COLUMN ONE : U.S. Inmate Has a Hold on Europe’s Power Elite : Politicians, philosophers seek to save convicted killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, saying his case shows America’s racism and the barbarism of capital punishment.

When Marie-Agnes Combesque, a tireless campaigner against racism, arrived at her apartment building here recently, she found police on a random hunt for terrorists, demanding identity papers from all the Arab-looking residents. Combesque, being white, walked through without receiving a second glance.

But it wasn’t the injustice outside her door that inspired this French writer’s strongest passions. Rather, it was a case more than 3,500 miles away, where Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African American, sits on Death Row hoping for a reprieve and a new trial.

While racism may be easy enough to spot in Europe, thousands of intellectuals, writers and politicians have found it easier to identify--and even more reprehensible--far across the Atlantic, in Pennsylvania.

The French, the Germans, the Italians and even the British have rallied to Abu-Jamal’s cause, staging street protests, signing petitions and dispatching thousands of letters and faxes to the trial judge, Pennsylvania’s governor and President Clinton.

On the front page of the respected Paris daily Le Monde, French philosopher Jacques Derrida trashed Pennsylvania as a “drunkenly racist state . . . that dares to call itself the birthplace of the U.S. Constitution while every day violating the letter and spirit of that document.”

President Jacques Chirac even ordered his ambassador in Washington to do “everything he can within American law” to spare Abu-Jamal’s life. And when a bomb went off at a Citibank branch in Athens recently, a previously unknown guerrilla group claimed responsibility, saying the attack was a protest over Abu-Jamal.

Why has a man convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer 14 years ago, who is now one of 3,000 inmates facing death in the United States, become the summer’s cause celebre in Europe?

The answers to that question say plenty about the modern passions and predilections of European writers and intellectuals, always in search of a noble cause. But they also reflect a deep feeling on this side of the Atlantic that the United States is, fundamentally, a racist land and that capital punishment is a barbaric practice.

Why Abu-Jamal? One reason is the man himself. He is a writer and former free-lance journalist, unquestioned badges of honor in countries such as France. His recent book of essays, “Live From Death Row,” though still available only in English, is popular in European literary circles.

He also has political credentials, having once been a member of the Black Panthers, a radical movement that still fascinates European intellectuals. The view widely held among Europe’s elite is that Abu-Jamal faces a death sentence because he holds political beliefs unpopular with white America.

‘Intellectual in Action’

“In Abu-Jamal, you have the ‘intellectual in action,’ and the French really admire that,” said a Western diplomat in Paris. “So you’ve got someone with a bit of an intellectual aura. He’s black, and that is a factor. And they believe his death sentence is a political thing. He’s the little guy, the underdog fighting the big political power.”

Originally set to die by lethal injection Aug. 17, Abu-Jamal has been granted a stay of execution pending legal appeals. A hearing on his motion for a reprieve and a retrial is scheduled to resume Monday.

Defense lawyers say Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial because the judge displayed open contempt for him, and they contend police suppressed evidence in the case. They have presented a new witness, who testified that Abu-Jamal did not fire a shot.

Prosecutors have questioned the credibility of that new witness, a prison inmate whose testimony contradicts two other eyewitnesses. And the authorities, backed by local police organizations, contend that the first trial was scrupulously fair.

Abu-Jamal’s cause has been embraced in the United States by writers and entertainers from William Styron to Ed Asner. But, as Le Monde recently observed, “the mobilization in favor of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the United States hasn’t reached the level found in Europe.”

“Why are we so concerned about this case?” said Combesque, a leader of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship, a French intellectual movement. “It’s because the United States is, unfortunately, the future of the world. And I don’t want to live in a society that resembles the United States.

“Separate districts for white and black, poor and rich, like in America?” she said. “It’s silly. That’s why this case speaks to people like me.”

It is, in fact, people like Combesque--the intellectual and political elite--who are behind the Old World campaign to save Abu-Jamal’s life. The average European, while not opposed to the cause, has shown little passion for the drive.

Opposition to capital punishment fuels much of Abu-Jamal’s support in Western Europe, where the death penalty no longer exists and where the rate of violent crime is much lower than in the United States.

Even though opinion polls in France, for example, regularly show that a majority favors capital punishment, the intellectual and political elite is nearly unanimous in its opposition.

“There is this sense that we Americans haven’t reached their level of evolution,” said a U.S. official from Washington. “It’s a way of remaining superior when the United States challenges them on other fronts.”

