Comment
In The Public Interest
The newspaper, Le Monde, is acknowledged to be very sympathetic to the socialist government of President Francois Mitterand and nobody can accuse those that own it and/or work on it of unpatriotism. They are as French as they come.
Equally patriotic are the two French secret service agents awaiting trial in New Zealand for their involvement in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
Then there are those Frenchmen who allegedly did the actual sinking of the ship. The Prime Minister M. Fabius says no action will be taken against them because they only obeyed orders. They too are patriots.
Then there are the three Secret Service agents who have been arrested and accused of having leaked information about the whole affair to the press. They are as patriotic as their colleagues who are said to be very incensed and regard the action of the three as treasonable.
Between the Prime Minister and the President, they would be striving to act only as the true patriots that they are. Whatever they did and have been doing and propose to do will all undoubtedly be motivated by one consideration: the interest of France.
This same motive, in the interest of France, can be said to have guided all the various actors and participants, major and minor, in the Rainbow Warrior saga. Try telling the couple in jail in New Zealand that their actions were not in the interest of France, or the French journalists who have been exposing the details of French involvement or their sources within the French Secret Service or those that would kill these sources for treason or those who planted the explosives.
They all in their own and varied ways were acting in the interest of France. It is not unlikely that the dismissed Head of the Secret Service, Admiral Lacoste, feels betrayed that having acted in the best interest of his country he has been fired from his job, for when he refused to answer Monsieur Hernu's queries, he must have adjudged it to have been in the interest of France.
It is suggested by those who presumably know these things that all French people are generally agreed on their country's right to test nuclear weapons on their Pacific territories, and in the pursuit of this aim, it is not difficult to see when they would identify Greenpeace as an impediment since Greenpeace is equally determined to frustrate France's nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Some have suggested that the only thing the French got wrong is to have broken the cardinal rule of espionage (government?) being the eleventh commandment and to Secret Services the first commandment: Thou shalt not be found out. In other words, if by some miracle the Rainbow Warrior could have been sunk, hopefully without the loss of life, and those responsible could have so covered their tracks that no French involvement could be traced, it would all have ended well.
There are many flaws in this theory but the only one worth going into now is that things did not work out that way and the scandal is spreading beyond the sinking of the ship and the unfortunate loss of the life of a crewmember.
There is always the danger that once having been elected to govern a country the members of the government either confuse or deliberately interchange their own personal, partisan, or misguided interests with the 'public interest'. It is not every day that every citizen can be asked to declare his position on any one issue to determine what the 'public interest' really is. In a system where the people have the opportunity to vote, they will make their opinions known when election time comes. around and in the meantime, they make their voices heard in the press.
When the rulers are self-imposed and not subject to elections, it becomes difficult to subject their 'public interest' actions to any test.
All the various events that have become contentious items in the political life of the West African region have all been said in the 'public interest'.
When Kwame Nkrumah brought his Preventive Detention Act, it was in the public interest, and so was the Protective Detention of the NLC and so was Busia's confrontation with the judiciary and so were Acheampong's green ink instructions for import licences to be given to women who came to him in tears, and so claimed the Rawlings AFRC were the public executions of those he overthrew and the public shaving of women in the market places and so were the Peoples Defence Committees, the IMF loans, etc, etc.
When Maj-Gen Buhari addressed the Nigerian nation on New Year's Day 1984, their actions were in the public interest, the wholesale arrest and incarceration of politicians and businessmen and personal enemies were all in the public interest, and so were the various Decrees 2, 3, 4, 20, and the NSO Director Rafindadi and his staff were also convinced that all those they were prosecuting, and even their overcrowded jails were all in the public interest. Maj-Gen Idiagbon would undoubtedly also swear on his honour that everything he did while in power was in the public interest.
And so would the new President, Maj-Gen Babangida. It is doubtful whether all these people could all have been serving this same public interest. There is an obvious need for an acceptable yardstick to test this much absurd 'public interest'. An attempt was made in the 1979 Ghana constitution to tackle this problem in Article 173 of the constitution. This granted all citizens of Ghana the right to take to the Supreme Court to test the validity of any such claim. That is, people did not have to wait until election time came around to demonstrate their disagreement to things said to have been done in their interest.
There is in jail in the French city of Lyons, currently awaiting trial, an elderly man who might also very well claim that the crimes with which he is charged he committed either because he was only obeying orders or they were in the public interest. For Klaus Barbie too, in his time with the Nazis, considered his 'crimes' in the public interest
