor of a Paris suburb. Sarko has always trusted his gut, and most of the time this has served him well - together with his genuine physical courage.

But winging it, even with the best intentions, simply doesn't work in this case. For the sake of "engagement", Sarkozy, in his capacity as rotating president of the EU, abandoned beleaguered Georgia, and agreed to resume talks on EU-Russian economic partnership, event though Russia violates to this day even the favourable ceasefire brokered by that self-same Sarkozy last August in Tbilisi - there are Russian troops not only in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but as close as 30 miles from the Georgian capital.

To "help" Medvedev feel he was in congenial company in Nice, and - as he thought - get the negotiating ball rolling - Sarko didn't hesitate to state that the US plans to install an anti-missile shield against Iranian nukes in willing countries like Poland or the Czech Republic "would bring nothing to European security." (Only the week before, Medvedev, for his part, had shown no compunction to threaten to target missiles on EU and NATO countries.)

Sarkozy believes he can "mediate" between Russia and the West. He is wrong on several counts. The first is that no-one gave him a mandate. (He believes success will validate him after the fact, but his definition of "success" while bleeding advantages left and right should be unacceptable to the West and the United States.) The second is that he seems to forget what Ronald Reagan always knew (from his past as a tough union negotiator battling Communists in Hollywood): that for a certain type, which was Russian even before it was Soviet, everything that's theirs is theirs and everything that's yours is negotiable. The third is that you do not talk with an adversary who does not share your basic values without preconditions. It is strange that Sarkozy understands this about Iran, but won't see it when it comes to Russia. From all accounts, President-elect Obama does see this about Russia, but is still uncertain about Iran. Each of them should learn something from the other; but they should not be mistaken on what there is to learn.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet & Hudson Institute, 2008

Of Russia, spies and old friends: Graham Greene at 82

Graham Greene tells Anne-Elisabeth of his Moscow reunion with his old friend Kim Philby, 25 years on

On the bamboo coffee-table in Graham Greene's modern one-bedroom flat at Antibes lies a dog-eared Penguin copy of Our Man in Havana. The book's cover has been crudely repaired with opaque brown Sellotape by Greene himself. "I'm afraid I've rather made a mess of it," he says apologetically. The book, he explains, was a present from a Russian cosmonaut he met in Moscow last September, when he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1961, invited by the Union of Writers. (Since then Greene returned briefly to attend last February's massively publicised Peace Forum.) On the flyleaf is an inscription written in English by the cosmonaut.

"He took it with him in space," Greene says, sitting in a wicker chair in his small, unstylish book-lined sitting-room overlooking the noisy Antibes harbour. "It was the mission that broke the record for the longest time in space, five men out there for over five months. They were only allowed three books each."

The inscription reads: "There are books which you forget as soon as you've read them, there are some which make you read them a second and a third time; and as to this one, I've been re-reading it all my life, both on Earth and in Space. I've learnt it by heart; while in Havana, I specially visited all the places described here. This is the most valuable thing of mine, and I give it back to you with gratitude."

Greene only remembers the first name of the cosmonaut - "Yorgi - it's the equivalent of George, in Russian..." - but he values the book and shows you underlined words in the text - places in Havana: the President's Palace, the Chacha Club; colloquial expressions. "He used it to learn English, you see," Greene says, apparently pleased.

Today most of Graham Greene's books, including The Power and The Glory, Monsignor Quixote, and even The Human Factor, are all in print in the Soviet Union; but for over ten years he'd forbidden his work to be published in Russia, following the internment in a labour camp of the dissidents, Siniavski and Daniel, in the late Sixties.

In his usual fashion, Greene made that decision public by writing to the Times: in his letter he also said he wouldn't set foot in the USSR as long, he wrote, "as new conditions are not brought about". A few weks after its publication, he received a Moscow-stamped letter from his old friend and wartime colleague, Kim Philby, breaking a silence of seven years since his defection in 1963.

Philby wrote he approved of Greene's decision - and hoped that "the conditions" in the USSR might change, "not only because what you did is just and honourable, but also because it might result for us in some unexpected gratification, some meal together, for instance, when we could talk like in old times..."

A correspondence ensued, "largely on private matters," Greene insists: "Well, if there was anything political in it, I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield, so it was either information or disinformation...", he says, letting his voice trail off.

In a span of some fiteen years, Philby wrote seven or eight times. Greene sent him all his books, as well as the manuscript of The Human Factor - a novel about an Intelligence Service agent who defects to Moscow - for comment. (Philby answered that the flat assigned to Greene's hero in Moscow was too drab and that he'd been much better treated; but Greene stuck to his description, which he'd based on Eleanor Philby's account of her life in Moscow.) And so, as Greene finally visited Gorbachev's glasnost-tempered Russia twice in the past six months, he did have his long-awaited reunion with Kim Philby.

"I don't say anything about that," he says, when first asked. And again, as you insist; "I don't give any answer to that." But to a point-blank question he will not lie - honesty has been an habit with him for so long. "Well, actually yes, I met him both times."