In Germany, long a critic of the death penalty, Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel wrote the governor of Pennsylvania, asking for a reprieve for Abu-Jamal. Noted authors such as Gunter Grass have signed petitions, which still circulate in bars, movie theaters and bookstores, demanding that Pennsylvania not permit “the legal murder of this courageous voice of the rights of black and poor people.”

In Italy, members of Parliament passed a resolution urging the U.S. government to stop the execution.

Support for Abu-Jamal in France ranges from those who, on principle, oppose capital punishment to the smaller group that contends Abu-Jamal was railroaded onto Death Row by police, prosecutors and a judge angered over his radical black views.

“Mumia, in my view, is innocent,” said Combesque, who has met Abu-Jamal in prison and corresponded with him for several years. “But to do an international campaign we have to work with many other groups that don’t share our political views. So everybody agrees he should get a new trial.”

During an international meeting of writers in Paris in August, Derrida charged that Pennsylvania “is trying to beat up on a man just because he was a member of the Black Panthers and an independent and courageous journalist.”

“Even if we weren’t persuaded by thousands of facts that justice has been violated,” Derrida said, “we would be opposed, on principle, to police torture, prison torture and the death penalty.”

Disdain Is Palpable

Indeed, disdain for the American judicial system is palpable in Europe. “Prosecutors didn’t even seek the death penalty against O.J. Simpson,” Combesque said. “Why not? That was nothing but a question of class. He was famous and rich.”

Many criticize the American practice of electing judges, arguing that judges should be appointed to prevent them from making decisions based merely on popularity with the voters. (Asked how a state-appointed judge could rule impartially on matters involving the state, one French activist admitted: “It’s a problem.”)

Also underlying the support for Abu-Jamal is a strident anti-American feeling. In Europe, and especially in France, the United States is viewed, often by the same people, with both fascination and revulsion.

“We French talk very often about the great open spaces in America, the vibrant people and the American passion for discovery,” said Pascal Noblet, a sociologist who heads a government office fighting poverty in France. “But people quickly can become hostile on the question of politics. There is this idea that, because I am French, I must be anti-American. It’s a bit of an ideological reflex.”

That dim view of America helps explain why the French Communist Party is one of Abu-Jamal’s most vocal supporters, seeing in his case all that is wrong with market-driven democracy. But joining the Communists are a number of French intellectuals and writers, sometimes dubbed Left Bank intellectuals, whose view of race relations in the United States hasn’t changed much in recent decades.

“Many French, and not only the left, have a deformed vision of the situation facing American blacks today,” Noblet said. “They think that the conditions for blacks haven’t changed at all. And that is an idea that remains very strong.”

For others, it is Abu-Jamal’s radical roots that make him a sympathetic figure. As a member of the Black Panthers and an outspoken supporter of the black separatist group MOVE in Philadelphia, Abu-Jamal has sterling credentials for French intellectuals. They have likened him to such left-wing luminaries as Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American couple executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union.

Of course, racism exists in France and other European countries. Right-wing radicals have attacked immigrants and blacks in France, Italy and Germany. Everyday racism exists too, and people denied a job or apartment in France because of their race have no legal recourse.

But there has been little outcry over such domestic cases. When the conservative government passed laws making it more difficult for foreigners to marry French people and become citizens, the left complained, but with none of the fervor reserved for Abu-Jamal.

Similarly, no one protested when the French police, in an effort to stave off Islamic terrorist acts last year, won new powers to detain and search people. Everyone in France knows that those most likely to be checked are Arabs and blacks. But most whites have looked the other way, believing that the terrorist threat warrants the exceptional measures.

One reason the French find Abu-Jamal’s case so clear-cut is that the issue of race is seen very differently in France than in the United States. While ethnic groups in America often strive to hold on to their cultural identities, many in France see that as a divisive practice that allows the government to repress minorities.

Ignoring Race Issues

The French solution is to ignore race. When someone becomes a citizen, the French like to point out, race ceases to be an issue. But, increasingly, ethnic groups in France are maintaining their identities, living together in their own areas and becoming the focus of troubling social problems.

Many here blame growing racial troubles on the poor example set by the United States. And to them, Abu-Jamal’s fate is linked to the future of Europe.

“Of course, it’s always easier to criticize another society,” Combesque acknowledged. “But, in the case of Mumia, American justice has a direct effect on what will happen in France in the coming years.”

Christian Retzlaff of the Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.