Macron tosses highest award to leader of repressive Egyptian regime
TOP OF the list of people you might jib at sharing a Covid bubble with is Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, president of a country that has emerged as having one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, with a worsening human rights record and prisons packed with dissidents.
But your aversion would presumably not be shared by Emmanuel Macron, the French president who has just presented el-Sisi with the country’s highest award, the Légion d’honneur.
So what can have possessed Manny, leader of a nation that presents itself as a paragon of human rights and liberty, to burnish the ego of a man whose government has in recent weeks arrested three employees of one of the country’s few remaining human rights organisations, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, prompting a global outcry? The three men were released on bail but still face vague national security charges. In early December, Italian prosecutors charged four of Mr Sisi’s enforcers in the 2016 Cairo kidnapping and murder of doctoral student Giulio Regeni.
Under al-Sisi’s government, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch says, Egypt has been experiencing its “worst human rights crisis in many decades.”
How, then, to explain the honour? Look no further, presumably, than a conclusion by Macron that it would be judicious to reward the ruler of the Arab world’s most populous land for being a loyal customer of the French arms industry.
France profits handsomely from weapons sales to Egypt, and during his visit el-Sisi met the leaders of Dassault Aviation, which sells Cairo Rafale advanced fighter-jets, as well as those of Airbus.
“I will not condition matters of defence and economic cooperation on these disagreements [over human rights],” Macron was quoted as saying as el-Sisi’s visit began. “It is more effective to have a policy of demanding dialogue than a boycott which would only reduce the effectiveness of one of our partners in the fight against terrorism.” So did the purportedly humanitarian Macron have to steel himself to speak thus, or were his words delivered with that certain insouciance he likes to cultivate?
An obvious clue to the French president’s inner feelings on the matter must be assumed to be the fact that there was absolutely no announcement about the conferring of the honour by the Paris government, and no French correspondents were invited to cover the ceremony, or indeed other events during the Egyptian’s state visit. Underlining their exclusion, French media outlets seeking footage of the events suffered the indignity, ironically, of having to resort to state media in Egypt, among the countries in the world with the highest levels of censorship.
Bronterre News 