19, April 2019
France: Notre-Dame fire donations pour in, spark controversy 0
Monday’s calamitous fire at Notre-Dame elicited an unprecedented outpouring of generosity from donors near and far, great and small. But as the embers cooled, so have cracks appeared in the initial élan of unity and controversy flared over funds.
Donations nearing the billion euro mark
Donors had by Thursday already pledged €850 million to rebuild the 850-year-old monument. The unheard-of sum appeared with lightning speed — not least, observers quip, thanks to a fortuitous, decades-old rivalry between two of France’s top culture-minded billionaire families, the Pinaults and the Arnaults, who head the world’s top luxury goods giants, Kering and LVMH.
The Pinaults pledged €100 million shortly after midnight on the night of the fire, with the Arnaults adding €200 million as Paris awoke the following morning. The Bettencourt family and its L’Oréal cosmetics firm chipped in €200 million later on Tuesday. Other French fortunes have followed suit (the Bouygues brothers offered up €10 million euros; Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière earmarked €10 million more to revive the building’s iconic spire).
Other firms pledged help in kind. Air France-KLM offered free flights for experts officially taking part in the rebuilding of Notre-Dame. The day after the blaze, the insurer Groupama offered 1,300 oak trees from the forests it owns in Normandy, on the assumption the cathedral’s ravaged roof would be rebuilt to match the 13th-century original. Steelmaker ArcelorMittal on Thursday offered up steel. Saint-Gobain has offered its glasswork expertise.
Books, videogames, cartoons
Publishers of certain French-language editions of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”, which shot to the top of bestseller lists after the tragedy, have pledged to donate the proceeds.
French video game maker Ubisoft, whose Assassin’s Creed Unity includes a faithful digital reproduction of Notre-Dame, promised €500,000 to the cause
Abroad, Apple chief Tim Cook pledged an unspecified sum and the Walt Disney Company, which turned Hugo’s Hunchback into a 1996 animated feature, said it would put up $5 million. The University of Notre Dame promised another $100,000.
An Olympic effort
The International Olympic Committee said it would give €500,000 to boost the chances of meeting French President Emmanuel Macron’s five-year rebuild goal, with Paris slated to host the summer Games in five years’ time. “The objective of completing this reconstruction in time for Paris 2024 will be extra motivation for us all,” IOC President Thomas Bach wrote in a letter to the organisers.
In Hungary, the city of Szeged, population 160,000, said it would donate €10,000 in gratitude for a donation from the City of Paris after a flood devastated the city south of Budapest killing 160 people in 1879.
Still, the astronomical pledges from conglomerates, billionaires and government authorities the world over have not discouraged individual donors from stepping forward en masse. The Fondation du Patrimoine, or French Heritage Foundation, had collected €13.1 million in donations from individuals by late Wednesday. It is one of four organisations the French government has certified to take donations, alongside the Fondation de France, the Fondation Notre-Dame de Paris and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
Scam artists at work
The Fondation du Patrimoine issued a warning on Wednesday that fraudsters are seeking to profit from the torrent of generosity after the inferno. “A number of scams have been flagged to us both in France and abroad,” the organisation said Wednesday, saying any phone, mail or e-mail appeals aren’t coming from the foundation. “All of these initiatives are fraudulent.”
Taxman lends a hand
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced an extra fiscal incentive for individual donors, bumping the usual tax break for such donations to 75 percent, up from 66 percent, for gifts up to €1,000.
Gilles Carrez, the conservative lawmaker who reports to the French lower house’s Finance Committee on heritage spending matters, deplored the fact that exemptions meant taxpayers would be saddled with the lion’s share of reconstruction costs. “Out of nearly €700 million [pledged Tuesday], nearly €420 million will be financed by the state, by way of the 2020 budget,” Carrez told Le Monde.
The MEDEF employers’ union, for its part, put out a statement on Thursday noting that, since Notre-Dame Cathedral belongs to the state, which serves as its own insurer for the building, all of the rebuilding costs would fall to the state anyway. “Every donation, even tax exempt at 60 percent, is therefore a 40 percent savings for the state on the amount given,” it said. In short, since no one would suggest leaving the emblematic landmark in ruin, every little contribution helps.
Some rich donors, meanwhile — amid mounting controversy over their motivations as well as the hit to taxpayers – said they would forgo the fiscal favours attached to giving. The Pinault family said as much Wednesday and JCDecaux followed suit Thursday. LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault told a shareholder meeting on Thursday that his family holding company was not eligible for a tax break and that his firm had reached the ceiling for such benefits.
