May 22, 2008
JUST AS IT would be hard to imagine music without notes or poetry without words, diplomacy is impossible without broad diplomatic contacts – including ones with potentially objectionable parties. Yet certain powerful governments have been trying to change the rules of diplomacy. The Bush administration has now criticized France, an ally, for contacts that were entirely reasonable, and Germany is limiting certain contacts out of deference to China.
The issue came to a head this week when France acknowledged one of its diplomats had met with leaders of the Palestinian movement Hamas, and when a second-tier German minister chatted for 45 minutes with the Dalai Lama during the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s recent visit to Germany.
News that France’s former ambassador to Iraq, Yves Aubin de la Messuziere, conducted talks over several months with Hamas should not have been shocking. Hamas, the dominant party in the Palestinian parliament, has become a presence that cannot be ignored.
Yet France’s disclosure came just after President Bush, plainly alluding to a short list of groups that included Hamas, compared anyone who would meet with “terrorists and radicals” to appeasers of Nazi Germany. So the White House felt compelled to condemn France’s move, however mildly.
Yet talking to Hamas need not mean appeasement. The Israeli government, relying on Egypt as mediator, has been conducting indirect negotiations with Hamas about a truce and a prisoner exchange. The other bitter foe of Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has used Saudi Arabia to try to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Hamas leaders.
And two years ago, Bush himself rejected pleas from Abbas and Israel to keep Hamas out of parliamentary elections on the grounds that it was a terrorist organization. If Bush once wanted Hamas to participate in elections, it hardly makes sense for him to quarantine a Hamas government now – or expect France to do the same.
Germany’s awkward reception of the Dalai Lama was also discouraging. Germany’s foreign minister and other top officials snubbed Tibet’s spiritual leader, and not because Germany objects to the monk’s peaceful message. Instead, German corporations realistically fear being punished by China, their biggest Asian market.
Refusing contacts with Hamas may be counterproductive. But when officials of a democratic Germany boycott the world’s preeminent advocate of nonviolence at the behest of a communist regime in China, that is far worse than a mere diplomatic blunder.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
