He was every Italian mama’s dream child: industrious, discreet, well turned-out and always even tempered. Being an Agnelli, and thus a member of the closest thing Italy has to a royal family, Giovanni Alberto – Giovannino to his friends and the Italian media – was also an emblem for a whole generation of young people and their hopes for the next century. But this weekend Giovanni Alberto Agnelli died of a rare form of intestinal cancer, plunging Italy into the sort of mourning usually reserved for princes and film stars. He said he would never allow French officers to testify in The Hague.
They would give evidence only in writing.This policy is, by all accounts, being dictated by the officers themselves. They are said to be wary of the “Anglo-Saxon” form of adversarial litigation and cross-examination practised in The Hague. Whether or not they have something to hide – and French officers and others, were implicated in UN failings before the Srebrenica massacre in 1994 – they fear that they will become de facto defendants.The French refusal to take action against war criminals in its sector of Bosnia is more puzzling. Le Monde pointed out that the French military had always been pro-Serb and that this might be a partial explanation.
Beyond that, the newspaper said, no one – neither in the foreign ministry, nor in the President’s or the Prime Minister’s entourage – had been willing to defend or explain the policy.. He was the great hope for the future of the Agnelli dynasty; young, smart, good looking and, at 33, already well on his way to the top of the Fiat industrial empire. She hinted that she might ask the UN to take action to oblige France to send senior officers to testify.Meanwhile, she said, the many indicted war criminals living in the French sector of Bosnia “have, at the present moment, a feeling of complete security”.”The great majority of those indicted, including the most important, are in the French sector. It was “working against peace” by compounding the “impunity” of Bosnian war criminals.Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor for both the Bosnian and Rwandan tribunals, will meet the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, in Paris today. She will be asking two principal questions.Why, of all the countries involved in Bosnian peace-keeping, is France alone refusing to allow its military officers to testify before the tribunal? And why is France refusing to take any action against the many indicted war criminals – including Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – living in the part of Bosnia under French military control?In an interview with Le Monde, Ms Arbour accused France of seeking to “limit access to the truth”.
His standing in the party, and the wider alliance of centre and right parties, was severely damaged by his decision to call an early general election last May which was, against expectations, won by the Left. Mr Seguin’s selection as party president, soon afterwards, was seen as the first step towards a presidential challenge of his own.. The French-controlled sector of Bosnia has become a haven for war criminals, says the chief prosecutor at the international tribunal at The Hague. Paris is also refusing to allow senior military officers to appear before the tribunal. John Lichfield asks: What is going on?
Even at its most petty and bloody-minded, French foreign policy is generally defended in the French press.
