Two French Pilots

Captain Frederic Chifeau and Lt. Jose Souvignet from the French base and Nansi-Oche took off on Wednesday, August 30, in a Mirage 2000 fighter bomber and headed for Bosnia. Their job was to bomb targets near Pale as part of NATO's operation Deliberate Force. Someone was waiting for them with a shoulder launched Strela or Igla anti-aircraft missile. The Mirage released several magnesium flares to draw missiles away from the aircraft. The trick didn't work and the Mirage came down. Serb TV in Pale taped the whole thing along with the ejection by both flight crew and that was the last time the Frenchmen were seen.

Then an interesting situation arose: the Pale Serbs said immediately that they had captured both men and were holding them. The problem was that no one believed them: to date there have been various claims which later turned out to be false from Pale and Belgrade sources close to Pale.

The French Defence Ministry and Minister Charles Millon kept up a heroic silence for 20 days, voicing occasional indications that the pilots are alive and efforts were being made to rescue them. They didn't even release their names. French President Jacques Chirac phoned Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic asking him to mediate; however, FRY Foreign Minister Milan Milutinovic said during a visit to Paris on Thursday, September 21, that he had no idea about the fate of the two French officers.

That same day Millon told a closed session of the French Senate that the pilots were alive and most probably in the hands of the Bosnian Serbs. NATO tried three rescue operations but got nowhere.

Then last week a man speaking English went to the Paris weekly Paris Match with two photographs of the French officers leaning against Serb soldiers, which led to the conclusion that they were wounded.

When the defence ministry heard that, they released the pilots' names and their photographs before the weekly was published. Millon said the fate of the two pilots would resolved within the overall peace plan.

The whole story has an important political angle: the Bosnian Serbs, impressed by the media fuss raised by Bill Clinton over Scott O'Grady, thought the two Frenchmen would be a good bargaining chip in negotiations. They lost sight of two things: first, the French, like other Europeans, see their professional soldiers in a different light than the Americans ("they're paid to do that"); second, that President Chirac was recently elected to a seven year term unlike Clinton whose chair is rocking. That faulty assessment is being paid for by Captain Frederic Chifeau and Lt. Jose Souvignet; if everything had gone normally they would have been traded or released as a sign of good will with the mediation of Milosevic's special envoy ("My name is Jovica Stanisic") with a suitable media campaign. Now, the Serb side will make waves in the negotiations until they realize that Chirac is not as interested in the two pilots as much as the Bosnian Serbs think.