“There’s some pettiness and jealousy in the air, instead of people thinking about the general interest,” Arnault said, responding to criticism over his pledges. “In many other countries we’d be congratulated.”
Backlash
Indeed, in a country that has seen 22 consecutive Saturdays of Yellow Vest protests partly in the name of income inequality, the backlash to such spontaneous largesse is audible.
“In one click, 200 million, 100 million. That shows the inequality which we regularly denounce in this country,” CGT union chief Philippe Martinez said Wednesday. “If they can give tens of millions to rebuild Notre-Dame, then they should stop telling us there is no money to help with the social emergency [in France].”
On BFMTV, Ingrid Levavasseur, one of the early figureheads of the Yellow Vest movement, slammed “the inertia of the big conglomerates in the face of social misery when they prove their capacity for mobilising ‘crazy cash’ for Notre-Dame in a single night”.
Culture Minister Franck Riester responded to the controversy: “This pointless debate consists of saying ‘it’s too much money for Notre-Dame even though there are needs elsewhere’ – of course there’s a need for money for the social system, for health, the fight against climate change,” Riester told RMC radio. “But let’s leave this extraordinary show of generosity to run its course.”
Meanwhile, the media personality who Macron charged with overseeing the influx of funds has pointed out that restoring the cathedral will bring France’s unique savoir-faire to bear and that the funds raised will save métiers and create jobs. “When will people understand that stones nourish men? For goodness’ sake, all of these professions would disappear!” Stéphane Bern told BFMTV. “Opposing old stones to men is ridiculous!”
Observers further afield took note of the discrepancy in action over Notre-Dame and causes like climate change or justice for the victims of London’s deadly 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg made the analogy in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday. “Yesterday, the whole world witnessed with sadness and despair the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris, but Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. I hope it has strong foundations and I hope we have strong foundations, but I’m not so sure.” Evoking the panic needed when one’s house is on fire, Thunberg told the assembled lawmakers, “Our house is falling apart and yet nothing is happening. We’ll have to switch to cathedral mode. I ask you to wake up and do what is necessary.”
Knock-on effects
The sweeping breadth of fundraising for Notre-Dame did indirectly bring attention and inspire knock-on generosity for three US churches recently ravaged by arson.
As Twitter users suggested that US President Donald Trump and US Vice-President Mike Pence appeared more interested in Notre-Dame than in the three Louisiana churches attended predominantly by African American worshippers and torched by a white suspect three weeks ago, a social media campaign urged people to give.
Supporters tweeted nods to the French cathedral blaze to encourage help century-old churches an ocean away.
Among them was Hillary Clinton, who tweeted: “As we hold Paris in our hearts today, let’s also send some love to our neighbours in Louisiana.”
Donors responded: Pledges for the Louisiana churches spiked to $1.5 million on Wednesday night, at least quintupling the money gathered over the previous week.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS and AP)
19, April 2019
Southern Cameroons Crisis: EU Parliament Pushes Yaounde to the Wall 0
Yaounde is under pressure and the pressure is coming from an unlikely source. Its usual allies are slowly jumping ship and this spells a disaster for a government that is on its last leg. The European Union has sent a tough message to Yaounde and sources at the Unity Palace say the bad news is keeping Palace’s occupants awake all night.
Though the French are still solidly behind the corrupt regime in Yaounde, Mr. Paul Biya, the country’s long serving president, knows that the tides are turning and turning very fast. The EU’s rhetoric is gradually changing and EU parliamentarians are not happy with the way the Yaounde government has handled the Southern Cameroons crisis that has put the country in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
For more than two years, the Yaounde government thought it had many allies and with such a played out mindset, it has gone about killing its own citizens, especially in the North West and South West regions.
But this week’s discussion of Cameroon in the EU Parliament has clearly revealed that Yaounde has no allies and its hopes of continuing to ride roughshod over the opposition have been dashed . Speaker after speaker at the EU Parliament only lambasted Mr. Biya’s long rule that is collapsing from within.
The EU Parliamentarians also pointed out that the mind-blowing human rights abuses in the country only spoke to the desperation of a regime that has overstayed its welcome.
The speakers clearly indicated that the EU had the means and resources that could bring down the gerontocracy in Yaounde. EU parliamentarians want to use their influence to mount pressure on Mr. Biya who has rejected all calls for an inclusive dialogue.
The EU might have been quiet for a long time, but its members have now decided to speak out and to call on France, the only big nation still supporting Mr. Biya, to take the appropriate steps that should lead to a peaceful and inclusive dialogue that the Yaounde government has rejected for years.
While EU Parliamentarians acknowledged that Cameroon was a strategic partner in the fight against Boko Haram, they also pointed out that good friends should also be reprimanded when they are straying into violence and irresponsibility.
