France Under Fire for Aid to Habash

Opposition leaders called Friday for Prime Minister Edith Cresson and senior ministers in her government to resign for their responsibility in a controversial decision to allow ailing Palestinian guerrilla leader George Habash to come to France for medical treatment.

At the same time, attorneys for Habash--contending that the leader of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had been “trapped” illegally in France after having been promised medical asylum--demanded that Habash be permitted to leave immediately to seek treatment in another country.

“The decision allowing him to come was made at the highest level of the French government,” said Antoine Comte, a French attorney hired by the Palestine Liberation Organization to represent Habash. “He did not come to this country incognito. They knew who he was.”

The hard-line Palestinian leader’s admission to a French Red Cross hospital here Wednesday after his late-night arrival from Tunis, Tunisia, sparked a political controversy that has resulted in the forced resignations of Georgina Dufoix, president of the French Red Cross and a close adviser to President Francois Mitterrand, and three senior civil servants.

Habash, 65, whose PFLP is a radical faction of Yasser Arafat’s PLO, was ordered placed under police custody Thursday by a French judge seeking to interrogate the Palestinian leader about several terrorism-related incidents, including the 1986 discovery of an arms cache in Fontainebleau Forest near Paris.

Habash is remembered in France as the man who engineered the 1976 hijacking of an Air France jetliner in an episode resolved by Israeli commandos at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. His Damascus-based PFLP is also believed to have been involved in a 1978 terrorist machine-gun attack in a waiting room at Paris Orly Airport in which a French policeman and a civilian were killed.

French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere said he would not attempt to question Habash, who graduated as a medical doctor from the American University of Beirut, until a team of French physicians had examined him and found him fit enough to respond.

Helda Habash, the PFLP leader’s wife, told Radio France International on Friday that she would not let the doctors examine her husband. And Ibrahim Souss, the PLO representative in Paris, said Habash will refuse to answer French police questions.

“He refuses to be questioned by anyone,” Souss said during a French radio interview. The large Red Cross hospital where Habash is a patient was surrounded by police barricades and put under heavy guard Thursday.

Meanwhile, beleaguered French Prime Minister Cresson found herself under mounting pressure Friday to fire Interior Minister Philippe Marchand, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas or resign herself to atone for the “mistake.” Government officials say that permission for Habash to come to France was made at a senior level in the French bureaucracy without directly involving a member of the Cresson Cabinet.

However, that explanation seemed to satisfy no one as even members of the governing Socialist Party joined the ranks of those attacking the decision to admit Habash, described by Socialist Social Affairs Minister Jean-Louis Bianco as “one of the masters of international terrorism who must answer to the courts for a whole series of affairs.”

Francois Bayrou, secretary of the opposition Union for French Democracy (UDF) party, said: “Nobody who knows how government decisions are taken will believe for a moment that these decisions were limited to conversations among civil servants.”

“France’s honor will not be washed clean,” said UDF Member of Parliament Philippe de Villiers, “until Mrs. Cresson, Mr. Dumas and Mr. Marchand have resigned.”

On the French Concorde aircraft that transported him to New York for Friday’s U.N. Security Council summit meeting, President Mitterrand reportedly told reporters that those making the decision to admit Habash “are all fools.”

“They only thought of medical and humanitarian issues,” television reporter Dominique Bomberger quoted Mitterrand as saying. “They didn’t think of the political consequences.”

Another element of the Habash controversy involved the seriousness of his condition.

He was flown to Paris on the basis of a facsimile request from the PLO Red Crescent Society to the French Red Cross, saying Habash had suffered a stroke and possible cerebral hemorrhage. But television footage of his arrival in Paris showed him walking unaided off the aircraft, something doctors here said was not possible if his condition were as serious as described.

With his lawyers now pressing authorities to let him leave, Habash was described by his wife and visitors as being in good condition, ready to travel.