Giscard and the story of his diamonds

Early this month the former president of France Valery Giscard D’Estaing died. The Guardian in its obituary described him as “the grand old man of French politics”. President Emanuel Macron said, “his presidency had transformed France and his direction still guides its way”. The New York Times said he was “a modern-minded conservative”.

Unlike many of the other obituaries, the New York Times failed to mention the scandal that was a major factor in bringing him down when he ran for a second term in 1981. He was accused and it was proved that he had accepted a gift of diamonds from Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic valued at about quarter of a million US dollars. Giscard said he gave the money away to charities in the Central African Republic including to the Red Cross. The Red Cross said they never received a donation from him.

Those obituaries which did mention this restricted the mention to two or three lines. Yet at the time it was the event that consumed the French media and profoundly influenced the voters who in droves voted for the Socialist candidate, Francois Mitterrand. Without this scandal, Giscard would probably have won the presidency again.

Bokassa was a wilder creation than could ever have been thought up by John Updike or Evelyn Waugh, even in their most satirical moments. A man who could cut off the ears of his prisoners, murdered his former finance minister in the privacy of his ornate palace, who would receive the French ambassador in his underwear, and would conduct a serous conversation with him in an empty room in the palace, furnished only with a mattress. No novelist could have created such a character. Yet this was only a part of him.

According to a Commission of Inquiry consisting of five senior African jurists, sent into the country in the wake of revelations by Amnesty International of the murder of children, “riots in Bangui, the capital city, were suppressed with great cruelty by the security forces and in April 1979 about a hundred children were massacred at the order of Emperor Bokassa, who almost certainly participated in the killings”.

There is no good reason to doubt eyewitness reports that he kept pieces of his victims in his refrigerator and feasted on them in private orgies.

The discovery and exposure of the child-murders was one of Amnesty’s major breakthroughs. Not only did Amnesty reveal one of the most horrific events of the last century, the disclosure also provoked the French government into sending in paratroopers to depose a tyrant who had become an embarrassment.

I spent two months researching what went on for my book on the history of Amnesty International (Like Water On Stone published by Penguin).

Bokassa hit the news every so often, but by and large the world passed him by. The French government, which kept itself well informed, kept its information to itself. The press was not greatly interested in this African backwater. Amnesty maintained its watch, almost alone, as it does on dozens of other seemingly unimportant countries.

There is no gainsaying the fact that Giscard’s relationship with Bokassa had been unusually close and Bokassa was adept, politically at least, at exploiting it. Giscard love to hunt in Bokassa’s private forests. A large tract of jungle in the east of the country, accessible only by private plane, was Giscard’s chasse gardee. Often accompanied by Bokassa he would shoot elephants, giraffes and the rare white rhino. (Bokassa claimed in an interview in the Washington Post just before the French election that he gave Giscard a 3,000-square-mile hunting preserve.)

Giscard made things worse by choosing the Central African Republic for his first visit as president to Africa. He was the first head of state to congratulate Bokassa on his crowning. After the French invasion Bokassa fled into exile in the Cote d’Ivoire. He was sentenced to death in absentia on Christmas Eve, 1980. Eight years later, to everyone’s surprise, he voluntarily returned home. He was tried again and received the death sentence. This was commuted to life imprisonment. Three years later he died of natural causes.

If Bokassa were alive today and committing such crimes he could have been arrested for crimes against humanity and tried before the International Criminal Court. Perhaps Giscard could have been arrested too for connivance. Anyway, Giscard got his come-uppance. Although only young when he stepped down from the presidency at the age of 56, he never again held high elective office. The cloud over his Bokassa dealings never went away.