PARIS, 20 June — The French small farmers’ leader and anti-globalization campaigner, Jose Bove, went to prison in style yesterday.
Amid a media caravan reminiscent of a slow-motion Tour de France, he drove the lead tractor in a procession of tractors from his farm near Millau in the southern hills of the Massif Central to a jail near Montpellier, 60 miles away.
At the end of a seven-hour journey, punctuated with political demonstrations and media declarations, Bove gave himself up to the prison authorities. He has to serve a much delayed three-month sentence for organizing the desruction of a half-built McDonald’s restaurant in Millau three years ago.
Bove is a far-left politician-turned-sheep farmer who has become one of the most visible leaders of the international movement against globalization in the last three years. He announced that he would go on hunger strike in jail, to protest against the "anti-social" policies of the newly elected French center-right government.
There had been a widespread expectation that President Jacques Chirac would pardon Bove, whose sentence was deferred until after the presidential and parliamentary elections of the last eight weeks. Instead, the small farmers’ leader with a drooping moustache — a style now favored by men all over rural France — was informed that he must start his sentence this week.
Bove’s supporters were attempting yesterday to portray him as the first left-wing martyr to the "authoritarian" attitudes of the new government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
The Socialists, heavily defeated in the second round of the parliamentary election last Sunday, said that they had evidence that the Raffarin government was planning an amnesty for crimes associated with political fund-raising. Depending on its wording, this could end the half-dozen investigations into corruption at the Paris town hall when President Chirac was mayor up to 1995.
Socialist leaders in Paris, and Bove supporters on yesterday’s tractor rally, said such an amnesty would contrast sharply with the insistence of the Raffarin government that Bove must serve his sentence for his "political" attack on McDonald’s.
In August 1999, Bove — then the relatively unknown leader of the small farmers’ union, the Confederation Paysanne — led an attack by 200 sheep farmers on a half-built McDonald’s at Millau. They smashed up the building with sledge-hammers and crow-bars, causing damage estimated at £70,000.
Bove was protesting against a tax imposed on European luxury foods and drinks by the United States in retaliation for the refusal of the EU to import American beef reared with artifical, growth-boosting hormones. Among the foods taxed by Washington was Roquefort cheese, made from ewe’s milk in the Millau area by sheep farmers, including Bove.
McDonald’s, picked on as a symbol of American power and global reach, had nothing to do with the row. It uses only French beef in France.
Bove was briefly jailed at the time, projecting him into the national, and international, media spotlight. He has never looked back, establishing himself as a patron saint of all anti-globalist and left-wing causes, turning up everywhere from Seattle to Palestine in the last three years.
He was convicted and given a jail sentence for destruction of property after a trial in Millau in July 2000.
Before climbing into the cab of his tractor yesterday, Bove said: "Is is is normal to go to prison for this? It’s not a man they are sending to jail but a movement." (The Independent)
