Rama Yade with nowhere to go.
Before all the fuss about the Olympic flame is extinguished and we move on, it’s worth sparing a thought for Rama Yade, who, in her role as Minister for Human Rights, caused mild mayhem here by allegedly telling a journalist that Nicolas Sarkozy would only go to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games if China respected fundamental human rights in Tibet - and then being forced to deny she had ever said such obvious nonsense.
I suspect she’s a very bright young woman – I’ve never met her, the film Al Jazeera want me to make about her is still pending approval, but her book “Noirs de France” has some refreshingly different things to say about people like herself who have suffered discrimination. But she is in a closed cubby-hole of a ministry, with no way out. Think about it. The ministry of human rights isn’t really a ministry – it has no mission, no agenda, no crack team to back up the otherwise empty words which is all she can offer. As Azouz Begag found in the previous government, working as a coloured face in a meaningless ministry like “Equal Opportunities” or “Human Rights” is a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.
Rama Yade has learnt the hard way that she can’t mention human rights abuses in “le pays des droits de l’homme” itself (in the overcrowded prisons, or the repatriation of sans papiers): when she tried, going to see some immigrant squatters faced with eviction in a Paris suburb, she was keenly and patronisingly reprimanded by her seniors. If she can’t mention France, she can only pass judgement on other countries. But the countries with human rights abuses are the very countries where the market for French goods is still strong, or with which France needs to remain on good terms (the USA for example with Guantanamo Bay). Twice now she has put into words what most of us think: first about Colonel Gaddafi being a dictator and more recently about the Olympic Games. But both times she has been made to look ridiculous by her senior colleagues. When the President went with a huge entourage and much pomp to China last November, he made the last minute decision to leave Rama Yade ignominiously twiddling her thumbs at home.
Now she knows she has the choice of either speaking out and having her wrists slapped, thus being made to look a fool in public, or saying nothing and being forgotten. Either way she is side-lined for the next job. For apart from the fact that she clearly has very definite thoughts about human rights, it is probable she accepted the job as a stepping stone, and so she needs to shine. Her contemporary and white male equivalent, Laurent Wauquiez, has just been promoted from spokesman (where the job-definition is to shine) to junior minister in charge of employment – a real job with targets and measurable success (or failure). She is stuck, losing out whether she acts or does nothing. The Ministry for Human Rights is an empty shop window.
In the mean time she failed in her first bid for democratic election in the recent local elections and as of yesterday it looks as if her feisty denunciation of the operation by the Arche de Zoë, a humanitarian charity, to “save orphans” from the Sudan may rebound painfully on her, further damaging her credibility. The Arche de Zoë’s leader, now pardoned and released from prison, has said the Foreign Ministry gave his project their approval so he will sue Rama Yade for her defamatory remarks. Will those same senior colleagues who have been embarrassed by her before come to her aid this time?
The shame is that what she says about human rights is usually exactly what many people think.