French press review 25 May 2011

Both sides are to blame for atrocities in Côte d'Ivoire, human rights campaigners say. Sarkozy wants morality on the web and government to enforce it. Will the government's bonus proposal drive businesses to the wall? And why are French women paid less than French men?

Côte d'Ivoire makes the front page of today's Communist L'Humanité. The headline reads "Ouattara and the United Nations stand accused".

The story is based on an Amnesty International report which says both sides in the recent struggle for the presidency, that is, supporters of Laurent Gbagbo and partisans of Alassane Ouattara, committed crimes while UN peacekeepers and French soldiers stood by and did nothing.

L'Humanité interviews Stephan Oberreit, the head of Amnesty in France, who accepts that the position of the UN peacekeepers was a difficult one, but that questions have to be asked about the failure of a 10,000-strong force to protect civilians.

Amnesty says that members of Charles Blé Goudé's Young Patriots militia murdered people in front of regular army troops.

The report alleges that pro-Ouattara members of the FRCI, or Republican Forces of Cote d'Ivoire, murdered members of the Guéré community, traditionally seen as supporters of Laurent Gbagbo.

Amnesty International says presidernt Ouattara's silence on what happened in the Carrefour district of Duékoué in March, where at least 800 Gbagbo supporters were massacred, is a sure guarantee of future violence in Côte d'Ivoire.

There will have to be justice, with both sides answering for their crimes, if the country is to move forward.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is on the front page of right-wing Le Figaro.

He was speaking to the movers and shakers in the world of the internet yesterday, and he wants the world wide web to become a more moral place, with more respect for the rights of those who create copyright material and, wait for it, more government control.

The 1,500 delegates at the Paris forum on new communications must have wondered if they were in China, or the Stone Age.

Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, wasn't long about bringing the French leader up to date.

Yes, there are problems, admitted the Googling guru, but they can be solved by technology.

That's the trouble with technocrats.They create the problems, then devise solutions, which generate more problems, more solutions, and so on, ad infinitum, like George Bernard Shaw's fleas.

Business daily Les Echos looks at what French businesses are doing about paying their workers the bonus related to company profits.

Understandably enough, the big wheels on the Paris Stock Exchange, up to the tops of their silk socks in surplus cash, have no problem about letting a few crumbs fall in the direction of the lower orders.

But small and medium operations, many of them already struggling to keep afloat, view the proposed legislation with scepticism. An opinion poll suggests that 62 per cent of the French think that the bonuses are a good idea.

Catholic La Croix tries to explain why women continue to be less well paid than men. Equality has been promised since 1946, but French women continue to earn an average of 25  per cent less than men.

New laws currently being considered by the French legal watchdog, the State Council, have disappointed activists as lacking in real sanctions and having more holes than my hiking socks. Real equality remains a long way off.