French press review 24 March 2011

Jerusalem, Japan, Libya and Elizabeth Taylor are the focus of this morning’s French papers.

Le Monde leads with Libya and the story that Nato will play a key role in military operations in Libya, and Sarkozy is enjoying international and domestic support on this one. Inside the paper, Le Monde reports that Sarkozy's initiative was broadly supported in parliament, except by the communists who said it was a blind and blissful unanimity.

In its editorial, Le Monde says doubts and criticisms are already making themselves heard: a war for oil, a cynical show of force against a dictator who's no worse than other dictators, it's hubris that's leading the west into Libya, and it's motivated by domestic political calculations and so on and so on.

Stop right there, says Le Monde, and look at the facts. Libya provides two per cent of world oil supplies, five per cent of OECD supplies and 15 per cent of French supplies. It's not that much, says the editorial.

The campaign in Libya is the enactment of a doctrine of humanitarian intervention adopted by the United Nations in 2005. For the first time the duty to protect civil populations is being upheld not just by “human rightists” but also by world powers.

We can regret that this doctrine wasn't enacted when it came to Congo but that's no reason to mock it, says Le Monde. But it cautions that the UN mandate formally excludes regime changing intervention; the political battle after a ceasefire is a Libyan affair and international law must be respected to the letter with no bellicose calls for the toppling of the regime.

Libération's headline is Queen Elizabeth: Liz Taylor died on Wednesday aged 79. Her face takes up the whole front page. And yet Libération’s coverage is rather unkind. After a fair few false alarms, Elizabeth Taylor has died at 79. Since 1968 her public life was punctuated by more and more anodyne films and by her three survival instincts: getting fat, getting depressed and buying jewels.

In the editorial, entitled trouble, Libération says too much alcohol, too many antidepressants, too many husbands, too many diamonds, too many flops, too much weight, too much of everything. She was nevertheless one of world's sexiest women, it concedes, and she also engaged in the fight against Aids in the 1980s at a time when most of Hollywood preferred to stay quiet about the problem. This was, says Libération, one of her best roles.

You could say that her existence was marked by two recurring features: if she got ill, she got better, which is now no longer true, and if she got married she got divorced, the paper adds.

Right-wing Le Figaro leads with Wednesday’s bomb in Jerusalem: a very worrying bomb, says the editorial, which must be condemned with the greatest vigour. It is a sign of worse to come, too. Figaro points to the murder of a settler family on the 11 March and to an increasing number of rocket strikes from Gaza into Israel, some of which have been claimed by the Islamic Jihad group, which has links with Iran.

It's an Iranian strategy, according to Figaro: make tensions between Israelis and Palestinians rise at a moment when the Arab world is in chaos. This strategy could well succeed, it says. It's come at a time of diplomatic vacuum – Palestine and Israel have no contact, and the US and European Union don't seem to be focusing much on the problem. Iran, which already has a secret hand in Yemen and Bahrain, is destabilising the region more to advance its own pawns. The conclusion: something must be done.

Communist L'Humanité manages to turn the situation in Japan into a communist issue. Its headline is “Solidarity”. The editorial says that the tsunami left more than just chaos in its wake. It also revealed serious problems in the socio-economic system of one of the world's most developed countries. Being faced with the exploitation of nuclear energy by a capitalist group is bad enough, but there are also deficiencies in the humanitarian response.

L’Humanité went to the north-west of the country, one of the worst-hit areas, and, it says, it brought with it the solidarity of its readers.

A Le Monde correspondent in Abidjan says that the standoff that's followed November's elections in Côte d'Ivoire is threatening to turn into religious conflict. Two imams have been killed and several mosques have been destroyed. In multiplying the causes of conflict, outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo's camp seems to be trying to drown out the original point of difference: the election, it says. Media outlets and United Nations representatives are also under attack. The think tank International Crisis Group is advising West African bloc Ecowas to deploy troops in the country protect civilians.