2023-10-21 15:55:28
Combat diplomacy. Memoirs
by Jean-Maurice Ripert
Les Presses de la Cité and Perrin, 384 p., €24
In his introduction, François Hollande, his classmate at ENA, describes him as a «serious transgressive». Throughout his career as a diplomat, Jean-Maurice Ripert never put his flag in his pocket. “At home, we are left-wing”, says the former ambassador, at the beginning of his story. His father, an agronomist and UN diplomat, introduced him to political ideas at a very young age, around the Jean-Moulin Club and the magazine Esprit, incubator circles of a “French-style social democracy» played by Pierre Mendès France. Of the «humanist values», he says, in line with a family tradition made up of Catholic principles, Jewish heritage and English education.
Very quickly, the young diplomat participated in the development of the foreign policy of the left government, alongside Michel Rocard, Bernard Kouchner and Lionel Jospin. “A militant act» claimed, which will see it promote the “right of intervention” and support France’s humanitarian operations, a prelude to the adoption by the United Nations, in September 2005, of the concept of “responsibility to protect”.
In June 1992, Jean-Maurice Ripert accompanied François Mitterrand and Bernard Kouchner in Sarajevo besieged by the Serbs. A spectacular gesture but revealing the limits of humanitarian action. To Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic who pleads in favor of a military intervention to liberate the Bosnian capital, François Mitterrand opposes his refusal to“add war to war». It was not until the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995 that Americans and Europeans loosened their grip in a few weeks with NATO bombings.
Realism
His reputation as a “left-wing diplomat” earned Jean-Maurice Ripert strong enmities at the Quai d’Orsay. In the fall of 2008, during a presidential trip to New York, Nicolas Sarkozy and his diplomatic advisor Jean-David Levitte informed him that his fate as France’s permanent representative to the UN was sealed. This sidelining led him to then work as special envoy of the UN Secretary General for aid to Pakistan, then as head of the European Union delegation in Turkey, before his return to grace, at the favor of the presidency of François Hollande, as ambassador to Moscow then to Beijing.
Jean-Maurice Ripert has “experienced the world”. Far from this typically French anti-Americanism, syndrome of “disarray of our republic perpetually in mourning for its own power”. In Moscow, he saw the criminal dictatorship set up by Vladimir Putin found its legitimacy in the war, from Chechnya to Ukraine. In Beijing, he watched as Xi Jinping continued his work undermining the multilateral order that emerged from World War II.
“In the face of power, in the face of China as well as Russia, “realism” does not consist of turning a blind eye to excesses and massive violations of the law but, on the contrary, of denouncing them,” he writes, in unison with the neo-idealist leaders of Central Europe who today affirm the need to confront autocrats and fight to defend democracy threatened in Russia’s war against Ukraine. “Doormat diplomacy is not the right answer, insists Jean-Maurice Ripert, it brings us into disrepute. »
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