The Cameroon government, they said, had used the fight against terrorism to stifle genuine political opposition. They stressed that in prosecuting its war against religious extremists in the country’s northern part, the Biya regime had committed despicable acts of atrocities that must be condemned.
They pointed to the killing of a woman and her children by government forces, adding that the videos of those killings did not show that those killed were terrorists. They also condemned the army’s reckless and wanton killing of innocent civilians in the two English-speaking regions of the country.
The EU Parliamentarians regretted the fact that the government had not displayed any remorse for the chaos it had created in the country, adding that the EU should help the thousands of Cameroonian refugees who are scattered all over Nigeria and those who have been internally displaced by irresponsible army soldiers.
The EU Parliament clearly backed the U.S. decision to curtail military aid to the Cameroon government because of its awful human rights records. They constantly urged the beleaguered Yaounde government to release Professor Maurice Kamto and his supporters, pointing out that Mr. Biya had been in power for far too long and should start thinking of transferring power to a younger and more democratic leader.
These unsettling messages from the EU Parliament come on the heels of the acerbic criticism by the U.S. Under-secretary of State for African Affairs, Tibor Nagy, who has openly congratulated Cameroon’s Diaspora for the effective public relations job it has done to bring the world’s attention to the unfortunate civil war that is playing out in Cameroon. Mr. Nagy recently said that he was looking forward to profound change in Cameroon following the collapse of Omar El-Bechir’s government in Sudan.
It should be recalled that Americans and Canadians have been working behind the scenes to get Mr. Biya out of power, though they have not produced any real results. With the EU now on board, it is clear that the coalition against the ruthlessly inefficient Yaounde government is widening and the collapse of Africa’s longest serving leader is imminent.
The Biya regime has bitten more than it can chew. It has overplayed its hands and it is now running out of luck. The multiple conflicts in which it is involved will very soon relegate it to the ash heap of history.
In the northern part of the country, Boko Haram is still a threat and the government’s reckless killing of innocent civilians there has only pushed young northerners into the arms of the religious sect and this is making it hard for it to win the war.
In the two English-speaking regions of the country, it is clear that there will never be any outright military victory for the Yaounde government despite its adoption of a scorch earth policy. Many Southern Cameroonians have been killed, but the will and determination of the people and fighters remain intact. Southern Cameroonians are resolute and they hold that co-habitation with a violent Francophone regime is impossible and that only separation will solve their problems.
The government’s mismanagement of the situation has radicalized even the most level-headed Southern Cameroonian. Even chiefs and parliamentarians have begun displaying their disagreement with the government strategy of killing all young adult males in the North West and South West regions.
In a dramatic turn of events in the country’s senate, the eldest member of the upper house, Chief Victor Mukete, put his frustration and disagreement with the government on display. He castigated the government, decrying the government’s insistence on addressing the issues only through military violence.
Chief Mukete who is not being taken seriously in the English-speaking regions had however made a point – Southern Cameroonians, even those in government disagree with the government’s strategy and if that does not change, they will jump ship.
The message is clear. Even within the military, there are many dissenting voices and this is causing the government sleepless nights. With the government facing a flood of opposition both within and from outside, it is clear that it will be changing its strategy in the days ahead for fear of being chased out of power, especially as rumor is swirling that Americans could arm Southern Cameroonians for them to head to French Cameroon so as to put an end to the political mess in Yaounde.
There is fear that all these unfortunate circumstances could connive to unleash a people power revolution in Cameroon. The north is already boiling. The English-speaking regions are in a civil war, while in the east of the country, Central African rebels have stepped up their attacks on government forces and refugees. The conditions for a long-lasting chaos seem to be in place in Cameroon.
The world does not want to see Cameroon go down that path. Their best solution is to elbow Mr. Biya out of power and there are currently talks between the great powers on how to achieve this goal without putting the entire region in a tight spot.
While the French have publicly displayed their support for the failing Yaounde government, they are however gradually conceding that Mr. Biya clearly belongs to the past. They hold that if he is not replaced, they could lose their interest in the region.
Mr. Biya is therefore on the ropes and given his age, he is clearly out of steam. The pressure is mounting and Yaounde is on the wall. The days ahead will be crucial, especially as Prof. Kamto’s supporters at home and abroad are scoring more points.
Another people power revolution is surely going to take place in Africa and this time around, it will be in Cameroon, as all the ingredients are already in place. The world will surely be playing spectator soon to the fall of another reckless and ruthless dictator.
By Kingsley Betek and Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai in the United Kingdom.