France is back, says Chirac in regional power play

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr Rafic Hariri, fought his way through the forest of acute and grave accents, carefully enunciating…

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr Rafic Hariri, fought his way through the forest of acute and grave accents, carefully enunciating each syllable. The Lebanese leader had never given a speech in French before, and his old friend and dinner guest, President Jacques Chirac, said he was touched by the effort.

If Mr Chirac's visit here is anything to judge by, more Arab leaders will be speaking French soon - if not literally, then certainly in political terms. Stepping into the wreckage of US Middle East policy, Mr Chirac helped to avoid a US attack on Iraq in February, proposed a new peace conference with the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak two weeks ago, and demanded that Israel withdraw from Lebanon at the weekend. In mid-July, he will host the first state visit to Paris by President Hafez al Assad of Syria in two decades.

France is back, Mr Chirac repeated as he re-opened the Residence des Pins, the French ambassador's home on the former front line in Beirut which the French left under shellfire in 1982 - in Mr Chirac's words, "swearing to ourselves, our hearts in our throats, that we would come back one day". The graceful Ottoman building, originally intended to be a gambling casino, stands amid a pine forest in central Beirut. Shrapnel marks still scar its orange stone facade, shaded by plane trees under which embassy employees, surgical masks over their faces, tried to identify the bodies of 58 French paratroopers killed in a suicide bombing on the nearby `Drakkar' base in 1983.

Brigadier Pierre Figeac, a gendarmerie officer who kept the tricolour flying above the residence for two years after the ambassador and his staff fled, wept as the band played La Marseillaise. Mr Hubert Vedrine, the French Foreign Minister who was Francois Mitterrand's diplomatic adviser at the time, flew to Beirut with the late president when the paratroopers were killed; on Saturday, he said, he was deeply moved.

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A French television technician, a former paratrooper who lay trapped in the rubble of the base for 36 hours, read the names of his dead comrades on the memorial where Mr Chirac laid a wreath to the 137 French troops and 17 embassy employees killed in Lebanon's 1975-1990 war. The television technician did not want to be named, but he could not help recalling what happened that October morning:

"I heard an explosion. The walls fissured around me and began to cave in. I dived under a heavy piece of furniture, a tenth of a second after my corporal. But my lower body was sticking out, and my ankles and thighs were broken. I went into a coma and the corporal trickled water from his canteen into my mouth until they found us."

"This Residence des Pins belongs to our memory," Mr Chirac said without exaggeration. It was here that one-armed General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon on September 1st, 1920. For a few hours on Saturday, it was as if the tide of history had washed France and Lebanon up again on that distant shore.

There, again, were the Muslim and Christian dignitaries in their turbans and head-dresses, the feudal lords, the suited diplomats from Paris, on the same steps, in front of the same carved wooden door. This weekend, no one questioned whether France had erred in tearing Lebanon out of the Ottoman province of Syria as a gift to her centuries-old allies, the Maronites, thus sowing the seeds of civil war. France was again the Mother Country: "The commitment of yesteryear binds us forever," Mr Chirac said, repeating four times, "All of France wants to help you. . ."

Today, help for Lebanon means ending Israel's 20 year-old occupation of the southern 10 per cent of the country. Mr Hariri was only slightly more strident than Mr Chirac when he denounced "the aggressive policy of Israel endured by the Lebanese", and thanked Mr Chirac and his European friends "for helping us to rebuild what Israel has destroyed." The present Israeli government, Mr Hariri said, "went back on its international commitments, defying the international community and violating international law." Israel's behaviour hurt US prestige and weakened Washington's moral authority, he added.

For his part, Mr Chirac admitted that US mediation efforts "have not been a brilliant success". UN Security Council resolution 425 demands Israel's immediate and unconditional withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Mr Chirac reminded the crowd at the Residence des Pins ceremony to repeated applause. He was merely asking that UN resolutions be respected "without negotiation, without interpretation, to the letter".

Mr Chirac's views now seem indistinguishable from those of President Assad, who was long France's rival in Lebanon. Both men call for "a just, global peace" in the Middle East - not the `divide-and-rule', piecemeal deals favoured by Israel. The Golan Heights must be restored to Syria, Mr Chirac said. Apparently convinced by Mr Hariri's arguments, Mr Chirac refers only to Israel - not Syria - as an occupying power in Lebanon.

Mr Chirac has even offered to send French troops to guarantee Lebanon's borders, in the event of a peace deal. Israel wants nothing to do with his and Mr Mubarak's proposal for a summit of "saviours of peace", but the French President says he will persevere and hold the conference without Israel.

In the meantime, the new French occupation of Lebanon is to be linguistic, cultural and financial. At a press conference yesterday, Mr Chirac refused for the first time to respond to a question in English. Earlier, he visited a French business school that seeks to reverse the English-speaking trend among Lebanese traders. As a member of the Association of Francophone Mayors, which Mr Chirac also addressed during his stay here, Beirut now posts its streets signs in French - not English - and Arabic. The Lebanese capital will host the 2001 summit of La Francophonie, the grouping of 52 countries which Mr Chirac described as "our family" and "a window open onto the human and cultural world of 500 million men and women".

Lara Marlowe

Lara Marlowe

Lara Marlowe is an Irish Times contributor