Indeed, although Habash was quickly detained in his Paris hospital, then hustled aboard a plane to Tunisia, the political cloud he left behind is likely to linger over the shaken Socialist government. The official story-that sole responsibility rests with one presidential adviser, who resigned, and three top civil servants, who were fired-has proven less than convincing to France’s opinion makers. THE STATE GONE MAD, headlined the left-leaning daily Liberation, while the conservative Figaro remarked on the “incoherences of the official version. " Already the focus of inquiries is what the resident knew and when he knew it.
This was just the kind of trouble Mitterrand didn’t need. Weakened by allegations of financial shenanigans at party headquarters and by a stagnant economy, the Socialist government led by Prime Minister Edith Cresson has teetered near collapse for several months. Now it must endure taunts of “hypocrisy” and ,‘shame” for harboring, however briefly, a man whom rightist politician Francois Leotard termed “the biggest current terrorist in the world.”
In truth, the shock of l’affaire Habash was less the fact of his visit than its revelation. French dealings with Levantine figures of dubious repute are nothing new. Paris has always prided itself on a sophistication in Middle Eastern politics that moralists might call cynical. Such notorious characters as Rifaat Assad (exiled from Syria by his brother the dictator) are welcome in Paris. Several times in the last 20 years terrorists and arms dealers sought by other Western governments have been identified and deported to freedom by French officials.
By comparison with some of these thugs, the 65-year-old Habash looks like a terrorist emeritus. As head of the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he is regarded in much of the Arab world as one of the grand old men of Palestinian nationalism. His group started the worldwide series of airline hijackings after 1968 that culminated in the blowing up of two planes at a Jordanian airstrip in 1970. That touched off the bloody “Black September” confrontation in Jordan. More recently, Habash backed Saddam Hussein during the gulf war. He opposes the peace process, and the PFLP continues to mount guerrilla attacks in the Israeli-occupied territories. His arrival in a major Western country as a Mideast conference is underway in Moscow is an event rich in symbolism.
Thus the notion that presidential adviser Georgina Dufoix would take the decision on herself as head of the French Red Cross strikes few observers as credible. It seems unlikely, too, that punctilious technocrats like the Foreign Ministry’s secretary-general, Francois Sheer, would approve the visit without actually telling Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. Yet Dumas and Mitterrand, overseas in Oman early in the week, are said not to have known about Habash until queried by reporters traveling with them.
Theories abound about what really happened. Some reports contend Habash had come for a routine checkup, and may have come routinely on other occasions before his cover was blown. Arab correspondents say initial word of the visit leaked out of Tunis, where Habash was initially said to have had a stroke. But however the story began, it is not likely to end until France has gone through a reappraisal of its Mideast conduct. And as details continue to emerge, it may be hard for Mitterrand to escape the words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand: admitting the terrorist was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.
