France's War on Intelligence

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France's War on IntelligenceAuthor(s): Sophie MeunierSource: Foreign Policy, No. 143 (Jul. - Aug., 2004), pp. 85-87Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4152919 .

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The ICTR is not the only mech- anism for accountability. The Rwandan government, hostile to the ICTR in part because the tribu- nal has no death penalty, turned to the country's domestic courts to prosecute the tens of thousands of Rwandan citizens implicated in the slaughter. The United States and other donor countries tried to help. As U.S. President Bill Clinton's ambassador at large for war crimes issues, I spent years futilely advo- cating for judicial assistance pro- grams and supporting a new genocide law in Rwanda that would dispense criminal justice while meeting high standards of due process. But the task was impossi- ble given the huge number of suspects and the significant foreign aid required (which likely would have diverted funds from other national development priorities). The alleged crimes of the Rwandan government's own military only compli- cated these efforts.

Rwandan officials often bitterly compare the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the ICTR with

the paltry foreign aid allocated to national courts. But few struggling court systems anywhere in the developing world attract much financial or technical aid; this is a systemic problem not unique to Rwanda or caused by the ICTR. Although Rwanda's courts continue to exercise jurisdiction over some criminal cases arising from the genocide, their inability to deal with all suspects has led to other approaches.

In 1999, the Rwandan government began moving in a new direc- tion and, in 2002, formally launched a version of the old gacaca system of community courts (gacaca means "justice on the grass"). The new approach is designed to move tens of thousands of suspects through a rudimentary form of truth telling, community-based punishment, and reintegration into society over several years. In local elections, Rwandans chose more than 200,000 citizens to serve as gacaca judges, and they have since received a few months of informal training.

Corey and Joireman state the obvious when they claim that

gacaca justice fails to meet international due process standards. But the authors' assertion that vil- lage justice will stoke Hutu resent- ment and make future atrocities more likely is particularly serious. The gacaca process excludes crimes committed after 1994 and effectively immunizes those guilty of revenge attacks against Hutus. Although they are correct to iden- tify this shortfall, Corey and Joire- man mistakenly insist that gacaca should also cover war crimes of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front in the aftermath of the genocide. Those crimes require serious investigation by the ICTR and national courts bolstered by more generous international assistance.

Overloading gacaca with tasks it cannot handle would only repeat the mistake some of us made 10 years ago when we vainly sought legally pristine prosecutions of the many thousands implicated in the genocide. Justice in Rwanda has evolved and produced an imperfect but ultimately practical search for truth and redemption. 10

France's War on Intelligence By Sophie Meunier

U Les Inrockuptibles, No. 429, February 18, 2004, Paris

As debate rages in the Unit- ed States over the Iraq intelligence failures, the

current controversy in France is the "war on intelligence." But this

debate has little to do with weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda. From teachers to architects and theater workers to jobless Ph.D.'s, members of France's intellectual class are attacking the con- servative government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin for neglecting them.

In the past year, part-time per- forming artists have canceled the country's top arts festivals and booed France's culture minister at the Cesars (the French equivalent of the Academy Awards) to protest

unemployment insurance reforms. Archaeologists complain about their weakened supervision over construction projects, and lab directors lambaste the government's refusal to disburse scientific fund- ing. But the war's coup de grfice was orchestrated by the music and culture magazine Les Inrockupt- ibles, an upscale French version of Rolling Stone targeted at readers concerned with social justice, post- materialism, and hipness. In Feb- ruary, the magazine united France's malcontents through a petition

Sophie Meunier is a research associate at Princeton University and coauthor with

Philip Gordon of The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2001).

JULY IAUGUST 2004 85



Global Newsstand

titled "Appeal Against the War on Intelligence."

"All the sectors of learning, research, thinking, all the producers of knowledge and public debate, are today the target of a massive attack by an anti-intellectual government," stated the magazine's edi- tors in the petition. They warned of "the development of ... a policy of impoverishment and insecurity aimed at everything that is consid- ered useless, dissident or unpro- ductive in the short term." The essay implied that this conflict could threaten France's sacrosanct policy of exception culturelle (cultural exception), which employs quotas to promote French films and music in an attempt to fortify French culture against a globalized (read: Americanized) world.

Signatures came at the rate of 700 an hour in the petition's first

week of Internet circulation in February and totaled more than 80,000 by April. The appeal was so successful that the magazine published a 50-page list of signa- tories, including deconstruction- ist philosopher Jacques Derrida, antiestablishment hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard. The mainstream French media publicized the petition through numerous articles and supportive opinion essays.

