A senior United Nations aid worker has been suspended for disclosing to prosecutors an internal report on the sexual abuse of children by French peacekeeping troops in the Central African Republic.
Sources close to the case said Anders Kompass passed the document to the French authorities because of the UN’s failure to take action to stop the abuse.
The report documented the sexual exploitation of children as young as nine by French troops stationed in the country as part of international peacekeeping efforts.
EMERGENCY call devices that automatically alert rescue services to car crashes (eCall) will have to be fitted to all new models of cars and light vans by 31 March 2018 under rules voted by European Parliament.
The eCall in-vehicle system uses 112 emergency call technology to alert the emergency services to serious road accidents automatically.
"Deploying the 112-based eCall in-vehicle emergency system across the EU will help to improve road safety in all 28 member states," said socialist MEP Olga Sehnalova, lead negotiator of the legislation.
"The European Parliament has repeatedly stressed that reducing deaths and the severity of injuries on the roads is its priority.
"eCall as a public service, free of charge for all citizens, irrespective of the type of vehicle or its purchase price, will contribute to this common goal."
MEPs strengthened the draft law’s data protection clause to preclude tracking of eCall-equipped vehicle before the accident occurs.
Under the new rules, the automatic call would give the emergency services only basic minimum data, such as the type of vehicle, the fuel used, the time of the accident, the exact location and the number of passengers.
The rules say eCall data gathered by emergency centres or their service partners must not be transferred to third parties without explicit consent of the person concerned.
Manufacturers will also have to ensure that the eCall technology design permits full and permanent deletion of data gathered.
THE number of unemployed in France hit a new record in March at 3.51 million people, up 0.4 percent from February, with young people especially hard hit, the Ministre du Travail said.
Employment minister, Francois Rebsamen, focussed on first quarter of the year, saying there had been the smallest increase in unemployment over three months since early 2011.
Claiming it was down to the work of the government as it looks to offer young people apprenticeships, and makes it easier for firms to take on staff.
The news comes as the third anniversary of President Francois Hollande's election approaches.
He has pledged not to seek re-election in 2017 if he does not succeed in reversing the trend of ever-increasing unemployment.
Nearly 20 years after compulsory military service was phased out in France, President François Hollande announced Monday the creation of a new voluntary service that aims to give marginalised young people a better start in life.
Three centres for the new Voluntary Military Service (SMV) will open this year, taking in 1,000 recruits aged 18 to 25 who have dropped out of the educational system and have precarious family situations.
By 2016 the scheme will be operational in seven locations across France and open to 2,000 volunteers.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right Front National, allegedly held a hidden Swiss bank account via a trust overseen by his butler, containing €2.2m including €1.7m in gold ingots and coins, the investigative website Mediapart has reported.
The website reported on Monday that prosecution authorities in Nanterre, west of Paris, were handed details of the trust and bank account by the French anti-money-laundering authority, Tracfin.
If the presence of a hidden bank account is established, Le Pen could face action for failing to make a full disclosure of his estate to financial watchdogs and possibly for tax fraud.
AT least two French people have died in the Nepal earthquake, with no news yet on 676 others, while 1,400 have been traced and are safe.
Speaking at a press conference, Laurent Fabius, minister of foreign affairs in France said they were worried about a group of French people trekking through the mountains.
And he also said that a special emergency telephone number, 01 43 17 56 46, had received more than 10,000 calls and that a group of aid agencies were offering support to Nepal.
A LOOK over some of the news headlines from France.
Over two tonnes of cocaine seized off Scotland: French customs
Nine men have been charged with drug trafficking after the British coastguard seized more than two tonnes of cocaine off the east coast of Scotland, French and British officials said on Sunday.
French customs shared "specific information allowing two ships from the Royal Navy and the British coastguards to board a tug 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Scotland carrying a very large quantity of cocaine, more than two tons" on Thursday, it said in a statement.
Earlier, Australia called on Indonesia to delay executing two convicted Australian drug traffickers until corruption claims were investigated.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were convicted in 2006.
The two, with six more foreigners and one Indonesian, have been formally told of their execution. A French trafficker is still appealing his conviction.
Peter Carey among writers to protest PEN honour for Charlie Hebdo
Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, and at least three other writers have withdrawn from next month’s PEN American Center gala, citing objections to the literary and human rights organisation’s honouring of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Once that so American of Americans’ staple dish was permitted to enter the French culinary scene, there seemed to be no boundaries left. Well, maybe one, but now that’s gone, too. Paris has decided to roll out the red carpet to another emblem of fast cuisine: the food truck.
French President Francois Hollande urged vigilance against resurgent anti-Semitism and racism, as he visited a former gas chamber on Sunday to honour Jews, Gypsies and French resistance fighters who died in the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil.
"The worst can still happen. Anti-Semitism and racism are still here," Hollande said at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, at a ceremony marking 70 years since the last Nazi camps were liberated by Allied troops in WWII.
Hollande, whose country is still tense after terrorist attacks on a kosher supermarket and newspaper in January, decried the "atrocities" at the camp.
THE French humanitarian organisation, Médecins du Monde, has been offering support in Nepal after the devastating earthquake over the weekend.
They already had a team in the area offering advice on health and child care, but this team has been expanded with the arrival of 12 extra staff including doctors and nurses.
Médecins du Monde says that it has sent around 20 tonnes of equipment to help in medical situations and in disaster relief.
And has also as launched a fund raising campaign for people to help in support of the Nepalese people.
Officials say more than 3,300 people are now known to have died, including 3,218 in Nepal making it the nation's deadliest disaster in more than 80 years.
