Two little known news stories about a bombing which killed 11 French technical consultants suggest that in the hard world of international salesmanship, it is hard to welsh on an unspoken deal. The Times of India reports that the French engineers were killed, not by terrorists, but by Pakistani officials who were waiting unsuccessfully for their kickbacks. The French decided not to pay bribes earlier agreed upon and the Pakistanis decided to send a high explosive message. The French, being more civilized, replied with hit men and leg-breakers.
LONDON: High-ranking Pakistani officials were behind the killing of eleven French ship-building engineers in Karachi seven years ago, two French judges have ruled. Until now al-Qaida had been blamed for the bomb attack on a bus in 2002 that killed 11 engineers and three Pakistanis.
The judges suspected that the Pakistanis were retaliating over a decision by former French President Jacques Chirac, to halt payment to Pakistani officers of millions of pounds in secret commission from an 720 million pounds contract signed in 1994, for three French submarines, the Time reported on Tuesday. ..
According to media reports, the French secret service retaliated after the 2002 attack, breaking the legs of two Pakistan navy admirals and killing a lower-ranking officer.
The Reuters account of events is a tad less spectacular. But only a tad. They suggest that a French politician glommed in on the slush fund, depriving the Pakistanis of their kickbacks and precipitating the attack. Reuters writes:
The investigating magistrates obtained a top secret internal memo in October 2008 from a state-owned military shipbuilder which contains the allegations, Morice said.
The memo, copies of which were shown on French media on Friday, says French and Pakistani officials connived to take bribes as part of the sale of French Agosta submarines to Pakistan in the mid-1990s.
According to the memo, some of the kickbacks that were paid to French officials ended up in the electoral campaign funds of then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a rival of Jacques Chirac ahead of the 1995 presidential election, a judicial source familiar with the matter told Reuters….
The secret memo says France stopped paying the bribes after the 1995 election, won by Chirac, and that Pakistani officials kept asking for them for several years.
The allegation is that they eventually lost patience and organised in retaliation the attack on the bus full of French engineers, who were working on the Agosta submarine project.
Underneath the glamorous veneer of diplomacy lies the hard fact that it is about talking to some rather rough characters. When Yasser Arafat died, he was shown to be worth many millions of dollars indicating that he was perhaps interested in more than the poor and downtrodden. How much of engagement is really spelled b-r-i-b-e-r-y? And should anyone care?
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But, but, but they aren’t any different than us, yeah? So if we speak to them openly and honestly why won’t they merely respond in kind? It is just logical.
The problem is enforcement. Bribery only happens when you can’t use force to compel a course of action; and force is necessary to enforce contractual duties. If we were actually willing to break legs in the first place we wouldn’t need the bribe.
Ho-hum, stretch and move on. But if these were the Yanks …
Eleven French engineers (and three Pakistanis) killed on the one side, and a few legs broken on the other? When are they going to get even?
When are they going to get even?
The Pakistanis didn’t get the money. A cynic might say that counts for something.
I was living in Kenya when Idi Amin assassinated Kenyan Minister (and possible British intelligence agent) Bruce MacKenzie with a timed bomb hidden in the “gift” of a lion’s head. Blew up MacKenzie’s plane on his way back home from Uganda.
I’m with 49er.
Give Peace a Chance!
Do the submarines still float?
Are their screws intact?
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Better question:
Do they remain permanently submerged?
(hoping Marie’s not around!)
If this story is out, that our erstwhile Eastern allies have behaved perfidiously, could it long before …
… a story comes out about Iran and EFP’s killing our troops in Iraq, and the Marine Barracks bombing in ’83, and Hezbollah, Hamas.
Who the hell cares about the Embassy take-over? That was the least of it.
If we get condemned for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 …
why don’t we get praised for Jimmy Carter’s overthrow of the Shah, and his historic cooperation with the French to install the Ayatollah in the Islamic Republic in 1979?
C’mon, be fair.
#9 (Aaron): good question. With any complex technology transfer it should be possible to maintain “hostages” indefinitely. Computer software licensors often used to do that, I bet some still do: when the licensee misbehaves (e.g. fails to send the check), the software craters. Benign version: it just stops working. More of the blow-up-the-bus version: it reformats the licensee’s hard drive on the way out.