Meanwhile, a similar move- ment emerged within France's scientific community. In January, many top French scientists and researchers created a group called Let's Save Research to protest the decline of science as a national pri- ority. Their complaints were not unfounded: Though the share of France's gross domestic product

devoted to research and development (2.2 percent) compares with that of technological powerhouses Japan (3 percent) and the United States (2.8 percent), funds are fre- quently withheld to reduce the budget deficit. In 2002, the government froze public research funds and transformed 550 permanent positions for young researchers into temporary research contracts, forc- ing an exodus of French scientists. Indeed, France is the only devel- oped country that doesn't recruit its own graduates: About 3,000 science graduates left in 2000 for the United States alone, where salaries and advancement opportunities are much greater.

Let's Save Research circulated its own Internet petition, which gathered signatures from more than 70,000 French public-sector researchers and nearly 250,000

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from the general public. The researchers threatened to resign if the government did not take their concerns seriously. Polls showed 80 percent of the French public supported the researchers. In a dramatic move two weeks before the March 2004 regional elections, more than two thirds of the 5,000 research and laboratory directors at France's universities and insti- tutes resigned en masse.

Beyond the theatrics, France's war on intelligence reveals a nation deeply worried about its identity in a globalizing world. What unites many of the strange bedfellows is a fear that econom- ic liberalism leaves little room for

anything not immediately useful- whether a theater production or scientific research. These fears were not assuaged when Patrick Devedjian, the junior minister of industry, recently attacked "French intellectuals who have the habit of signing petitions," while "in the United States, they win Nobel Prizes."

Prizes are not necessarily com- mensurate with spending, but ade- quate funds are necessary to make discoveries, file patents, and sustain research. In protesting, scientists expressed their fear that Anglo- Saxon capitalism would encroach upon France's egalitarian research traditions by exposing them to more

competition and bottom-line demands. This model could result in lost jobs rather than improved long- term research prospects, they worry.

In the meantime, the one losing his job may be the prime minister. When Raffarin took office in 2002, he vowed to act on behalf of la France d'en-bas (downstairs France), meaning those who come from modest backgrounds rather than the upper classes. But if the humiliating defeat incurred by his government in the March regional elections is any indication, anti- intellectualism is not a winning political strategy in a country where culture and national identity remain so intertwined. [H

The Biosecurity of Nations By Bradley T. Smith

1 International Security, Vol. 28, No. 3, Winter 2003-04, Cambridge

Biological threats, whether from transnational terrorist net- works or from naturally

occurring diseases such as SARS, have become a central "homeland security" concern in the United States. Some observers argue that globalization worsens the threat of bioter- rorism attacks in particular. Eco- nomic liberalization can cause or aggravate social upheaval and eco- nomic inequality (which may provide the motivation for such attacks). Faster and cheaper communications and transportation enable the spread

of powerful biotechnologies (which provide the means).

Kendall Hoyt of Harvard Uni- versity's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and political scientist Stephen G. Brooks of Dartmouth College offer a com- pelling counterargument in their recent article, "A Double-Edged Sword: Globalization and Biosecu- rity," appearing in International Security. While acknowledging its downsides, Hoyt and Brooks con- tend that globalization has also produced a robust and interconnected biomedical research-and-development (R&D) enterprise essential to effective future biodefense.

Globalization is not the only double-edged sword; the authors also highlight the dual-use nature of biology itself. Biological knowledge is needed to develop weapons, but it is also vital to developing the drugs, vaccines, and other countermeasures

essential to biosecurity. These countermeasures are critical because, as Hoyt and Brooks point out, the traditional routes to security-nonpro- liferation and counterproliferation- are of limited use for biosecurity. The biotechnology horse is already well out of the barn.

Pharmaceutical companies in India, Brazil, and elsewhere exem- plify the globalization of biology as they emerge to challenge U.S. and European corporations in the half-trillion dollar world market. Cutting-edge biomedical research has also spread to laboratories beyond traditional powerhouses in the United States, Europe, and Japan: witness South Korea's Feb- ruary 2004 advances in human cloning. Moreover, complex genet- ic engineering techniques have been simplified into user-friendly kits and automated instruments available on the Internet. For good and ill,

Bradley T. Smith is a fellow at the Center

for Biosecurity of the University of Pitts-

burgh Medical Center and assistant pro-

fessor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

JULY IAUGUST 2004 87



Documents

France's War on Intelligence