A group of unidentified French gunners posed with a howitzer in the Dardanelles, 1915. Among them are a couple of Australians. Athelstan Markham Martyn/Wikimedia Commons.
With almost the same number of soldiers as the Anzacs – 79,000 – and similar death rates – close on 10,000 – French participation in the Gallipoli campaign could not occupy a more different place in national memory. What became a foundation myth in Australia as it also did in the Turkish Republic after 1923 was eventually forgotten in France.
Some of the reasons are obvious.
France was fighting for its very existence and many, including Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief on the western front, thought Gallipoli a side-show at best and a wasted effort at worst. It was a British conceived and led campaign, although the French were a fully-fledged expeditionary force with their own staff and command structure.
It was also a failure, and while that never prevented anyone spinning redemptive narratives about heroism and national virtue, the French had plenty more relevant episodes to use for such purposes during the Great War, from the Marne in 1914 and Verdun in 1916 to final victory in 1918.
Even regarding the “front of the Orient”, as they called it, the French saw Gallipoli merely as a curtain-raiser to the subsequent campaign in Macedonia, to which most French units from Gallipoli transferred, and which finally defeated Bulgaria in 1918, contributing to the victory over the Central Powers. Gallipoli failed to achieve any of its goals.
What was in it for the French?
A French battleship firing at Turkish shore positions in the preliminary bombardment, Dardanelles 1915.Unknown/Wikimedia Commons
Other reasons for the neglect of the campaign are less obvious – and more revealing – about its actual nature.
The French conceived of the Dardanelles in part at least as a colonial campaign. This was not true of its ostensible goals – since the idea of defeating the Ottoman Empire and linking up with Russia was clearly part of a continental conflict between the major European powers.
But one consequence of success would be (as it eventually was) the partitioning of the Ottoman Middle East. The French could not afford not to take part in case the British won.
Even more tellingly, the campaign was conceived in a colonial mode.
As the “sick man of Europe” it was assumed that the Ottoman Empire would collapse at the mere demonstration of Allied naval and military might. The land campaign would be just like the expeditions that had subordinated “native” peoples to French and European authority pre-war – in Indo-China, China and Morocco.
Even after the naval fiasco of March 18, when British and French ships failed to force the Dardanelles, the French imagined that the land campaign would be an easy march along the shores of the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople.
Finally, two thirds of the French Expeditionary Force were composed of colonial soldiers, though two thirds were also white. While two regiments were specially raised for the campaign from metropolitan France, many of the other soldiers came from elite European colonial regiments or white settlers from Algeria and Tunisia.
Despite initial plans, it proved impossible to use native North African soldiers (though they later went to Macedonia) because they would be fighting against fellow Muslims and possibly occupying the holy sites of the Middle East.
But a quarter to a third of the French soldiers were Tirailleurs Sénégalais, or Senegalese Infantry, though in reality they were recruited from all over French West Africa and included some creoles from the West Indies and islands of the Indian Ocean. While it is not true that there was no memory of the Dardanelles campaign in inter-war France, it was largely colonial, being especially strong among the settler community in North Africa.
Needless to say, the Senegalese had their own oral traditions but they were never in any active sense part of the official “memory” of the campaign. When the Empire vanished after the second world war, and French Algeria with it, the most obvious sources of a commemorative culture of Gallipoli disappeared.
Not exactly a colonial campaign
The paradox, as rapidly became evident to the French soldiers, is that Gallipoli as an experience had little of the colonial campaign about it. The Turkish soldiers who opposed the landings were men fighting to defend their homeland and religion, and they did so as tenaciously as any of the other European armies of the Great War.
They were also instructed and party commanded by a significant number of German officers, who had initiated them into the rudiments of trench warfare in ways that still remain fully to be established.
Even more fundamentally, Gallipoli was as much a military part of the war in Europe as it was by virtue of its political logic. The great surprise of the first world war was that a conflict that almost everyone had imagined as a war of movement in the same broad mould as warfare since Napoleon, where the outcome would turn on the massed infantry offensive, became in reality a drawn-out conflict in which the defensive predominated.
The application of industrialised firepower only made the stalemate all the more destructive and prolonged. In effect, the “front” was invented as the battlefield of this mutual siege warfare, and Gallipoli was simply the most distant of the fronts that locked down Europe in 1915.
Unsurprisingly – though at the time it surprised everyone – the conflict that raged for eight months on this most distant peninsula of the continent reproduced the trench warfare of the western and other fronts.
As one French soldier, Arnaud Pomiro, lamented on May 15:
So it’s siege warfare, or if one prefers, trench warfare, exactly as on the French front. I see no end to it.
Nor did he. The French, like the British, never got further than seven kilometres from their landing place on April 25 at the tip of the peninsula. As Pomiro’s comment shows, they were referring to Gallipoli as a “front” within three weeks of arriving. Yet they clung grimly on.
While Paris began transferring troops to the Macedonian front from September, French soldiers remained with the British until the final disembarkation on January 8-9 1916.
As a front, confined to a tiny area but extended by naval logistics on both sides to the Greek islands and to Constantinople respectively, Gallipoli offers a perfect laboratory for historians wishing to study the nature of warfare in the Great War.
Instead of being a colonial exception, it was a microcosm of the European war at large. What the French discovered to their painful surprise becomes an exciting challenge to the historian a century on.
But the price of meeting that challenge is to end the tendency to separate out simplistic national accounts from a more complex episode that only makes real sense when viewed as a comparative and transnational whole.
John Horne will be speaking at the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) XXIV Biennial Conference, War, Violence, Aftermaths: Europe and the Wider World, to be held in Newcastle, from July 14-17 2015. Details here.
