Bangladesh’s climate refugees PAGE 8

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MAY2007

Reconstruction

BY IGNACIO RAMONET Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory on 6 May with 53% of the votes in the second round of the presidential election marks a turningpoint in the history of the fifth republic. It is not simply a matter of the French right remaining in power, as it has been since 1995 and before that from 1958-1981. The programme presented by Sarkozy, as UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire) candidate, and the forces he sought to gather round him, represent a major change of direction, making him the first French president to be at once neo-liberal, authoritarian, pro-American and pro-Israeli. The deliberate smokescreen created by a campaign peppered with eclectic references ranging from Joan of Arc to Léon Blum (the leftwing prime minister of the interwar years) cannot disguise Sarkozy’s political profile. Though he claims that the state will protect France and the French people, his economic and social programme draws on old Thatcherite remedies and favours those whom fortune has already favoured. His republican sallies cannot obscure his security-based vision of society in which repression is the only answer to the claims of the lower classes and the young. The former may explain the latter; his apparent gaffe about the genetic origins of paedophilia and suicide tells us a lot about the theories that inspire him. And though he has tried to play down the effects of seeking President Bush’s blessing, he has not abandoned his intention to align himself more closely with American policies, including in the Middle East, and to bury the question of the May 2005 referendum on the European Union constitutional treaty. Sarkozy’s programme is extensive and the ìclientsî to whom he is determined to sell it are no less so. The manoeuvres to win over François Bayrou’s supporters between the first and second ballots cannot wipe out months spent poaching Jean-Marie Le Pen’s. On the pretext of converting Le Pen’s troops to democracy, Sarkozy took over the well-worn themes of the far right – from supporting the idea of a ministry for immigration and national identity to adopting the slogan “Love France or leave”, hunting down illegal immigrants and abolishing the 1945 act on the protection of minors. None of his predecessors had gone to such lengths to get elected, and we should stop to take the full measure of this before we welcome the retreat of the National Front. But Sarkozy’s success is not just due to his own efforts and the massive support he received in the

MAX NEUMANN – Untitled (2005)

media, or to the perverse effects of electing the president by universal suffrage; the cult of the personality, demagogy and strategic voting. The main factor was the absence of any real political alternative to the right and the far right. The total vote for the left in the first round – 36.44% – was lower than at any time since 1969. And for good reason. In Ségolène Royal, the Socialist party had a candidate who succeeded in erasing painful memories of the Socialists’ rout in the 2002 presidential elections but had nothing to offer that could mobilise popular support. Especially since the Communist party, far left and the ecologists did not join forces with her to maintain the momentum of the great popular movements in defence of social security and pensions that led to a resounding “no” to the 2005 EU referendum and anger in the suburbs. The main issue, transcending complaints about the system or individuals, is the inability to devise an anti-capitalist policy for France and for Europe. This is the ground on which reconstruction must start, and soon. If the right and far right win in the upcoming parliamentary elections, they will try to put in place a policy of social destruction: a single work contract; restrictions on the right to strike; abolition of labour laws, death duties and wealth tax; further dismantling of public services, social security and pensions; cuts in health benefits and civil service recruitment; a crackdown on immigrants; revival of a neo-liberal Europe that supports US policies etc. The left will need to summon all its strength to resist this unprecedented onslaught and present some prospect of change. Le Monde diplomatiqueis not affiliated to any party or association and is not a militant newspaper. But it is committed to values that it has defended for decades, and it will contribute in its own way to an alternative intellectual debate by trying to provide a better understanding of the geopolitical realities of the modern world, reporting on social and political developments and playing a full part in the current discussions of ideas. This in the cause of reconstruction. TRANSLATED BY BARBARA WILSON

