Dam put on hold

Lisbon – Prehistoric engravings received government backing as Prime Minister Antonio Guterres of Portugal announced a decision to put on hold the dam project threatening to submerge the carvings. The open-air rock drawings may date back as far as 20,000 years, but Mr Guterres said his government needs time to investigate their importance and value before deciding the future of the Foz Coa dam AP. No nude shame

Athens – Greece’s controversial first lady, Dimitra Papandreou, triggered a new political row after saying she felt no shame over nude pictures published of her sunbathing naked or frolicking with friends while topless, and she was considering running for office Reuter. TONY BARBER

Europe Editor
The German and French governments attempted yesterday to put European monetary union back on track and remove doubts created by political disputes in Germany and economic uncertainty in France. Chancellor Helmut Kohl told the German parliament that French participation was essential to the creation of a single currency, which was “not a Kohl game but a central pillar of German policy”.President Jacques Chirac, addressing the new French government appointed on Tuesday, underlined his reversal of economic priorities by promising a determined assault on the state budget deficit.France needs to reduce the deficit to 3 per cent of gross domestic product to qualify for the European Union’s planned launch of a single currency in 1999, but until two weeks ago Mr Chirac was laying more emphasis on the fight against unemployment.This contributed to instability in the franc as bankers questioned his commitment to spending cuts and hence to the 1999 single currency target date. Mr Chirac’s switch of economic course, given dramatic expression by the reshaping of his government this week after only six months in office, followed a decisive meeting with Mr Kohl in Bonn.The two leaders felt it necessary to pledge themselves anew to the 1999 timetable, set out in the Maastricht treaty, to prevent the delay or even collapse of the single currency project.

Mr Kohl, though personally committed to monetary union, has trouble on two fronts, with German public opinion sceptical about giving up the mark and the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) threatening to make the single currency a campaign issue in the next national elections in 1998.The SPD may pass a motion at its conference next week demanding tighter financial discipline than foreseen in Maastricht from countries hoping to join a single currency. SPD leaders have suggested monetary union should be delayed beyond 1999 rather than go ahead if the economic health of some countries remains in doubt.Such declarations are aimed at Germans worried that an all-European currency will prove weaker than the mark, but they go down badly with the European Commission and certain EU governments opposed to any tinkering with Maastricht. For example, Belgium feels it should join the single currency in 1999 because, even if its public debt is unlikely to fall in time to the required level of 60 per cent of GDP, there is a loophole in Maastricht that lets in a country if its debt or budget deficit is deemed to be heading in the right downward direction.By drawing attention to such escape clauses, the SPD seeks to imply that Mr Kohl’s government lacks the determination to protect German prosperity by insisting on European financial rectitude. Mr Kohl will not want to be seen as less firm than the SPD over which countries enter the single currency.However, this raises problems for EU members such as Italy and Spain, which are not seen in Germany as serious candidates for monetary union in 1999 but which, at least publicly, have yet to reach that humiliating conclusion themselves. As for Mr Chirac, forced to water down his election promise of slashing unemployment, now 11.4 per cent, it remains to be seen how patiently he will wear the economic straitjacket placed on him by the Maastricht timetable and Germany’s rigorous attitudes.. MARY DEJEVSKY

Paris
This evening 800 soldiers, carrying torches, will parade before the golden dome of Les Invalides in Paris, forming up into a giant cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the French Resistance.

This ceremony, too reminiscent for some of the torchlit extravaganzas of Hitler and Mussolini and derided by many younger French people as the sort of showy overcompensation for recent history that does France no credit, is how one part of the French army has chosen to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Charles de Gaulle.There will be other events: the now traditional memorial masses – two of them – in the small stone church at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises; the Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, leading a government and RPR (Gaullist) party delegation to the resting place of the party’s founder south-east of Paris.Jacques Chirac has not yet announced his participation, but he, too, may yet make the journey to Colombey.De Gaulle has returned to the French mainstream. “It took Francois Mitterrand for us to rediscover Charles de Gaulle,” wrote the French political philosopher, Andrei Glucksmann, shortly before this year’s French presidential election. His book, De Gaulle, where are you?, was a plea less for the revival of “Gaullism” than for the revival of de Gaulle.The directness of the title was arresting, even shocking, and the argument impassioned. De Gaulle, Glucksmann argued, was not a conformist, he was a revolutionary; it was by swimming against the tide, being true to himself and true to France, by daring to project grand ideas for France and the world, that he distinguished himself.With the election of Jacques Chirac, whose every election speech contained references to de Gaulle, French voters reclaimed a part of their heritage. After 14 years of Mitterrand’s internationalism, France’s younger generation in particular seemed interested in their Frenchness, and that meant – in part – Le General.Since the election six months ago, much has been said and written about the return of “Gaullism”. There was the preoccupation with national sovereignty, dignity and world status that may have lain at the root of the President’s decision to resume nuclear testing.

There was the willingness to defy the world that was implicit in the decision and in Mr Chirac’s reaction to protests. There was the idealistic one-nationism that encouraged Mr Chirac to believe that he could, and should, heal what he saw as growing social divisions in France – and that voters would be prepared to pick up the bill. And there was the underlying idea that all this was for the sake of a “certain idea of France” – the phrase of de Gaulle’s so often quoted by Mr Chirac – that linked foreign and domestic policy into a supposedly coherent whole.As the 25th anniversary of de Gaulle’s death approached, however, that conventional but often mobile and elusive “Gaullism” has slipped into the background, to be replaced by the tall figure of the general himself: dignified patriot, traditional paterfamilias, a countryman at heart who saw power as a duty, not an opportunity. In a recent opinion poll, 57 per cent of those asked said they thought Gaullism was an outdated concept; 55 per cent, however, regarded de Gaulle himself as a positive figure.Returning to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and the de Gaulles’ country house, the Boisserie, French writers have remarked on the smallness, the modesty, the ascetism of the general This is a corner, one said, of the “eternal France”.

De Gaulle would not return to power without being “recalled”. When he had his house rebuilt after the war, he added a turret in brick, not local stone, “to save money”, and disguised the difference with a creeper.At home, he would drink only one glass of wine with dinner; an aperitif and digestif on Sundays. Mme de Gaulle did her shopping in the local town, Bar-sur-Aube, and the de Gaulles spent the evenings quietly, he writing his memoirs, she reading or knitting.When he died suddenly on 9 November 1970, Mme de Gaulle insisted that their son, Philippe, publish his will at once to ensure that the funeral took place at Colombey, and did not become a state occasion in Paris. “It is embarrassing for them to have a standard and a deadline, which many primary schools are unable to meet.