Where “Statesmanship” Means Influence Peddling and Arms Trafficking

Behold, some more of that “we are the world” stuff that Europeans are so well known for promoting.

Angola was on Monday seeking to halt a French trial into a vast arms trafficking scandal involving the son of late president Francois Mitterrand and other members of the French elite.

Funny that, I thought the left always sold itself to us as a transparent anti-elite that wanted to be a hermaphrodite version of both your mother and father. They are, in addition to anything else they can prove themselves to be, the global essence of the “Peace Camp”.

The son of the late French President and lefty demi-god, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand proves very nicely what “reaching across the aisle” amounts to in Europastan. Along with the UMP’s Charles Pasqua and his co-constiprator Jean-Charles Marchiani, they took bribes to assist in a politically pointless arms trafficking operation that makes the Iran-Contra affair look like a high school bake sale.

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, a former adviser on African affairs at the Elysee presidential palace, is accused of "complicity in illegal trade and embezzlement" and taking bribes worth 2.6 million dollars.

Former interior minister Charles Pasqua and his right-hand man Jean-Charles Marchiani also risk 10 years for influence peddling on behalf of the Angolan authorities.

Pasqua on Monday again denied any wrongdoing and suggested the charges were politically-motivated.

"Everything has been done to implicate me in an affair that I had nothing to do with," Pasqua told Europe 1 radio.

The Angolagate case long poisoned relations between Paris and Luanda and the trial comes at an awkward time for France which is keen to strengthen ties with one of Africa's leading oil producers.

Oh, and no war for oil!!! Only les ricains do that sort of thing!

The difference here is that since Jean-Christophe is the son of a man that the lift thinks a monarch, that there won’t be any screaming or public humiliation. Expect shortly a broad interpretation that the arms were sorely needed, and were the right and humane thing to do:

Prosecutors allege that tanks, shells, landmines, helicopters and even six warships were shipped to Angola over five years, allowing Dos Santos to build up his forces in the war against US-backed Savimbi.
Angola's payments were channelled through firms in Paris, Geneva and Tel Aviv to shell companies in Jersey, the Virgin Islands or Monaco, with suitcases of cash used to pay off middlemen, prosecutors say.
Other high-profile defendants include the French thriller writer Paul-Loup Sulitzer and Mitterrand's one-time advisor Jacques Attali, who risk five years for selling Angola access to their political and media contacts.
Although no Angolans are charged in the French case, prosecutors allege that 30 officials including Dos Santos received tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks.

These are the people screwing up humanity by fueling wars in underdeveloped parts of the world. THEY are why the US has had to deploy the expeditionary forces that have to rectify the imbalances caused by these European-government dwelling and selling pirates from the near east to the Balkans to their former human holdings in Africa.

This of course should never get in the way of a tirade about the dirty-trick, underhanded reactionary manipulatiuon, or warmongering of the CIA. Noooooo way. That’s different... That doesn’t require facts or anything based in reality.

This is why the likes of the BBC limit their description of this affair to calling it an “arms scandal” without any sort of ideological attribution. The UNITA rebels that the weapons supplied in this scandal were pointed at, were opposing a regime that was turning into a Soviet satellite propped up by the direct foreign intervention of Cuban soldiers. These weapons were for the local compatriots of those Cubans and Russians for the purpose of forcing a revolution that they hoped would spread violently – one fueled in that direction by Mitterand, Pasqua, and their cohorts – only to have that revolution ended by the diplomatic maneuvers of some rotten peace-hater called George Bush.