African Subs come with Lion Heads mounted in the Captain’s Quarters.
Should set up a Whitehouse in Hyde Park, Complete with Security by Farakahn.tm
“Better question:
Do they remain permanently submerged?”
I thought French submarines automatically sink just like French airplanes automatically crash.
Not until the tail falls off.
White House Says Iranians Still Invited To 4th of July Cookout Out
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They can watch Kim’s 4th of July Rocket together on TV.
Doug #8
Rather give pieces a chance.
trop tard Doug, LMAO, I’m looking for a french version of the facts, got a few snarky french journalist on my twitt, see you
I’d take Sarko over Obambie, if that’s any consolation!
mistake
well there isn’t much to find more ; apparently this affair is sorting now to annoy sarkozy who was Balladur’s minister of the budget at this time.
The juges are a bit of Carzon style, they make investigations, and one also knows that our justice corporation isn’t really on sarkozy’s side.
up to now they only have suppositions in their file, and don’t count on the interested persons to say anything, Chirac, Balladur Sarkozy.
So if there are some witnessing stuffs, they won’t sort until a certain delay, (and are classified under “Secret Défense”), which is longer than in the US by ours standards.
Now the retaliation of the DGSE is a laughable add to the affair, I don’t think that that really happened, it’s not serious
http://www.la-croix.com/article/index.jsp?docId=2378460&rubId=4077
http://www.marianne2.fr/Attentat-de-Karachi-discretion-de-rigueur!_a181118.html?com
http://dossierssignales.blogs.nouvelobs.com/archive/2009/06/23/karachi-une-vente-d-armes-hors-normes.html
“I thought French submarines automatically sink just like French airplanes automatically crash.”
Nane cie t’es un pove con, qui est même pas cap de faire de l’humour, ah si, ça ressemble beaucoup au vocabulaire de F**France
We know that French officials were being bribed by Saddam when Chirac’s govt was opposing our invasion of Iraq in 2003.
We know that the German president went to work for the Russians after opposing our invasion of Iraq in 2003 – and that the Russians opposed our invasion for a number of reasons, including keeping oil prices high.
We know that the Canada’s Cretin (as they pronounce it in Kay-beck), who opposed our invasion of Iraq had a close relative who was head of Totfina, the French oil company and therefore would benefit from Iraq’s oil being off the market.
And we know that the two American Congressmen who went to Iraq and urged that we believe Saddam and not Pres Bush had their trip paid for by Saddam.
We know that Mark Rich, who contributed heavily to the Clinton Library and who waa pardoned by Bill Clinton received some of Saddam’s Oil for Food money.
But we are supposed to believe that all of these people acted on principle when they defined their positions and not their rather obvious self-interest.
RWE, does it happens that you can think besides the rails ?
cuz this a worn out story, that impressed your mind and some others that are not practicing policy, your former adminsitration has closed the file, they know that what they invented it was for their cause.
Case closed they have moved to sumthin else.
Now, if you still want to stand for that then I’go back until the end of WWII, this is when Saudi and the US made the devil pact.
Do you think that your state representant didn’t gets subsidies from the Saudi ? Yeah I bet so !
Don’t you think while inviding Irak, your governement hadn’t made the file just for the sake of removing Saddam who was paying Chirac LMAO, nah, tout était bien ficelé pour que ça profite au maximum aux entreprises américaines, where your elite were actionnaires !
Bizarre no ?
So Chirac might have got some money from saddam, but certainly not the amount that your imagining, besides he is much less rich than Chesney, Bush and the team of the era !
Also, if he did, then little Blair too, the Brits are everywwhere where there are a good coup to make, the Germans, n’en parlons pas, ils ont toujours fait discretement du commerce avec les rogues states, the Russians, the Chineses … bha, ahah !
Chirac’s economic policies, based on dirigiste, state directed ideals, stood in opposition to the laissez-faire policies of the United Kingdom.
A few years passed -
Pakistan
The Pakistan Navy is reportedly negotiating for the purchase of 3 Type 214 submarines, all of which to be built in Pakistan. During the IDEAS 2008 exhibition, the HDW chief Walter Freitag told “The commercial contract has been finalised up to 95 per cent,” he said. The first submarine would be delivered to the Pakistan Navy in 64 months after signing of the contract while the rest would be completed successively in 12 months.[2][3]
- Wikipedia
Now Germany is selling the submarines. What goes around. Funny word that dirigiste- state directed ideals. Ought to add it to the dictionary for the next few years.
