LIBYAN DICTATOR Moammar Khadafy caused a stir this week when he pitched his heated tent in the garden of the Hotel de Marigny, the Parisian palace where foreign dignitaries are lodged. The brouhaha was instructive.
No, it was not surprising when members of the Socialist opposition castigated President Nicolas Sarkozy for receiving the Libyan megalomaniac with all the pomp due a foreign leader with clean hands. Yet Sarkozy's own secretary of state for human rights, Rama Yade, denounced not only Khadafy but also her government's willingness to legitimize him by receiving him. And she did so in the most undiplomatic terms.
"Colonel Khadafy must understand," the Senegal-born minister said, "that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet. France should not receive that kiss of death."
Traditionally, such overt dissent from official policy leads to expulsion from the government. But Sarkozy seems able to tolerate an unusual divergence of views among his ministers. This is a healthy quality in a democratic government, but one that has been sorely lacking in the Bush administration.
When commenting to his cabinet on Yade's vilification of Khadafy, Sarkozy simply said her "words could have been better chosen." This was not a sign that Sarkozy has a saintly power of forgiveness. Rather, it suggests that the French president is being politically shrewd as he furthers his country's naked economic interests.
After Sarkozy rolled out a red carpet for Khadafy and met with him in the presidential palace Monday, Sarkozy told reporters he and Khadafy would be signing $15 billion worth of contracts this week. They include a collaborative project for a nuclear power station in Libya, Libya's $4.4 billion purchase of Airbus passenger planes, and the sale of Dassault Rafale fighter jets and other French arms to Libya.
Sarkozy realizes he can have his cake and eat it too: He can allow his minister for human rights to speak the truth about Khadafy - not incidentally muffling complaints from the Socialist opposition - and still pocket Libyan petrodollars. Since Khadafy has accepted responsibility and paid compensation for blowing up Pan Am 103 and a French plane in the late 1980s, and has also abandoned his pursuit of nuclear weapons, France is not alone among Western countries courting him. The others would do well to follow the French example of not silencing official criticism of Khadafy's abuse of human rights.
France is at the intersection where the concern for human rights crosses paths with the demands of diplomacy and economics. So, Sarkozy is in the same quandary as other leaders of democratic states; he is just handling it in an unusually supple way.
