[R-G] And All of France Finds Itself Stuck in a War

[Anthony Fenton]

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/war-of-the-worlds/

And All of France Finds Itself Stuck in a War

Fausto Giudice - Tlaxcala

Translated from the French for Cubadebate, Rebelión and Tlaxcala by  
Manuel Talens, and from the Spanish by Scott Campbell and Machetera

This past August 20th, in the middle of the summer holidays, while the  
good people of France meandered worry-free between replete beaches and  
TV screens to follow the heroic deeds of the athletes in Beijing,  
making it possible to forget the stress of the impending return to the  
routine of “working more and earning less”, the news burst like a  
thunderclap in a serene sky: ten young and brave French soldiers just  
died in remote Afghanistan, in an ambush by the horrible Taliban 50  
kilometers outside of Kabul, raising the figures for French military  
deaths to 22, since 2002, minutiae against the hundred British who’ve  
lost their lives and still less when compared to the thousands of  
murdered Afghans. And when I say Afghans, I refer to armed men,  
unarmed men, women, children, and the aged.

And, unexpectedly, the good people of France discovered that their  
army was involved in the war in Afghanistan. Six years had to go  
before the French realized that they were physically engaged in a war.

A world war? No. A local war? Not that either. It is treated more as a  
“war of the worlds”. Two worlds facing off in the mountains and plains  
of Afghanistan: on one side, the good guys, the “coalition” that  
gathers 70,000 soldiers from some 40 countries. Officially, they are  
not there to make war, but peace, to rebuild the country and,  
especially, to liberate the women, these poor Afghan women locked in  
their prison-like veils. On the other side, the “bad guys”, the long- 
beards, the “terrorists”, the Taliban, al-Qaeda. So those soldiers are  
also there to fight against terrorism, the fight George Bush calls  
“the worldwide war against terror”. Except that apparently, the Afghan  
“terrorists” enjoy the support of a large part of the population.

During the six years that have elapsed since the beginning of the  
conflict, French public opinion hasn’t cared at all about this war  
that officially is not one. Neither the soft left nor the extreme left  
have organized a single demonstration. Nothing, nothing, nothing.  
Silence on the radio and total consensus. It hasn’t been different in  
Spain nor in Italy where the institutional left removed their troops  
from Iraq the better to place them in Afghanistan. There was more  
agitation in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and in Canada, although  
without great impact on events: “We’re here to stay”, is the slogan of  
the coalition forces, christened with the acronym ISAF*.

In fact, the allies of the US, the invader, were assigned the job of  
logistical and civil support, at the service to “the boys”, who are  
supposedly doing the dirty work, that is, the war crimes and bombing  
of the civilian populations with depleted uranium. For their part, the  
French and Europeans try to keep their hands clean, dig some wells and  
help a few women deliver their babies.

But, “What were the French soldiers doing in that mess?”, was the  
immediate question the average citizen of the French Republic.  
“Indispensable work,”answered the president, while Jean-Marie Bockel,  
his “Secretary at War”, called for”national unity” and warned that  
this was not a good time for criticism.

Because it seems that the soft as well as the extreme left have  
suddenly woken up: the French Communist Party and the Revolutionary  
Communist League (LCR, Trotskyites) are demanding withdrawal of the  
troops, while the Socialist Party is content to say that “the mission  
of French soldiers in Afghanistan” should be reviewed. For its part,  
the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen is the most virulent in  
denouncing this war that conceals its warlike nature.

On August 21, 1968, exactly forty years ago, the tanks of the Warsaw  
Pact entered Prague and put an end an all too short spring. Young  
Czechs then wrote the following on the walls of the city, “Lenin, wake  
up, they’ve gone mad”, and sang for the Soviet soldiers a  
spontaneously composed song, that went: “Ivan, go home, Natacha is  
waiting for you”.

The Afghan resisters, in their turn, should write “Jaurès, wake up,  
they’ve gone mad” on the walls of the French barracks in Kabul.

Jean Jaurès was the French socialist leader that dared to say “NO” to  
the sacred unity toward war in 1914 and paid for it with his life.  
Yes, Jean Jaurès, the same whom the presidential candidate Sarkozy  
cited in his campaign speeches.

As well, the Afghan resisters could sing this song to the French  
soldiers: “Kevin, return to your home, Jessica is waiting for you”[1].

[1] Kevin and Jessica are amongst the most popular names used by the  
new French generations. Kevin was the name of one of the ten  
paratroopers killed and Jessica is the name of the fiancee of the son  
of Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean.

*International Security Assistance Force

Scott Campbell is the editor of http://angrywhitekid.blogs.com/weblog.  
Machetera is editor of the blog http://machetera.wordpress.com/. Both  
are members of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic  
diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content  
remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translators are cited.