Crisis management the French way

As the office’s security coordinator, I went to a security meeting at the French Embassy yesterday. A right mess, chaotic, no agenda, long anecdotes from expats who have lived here for a longer time about earlier evacuations. N’importe quoi. In spite of his wise words on the occasion of his departure last week, the Ambassador was his old unpleasant self on one of his last working days, interrupting his Embassy colleagues, telling us all not to count on the army for evacuating our families, concluding after a long monologue that “there really is no solution” and that those around the table (evacuation group heads) should really ‘start reflecting’ about solutions themselves. When somebody asked the ambassador the perfectly reasonable question how, as a group head, he was supposed to call about 60 people if trouble occurred and the mobile phone network was almost sure to be either down or saturated, he told him curtly not to ‘polemicise’.

I have nothing against self-reliance, and in fact feel more comfortable in this situation not to depend on others’ lousy planning. Nevertheless I was dumbfounded by the whole thing. The Ambassador’s attitude was almost cynical, and with plentiful military, military police and police staff around the table, I found the conclusion to leave it all to non-professional civilians, almost obscene. The actual evacuation scheme dates back to 2002, and I am sure it needs updating. One of the longer standing expats I referred to, a lady restaurant owner, started waving her 2002 papers in my face to show me that instructions did exist, so if I didn’t have them I could only blame myself for it. Silly cow, I won’t dine at her place again.

So whether I like it or not (I am beginning to like it a bit, actually), my security tasks are becoming ever more serious. I made an inventory of our radio needs: we’re 90% undersupplied, with an overburdened colleague at HQ single-handedly dealing with demands from more than a hundred representations all over the world. The situation between Chad and Sudan does buy us some credibility at HQ though, and I am shamelessly exploiting this fact while cajoling them into sending us the bloody radios for which we have been asking for more than a year.

Very embarrassing: our security measures only apply to expats, not to local colleagues, apart from the rape kit I talked about in an earlier post. I actually think we should change this and provide at least for some security measures (e.g. right to seek refuge within the walled premises of the office), but the boss seems adamant on this point. I’ll raise it again in the near future.

Speaking about local colleagues: A. and I invited three of them to dinner last weekend. It was one of the most pleasant dinner parties we have had recently. My three colleagues said this was the first time they had ever been invited on an individual basis at home at a senior expatriate colleague’s home, and they were very appreciative about it. There is something unhealthy about the invisible divide between locals and expats in our office, even though on the surface relations are normal. But scratch a little further and there’s considerable mistrust. Not always because of the expats though, some local personnel are very quick indeed in claiming infringements, real or perceived, on their rights or dignity. On the other hand I’ve always found my Italian colleague overly suspicious of many local staff.

My tailor-made manual to our budgetary aid has taken weeks to trickle through to the government. Then, yesterday, the boss was invited by the Prime Minister, and I myself by the Vice Minister of Finance (the Minister is on mission of course, though apparently for better reasons that I thought). We both had to explain the letter from beginning to end, and I was certain that the Deputy Minister hadn’t even seriously read it…. We’re talking about a 12 million euros gift, for heaven’s sake!

On the other hand the Deputy Minister did have a good reason for the late arrival of the payment file for the 4 million euro disbursement we are preparing. Tthe man normally in charge of it at the Treasury had just been put in prison for embezzlement of state money in 2004. This was his third time, by the way. In the past he had someway managed to get his job at the Ministry back at least once after similar crimes. Employers here are a lot more forgiving when you’re a relative of the Head of State…