There were three meetings in September, when Greene had come from France with a woman friend of 25 years; then a quiet dinner in Philby's flat, cooked by Philby's wife, in February, when the two men swapped stories of their wartime years in SIS - where Philby was Greene's immediate superior - over Russian wine and vodka. Greene will gladly tell you that Philby's Russian mother-in-law fussed about his coming and helped prepare the dinner, but he remains vague about the conversation itself. Philby, unlike Burgess - whom he dismisses as "drunk and homosexual - I didn't like him very much" - remains a friend. (Even before receiving Philby's first letter from Moscow, Greene had agreed to write an introduction to his autobiography.)

Greene is uneasy talking about these meetings - when asked a precise question he will answer with an abrupt non-sequitur, either veering the conversation on Gorbachev, whom he met in February and admires very much ("His speech at the Peace Forum was almost unanswerable - moderate, non agressive... I wish there was a similar character in Washington...") or on his most recent trip to Nicaragua, two weeks ago, when he visited the Sandinista government, whom he has been supporting wholeheartedly since president Somoza's overthrow in 1979.

"Well," he finally answers, "when I went to meet Kim the first time, he said: 'No questions, Graham.' I said 'I've only got one question: how is your Russian?' And we drank and conversed about the past..."

At 82, Graham Greene, possibly the greatest living English writer - and a long-time contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature - has not much changed from his photographs of the Fifities, when he used to live at the Albany in London. He is very tall, with only a hint of a stoop, white hair, and slightly protruding, very clear blue eyes. He pays little attention to his clothes - on the coldish day we met last week, he wore a short-sleeved light blue shirt, shapeless beige trousers, and an uncongruous solid gold Rolex watch with a simple black leather strap.

The watch has a story. Greene explained it was a present from President Paredes of Panama, the man who succeeded his friend General Omar Torrijos when Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1982. "Paredes asked me to go and see Castro in Cuba and assure him that Panama's intentions towards Cuba remained the same. So I went off, and told Fidel, 'Fidel, I'm not the messenger, I'm the message.' Fidel knew how much Omar and I were close, you see." On his return Greene was presented with the watch, and promptly got rid of its flashy solid gold strap.

Politics and travel still take a great deal of Greene's time these days. He is just back from two weeks in Nicaragua. He is furious that the Times wouldn't publish a letter of his about Contra atrocities - "the Sandinistas may have shot by mistake some innocents in the course of a war, but there's no such thing as shooting by mistake an innocent baby, which the Contras do routinely," he says. He is planning to spend August in Siberia, where he's been invited to visit.(To the question "won't you be - well, haunted, by the ghosts of the people who've died there?" he answers "I daresay I will, but it will be purely tourism. And it is a new place to discover.")

There hasn't been a book since Monsignor Quixote, although he is working with difficulty on a novel started 15 years ago, abandoned, then picked up and left off once more five years ago. He doesn't know, he says, "whether I'll have time to finish it," and doesn't talk about it either, except to deny that it's about his recent Central American travels.

"I find that when I talk about a novel, it's dead. But I recently found an old unfinished play of mine in a drawer, that I'd abandoned ten years ago because I couldn't see how it would end. I reread it and rather liked it, and I saw quite clearly what the third act would be, so I wrote it. It's now with my agent."

The play, called The House of Reputation, takes place in Central America.

"In a brothel," Greene says with relish. "It has a rather good song in it. The girls sing it: 'I was born in a dive on Geronimo Street, Between one strip-tease and another, A man at the bar heard a baby bleat, And there I was with my mother, More naked than the law allows...' ...and each verse ends like that, 'More naked than the law allows...' ...and then there's this awful sentimental young man who's the son of the minister of the Interior, and falls in love with one of the girls. So to take her out he has the House of Reputation smashed up... But he doesn't get her all the same."

The "awful, sentimental young man" bears a more than passing resemblance with Ernie Pyle, the Quiet American, Greene's prophetic novel of American involvement in Vietnam; and Greene remains more than ever wary of what he calls "the dangers of innocence."

"You know, there are some people who'll tell you 'some of my best friends are Jews;' well... some of my best friends are American," he says. "There's an awful kind of innocence even behind the lies and stupidity of Reagan." He doesn't hide his dislike of America, which contrasts strongly with his respect of Gorbachev, and even of Andropov, whom he saw as a reformer. "Any change in the Soviet Union will have to come from the KGB," he says. "Because they take the youngest and the brightest and they train them and they send them abroad, where they learn about the world. Whereas the army are really a bunch of Napoleonic old men."

Greene watches little television apart from the news, hates book programmes ("There's no use doing them if you're bad, and if you're good they turn you into a television star. John Betjeman became a television star and it didn't do his poetry any good") and sees much less films than during his London and Paris days. He spent a very long time fighting a complicated custody battle for a goddaughter of his who had a messy divorce from a young Nice hoodlum, and although the case was finally won in appeal, he still has scathing words for the judges and the Mayor of Nice. He still gets up in the morning to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, in his spindly handwriting, some 300 words that will get typed and rewritten some more. What he enjoys most these days, he says, is "the company of a friend."

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1987