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

The war between the US and Iran has already begun page 2

Iraqi militias lie low as US searches in vain for a military win page 4

Affirmative action in the US is bypassing the poorest page 5

France’s minoritiesendure persistent prejudice page 6

Rights ignored as India’s castes fight for power page 7

China’s boom masks lack of jobs and need for skills page 10

How Henry Ford inspired Adolf Hitler page 12

Iraqi women:struggling against poverty and harassment page 14

French women:losing ground on abortion and employment page 15

Tony Blair – the leading man in his own Shakespearean tragedypage 16

NATIONALISTSMARCHASTHEARMYTHREATENS

Turkey: torn between God and state

The candidacy of Abdullah Gul,Turkey’s foreign minister,for the presidential elections provoked massive demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara and aborted the voting process.The confrontation is between secularists and a ruling party with a neo-Islamic tinge,the popular Justice and Development party (AKP),which has overseen a sophisticated, fast-improving economy and the nation’s candidacy for the European Union.The crisis arose from a contest for the soul of the nation, with nationalism at its core

BY ANDREW FINKEL

Afriend of mine, Ipek Calislar, couldn’t come to dinner the other night. She doesn’t have a car but she does have a police bodyguard and crossing from the other side of Istanbul on public transport would have been too complicated. She needed protection because of something that now affects many lives in Turkey and threatens many more. She didn’t testify against the mob, or blaspheme against any Islamic orthodoxy. She wrote a bestseller which was sold shrink-wrapped in plastic with an accompanying DVD. It offended not against God but against Turkey. It was a biography of Latife Usakizade, briefly married to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and it elevated into a feminist heroine a woman whom official history had dismissed as a harridan who tried to steal Turkey’s founder from his one true love, the republic. The author described, among other surprises, how Latife cannily saved her husband from waiting assassins by swapping clothes; she donned his uniform and he a black chador. The idea that the father of today’s secular state a) did not laugh at death, b) dressed in women’s clothing and c) religious drag at that, was too much for some, who applied to the public prosecutor to open an investigation. The case against Calislar, under article 5816, which is designed to protect Ataturk’s reputation, was feeble and collapsed last December, as you would expect in a country determined to break into the European Union. Calislar is among several Turkish authors who have been unsuccessfully pursued under statutes which many inside government find embarrassing. The prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, phoned to congratulate another friend of mine whose prosecution under article 301 of the penal code, forbidding insults to Turkishness, was dropped. As far as I know, he never phoned to commiserate with Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian editor who was given a suspended sentence under the same law. But to his credit, Erdogan did pay a condolence visit to Dink’s widow after a 17-yearold shot her husband dead in January. His death is the reason that Calislar and others now have a police guard. It worries us all; when you ask how someone is, and they reply with a sigh and a shrug, you know exactly what they mean. When people ask who killed Dink, they don’t mean who

pulled the trigger. The 17-year-old killer is now behind bars along with members of an ultra-right wing nationalist gang who sought to avenge the inaccurate headlines in the mainstream press claiming that Dink had “cursed the Turkishness in his blood”. The question really asks how far up the food chain the conspiracy went. Turkey has a history of covert operations organised by an entrenched old guard who have manipulated ultra-nationalist gangs to get rid of Kurdish activists or create chaos when the elected government was going in a direction that the “deep state” didn’t approve. In 1996 a gangster, his moll, a chief of police and a pro-government Kurdish MP were in a car that ran into truck in the town of Susurluk, providing evidence of links between the security forces, politics and organised crime. Some suspect that Dink’s death was plotted by the same dark forces trying to discredit the government in this double election year. The presidential election had once seemed a foregone conclusion. The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), aware of the military’s distrust of its neo-Islamic tinge, had nominated the soft-spoken foreign minister Abdullah Gul for the post and, as parliament does the voting, the outcome had seemed in the bag. But the opposition, weak and divided and struggling to find its voice, chanced upon a clever tactic to sabotage the vote. They asserted, with no real precedent, that a quorum of three-quarters of MPs had to be in the chamber for the vote to proceed and took their objection to Turkey’s constitutional court. The court annulled the first round of voting on 1 May. After parliament again failed to elect Gul as president five days later, he withdrew his candidacy. The standoff between secularists and the AKP – provoking massive demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara – has opened the way for early general elections, from which the AKP is expected to emerge as the largest party. Whether it will have enough support to enact constitutional reform to enable direct elections for the presidency remains to be seen. The constitutional court had seemed to be consulting the political weather vane as closely as its law books. The Friday before its decision, the military had taken the nation by surprise by posting

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