Hessel's
Memoir
Blurs
"Eastern"
Sahara,
Goldstone and
Hutus,
French Mirror
By
Matthew
Russell Lee,
Review
UNITED
NATIONS,
October 30 --
Before the
Nobel Peace
Prize this
year was
tossed to the
European
Union, rumored
laureates
included one
of the
many "fathers
of the Arab
Spring,"
retired US
academic Gene
Sharp.
Another for
whom paternity
is claimed is
Frenchman
Stephane
Hessel, whose
memoir "The
Power of
Indignation"
is brought to
the US by
Skyhorse
Publishing.
But how is it
brought, and
what does it
mean?
It
is brought
with typos,
some of them
telling.
Recounting a
sponsored
trip in the
late 1980s to
Burundi, it
says "the Huru president
had
just been
assassinated."
That would be
Hutu,
and the French
government
would play an
unseemly role
protecting and
even training
the genocidal
Hutu
government of
Rwanda just
next door.
This
escapes
comment in
Hessel's
memoir, even
as he
describes
representing
France in
Geneva at the
UN "Human
Rights
Council" and
at
the UN rights
conference in
Vienna in
1993, just a
year before
the
killing of
800,000 in
Rwanda.
Hessel
plays up the
UN in his
book, from the
Universal
Declaration of
Human Rights
to a proposal
of his to the
General
Assembly in
2001. But what
for example of
1994?
What
was Hessel
doing then, as
France
defended the
Hutu
government in
the
UN Security
Council,
including
through Herve
Ladsous, then
France's
Deputy
Permanent
Representative
and now,
not without
scandal, the
head
of UN
Peacekeeping?
Another
French
shame on which
Hessel
comments, but
with a glaring
geographical
mistake or
type, appears
on Page 177:
"we should
also mention
Morocco,
which, in the
case of Eastern
Sahara,
remains
as obstinate
and unjust as
Israel is
toward the
Palestinians."
That would be
Western
Sahara, which
Ladsous
recently
visited while
remaining
quiet about
restrictions
on the
movement and
ability to
observe of
"his" UN
peacekeepers.
On
the issue with
which Hessel
is most
identified,
his book
decries
"Robert
Goldstone" for
apologizing
for his report
which
Hessel says he
confirmed on
site in Gaza.
That, we can
confirm, would
be Richard
Goldstone.
Hessel
is a public
intellectual,
and his books
cites others
from Claude
Levi-Strauss
to Marcel
Mauss and
Derrida. But
wouldn't it
have been
important to
get
Goldstone's
name right,
and even more
so the name of
Western Sahara
and of the
Hutus?
There
is something
telling in
these
mistakes, and
in Hessel's
lack of
comment on
France's role
in the Hutu -
Tutsi
genocide. But
Hessel is
94 and so we
will leave it
here. Maybe
he, and not
Gene Sharp,
will
being in the
Nobel running
next year, as
the "White
Father of
the Arab
Spring"
candidate.
Watch this
site.
Other
Inner City
Press book
reviews this
month:
Annan
Memoir
Downplays Oil
for Food,
Congo and
Corruption,
Ignores W.
Sahara
(October 22,
2012)
New
Benghazi
Books, from
Exit the
Colonel, a
Guardian Short
and Shalgam,
Long
(October 20,
2012)
, 
