Far too low down some news bulletins I heard today was the plight of Hervé Gourdel, by all accounts a good, kind and decent man kidnapped and threatened with murder at the start of a hiking trip to Algeria by fanatics linked to Islamic State. The 10th day of the lamentable Air France pilots' strike, and the incredible mess made of arresting three French jihadist suspects, had taken priority ...
Today, public life in France, my favourite country in the world. descended into deep farce.
The country's wealthiest and perhaps most arrogant strikers, Air France pilots on up to €250,000 a year won their battle to force the withdrawal of a management project to make the airline competitive.
But they remained on strike and AF repudiated as premature an unequivocal ministerial announcement that plans to develop a low-cost subsidiary had been abandoned. The beleaguered company, losing €15m or more a day thanks to the pilots' action (or inaction), preferred the word "suspended" pending further discussions, a massive concession the well-heeled captains had already rejected.
Even this damaging dispute was pushed down the news agenda a little by a chaotic development in France's fight against Islamist terrorism.
There had been official word on Tuesday that three men suspected of illegal action in connection with French jihadist involvement in Syria and northern Iraq had been detained at Orly airport, Paris after flying from Turkey. One was the brother-in-law of Mohamed Merad, the Toulouse killer of Jewish children and off-duty soldiers; another was one of Merad's friends from boyhood. One of the three has a terrorism conviction and a second is said to be known to intelligence for his "implication in a jihadist network". The third is the husband of a sister of Merad, a woman who was caught on tape (by another brother, who is implacably opposed to terrorism) praising the serial killer's actions; he is said to have links with an Islamist school.
The trouble was that they didn't fly to Orly at all. The pilot of the plane onto which they put in Istanbul after volunteering to be repatriated from Turkey refused to take off with them because they did not have the right documentation and they were flown instead to Marseille.
Unfortunately, no one in Turkey thought to let the French know. And although the wandering trio ought still to have been picked up at Marseille, the system that would have identified their passports as belonging to recruiting network suspects had broken down, as it evidently does quite a lot.
As officials and pundits agonised over what the defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian admitted was something of a mix-up, one of the men was speaking cheerfully to French TV, saying they'd have been happy all along to report to the authorities. The authorities finally caught up with the broadcasters when all three presented themselves to police.
Le Monde reported that the men went to Syria in February to join Islamic State (IS) "but became disillusioned and surrendered to Turkish border police at the end of August, asking to be repatriated to France". Are we to conclude that even some dedicated jihadists find the monsters and monstrous aims and activities of IS beyond the pale?
Another TV phone interview I caught was with a man who claimed to be among the protesting Breton farmers involved in their own brand of terrorism, setting fire to and destroying insurance and tax office in Morlaix. This, he estimated, was an entirely legitimate response to concerns about crippling taxation and wretched red tape.
And now we learn that one of the batch of criminal investigations hanging over Nicolas Sarkozy's has been "suspended", a neat coincidence with his re-entry into national politics with the presumed aim of standing in the 2017 presidential election.
Such things can happen in any country, of course. They don't usually happen to one country and in more or less one go. And meanwhile, we can but hope that Hervé Gourdel emerges unharmed from his appalling ordeal.
It's a small thing but register your support for Hervé and his loved ones at https://www.facebook.com/SoutienHerveGourdel?fref=ts
Recent Comments