“for the next few years”
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Always nice to have an optimist around.
With bribery comes blackmail, and the lower esteemed party may get a free pass since the more revered party “should have known better” in the eyes of whomever cares.
Marie Claude,
Badly argued. All the whining and petulance and lashing out to say You’re Another or Bush-Cheney-Rich means nothing. It is what we call “flinging poo” to distract when there is no argument. Saddam bought the French government, among others. Deal with it. The corruption runs deep and Sarkozy is trying to peel it back a little. He will be fought at every step and traps will always be prepared for him to step in. He is not from Mars so he had to be around as shady deals were made. Hopefully he sees that it is in his interest and France’s to try to make things better. If you want to understand the strange creatures called the Anglo-saxons then understand that in addition to all the wheels within wheels and commercial links the arguments about Democracy and Sovereignty and Law and Liberty and Civilization and humanity and everything else that men of all political parties, Bush and Reagan and Kennedy and FDR, and Churchill and Gladstone and Disraeli and Burke and many more talked about are very real to us. When all is said and done then we are very capable of planning and executing a policy like the Invasion of Iraq in the expectation that it will change the dynamics in the future. Without knowing the results in advance, without relying only on pure Cartesian Logic, we can have faith that if the present is unacceptable then the future can be made better. The games model here could be pool, that is pocket pool and not billiards. Bush executed a good break and without certainty as to the results in advance he showed sufficient skill that some of the balls are starting to drop into the right pockets.
#32 – if only some of the Dems could grow balls of their own. There are still lots of pockets out there.
LOTM: Marie Claude may want to put some ice on that.
Life of the (mind ?),
I can revert your argumentation, you’re defending the “one way of understanding” this epiphenomenal portion of history, while selecting the documentation that fits your opinion, sorry, there are a load of counter documentation that advocates the contrary too, and, surely, the US have no “clean hands” in them too, in many domains, especially on the African and ME continents where our national interests were/are in concurrence, so you’re not neutral, I can get along with that, but suffer when you’re descending the french policy, that I am entitled to justify our position
and about Chirac, he is no actionnaire of Total nor of Eads, nor EDF, nor Matra, nor Dassault industry, but of France’s, and for us, that means he is was a state man, and find any polital man in the world that has no secret purse to finance his campain, oh yes, yours of course, all the papers say that LMAO
Must admit I am surprised the French let them off with 1 death & 4 broken legs.
Perhaps they expect to sell more submarines in future or perhaps Pakistan is paying through the nose for spare parts now, which I assume will be done in a 3rd country.
“Must admit I am surprised the French let them off with 1 death & 4 broken legs.”
le journal “Libération” a affirmé que les agents de la DGSE ont “cassé les jambes” de trois amiraux pakistanais et ont tué un officier de rang inférieur. Ce bilan supposé ne figure cependant pas au dossier judiciaire
http://tf1.lci.fr/infos/monde/asie/0,,4448758,00-la-dgse-savait-elle-.html
now about the “submarines” they were achieved, cuz I know a person from Cherbourg (a nuclear site customer) whose a family member died in Karachi, he was sent there afterword.
Though, the whole operation wasn’t a benefit, as we say “un gouffre financier”
Il s’étonne notamment que des généraux pakistanais aient attendu la réélection de Chirac, en 2002, pour se venger d’une décision vieille de sept ans. Il fait aussi valoir que l’attentat a été salué par le chef d’Al-Qaeda, Oussama ben Laden. La voix chuintante de l’homme le plus recherché du monde se faisait entendre, le 12 novembre 2002, sur la chaîne Al-Jazira : “Toutes les opérations qui se sont produites contre les Allemands en Tunisie [Djerba], contre les Français à Karachi, contre les Australiens et les Britanniques à Bali [...], tout cela n’est que la riposte de musulmans soucieux de défendre leur religion.” Une quasi-signature.
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/les-mysteres-de-karachi_769905.html
http://www.ouest-france.fr/actu/actuDetFdj_-Attentat-de-Karachi-de-nouveaux-elements-_39382-984397_actu.Htm
a pic of the submarine for those who had a doubt