Frenchman Jose Bove, an anti-globalization activist who became a folk hero for ransacking a McDonald's that sprang up near his sheep farm, was arrested again on Tuesday - this time in the West Bank, while protesting against the Israeli treatment of his fellow farmers.
Bove, 47, lifted his hands and flashed a peace sign to the crowd as he was put into an Israeli police van along with at least seven others during a demonstration in the town of El Khader to protest the closure of a Palestinian road, according to a report by the Associated Press.
More than 100 French, Israeli and Palestinian demonstrators say the road was closed to Palestinian traffic to allow the settlement of Efrat to expand over two more hilltops.
As police and soldiers pushed them back and tossed tear gas canisters at them, the demonstrators shouted, "No violence." They carried banners saying, "Stop the Israeli occupation" and "Settlers get out," and waved Palestinian flags, said the agency.
"We are here to protest, because this land belongs to the (Palestinian) village," Bove said. "That's why we are here - coming from France to say we are farmers protesting for our rights, and these villagers are farmers also, and we are protesting with them to defend their land."
Bove became a symbol of anti-globalization activists in France and abroad when he led the August 1999 attack on a McDonald's restaurant under construction at the foot of a hill in Millau, in southern France.
Bove, head of the French farmers' union, was sentenced to three months in jail for the McDonald's raid.
In 1998, Bove challenged an ultimatum to leave Brazil, according to a report by AFP then.
According to the agency, he was “in hot water” for leading an invasion by 1,300 Brazilian farmers of plantations run by US biotechnology firm Monsanto. They uprooted genetically-modified corn and soya bean plants, burned seeds and destroyed documents in the company's offices.
His initiative at an anti-globalization forum in Brazil -- an alternative to the annual gathering of the world's political and business elite taking place in Davos, Switzerland -- was another PR success.
Bove has become an instantly recognizable figure, with his extravagant moustache and pipe-smoking habit, popping up wherever there is an ecological axe to be ground.
He has traveled the world lecturing anyone who will listen on the evils of globalization and genetically-modified crops and has earned the nickname 'Asterix' -- after a French comic strip character -- for his determination to repel alien invaders in the form of foreign capitalist concerns.
A sheep-farmer and producer of the celebrated Roquefort cheese, he has become the standard-bearer of the fight against new economic and gastronomic imperialism.
His appearances at anti-globalization gatherings in Seattle and Davos shot him to fame and his conviction for the trashing of a McDonald's fast-food restaurant in his hometown of Millau served only to reinforce his reputation as a swashbuckling resistance hero.
A crowd of 30,000 turned out in Millau to support Bove when he and nine colleagues from his radical farmers' union, the Peasant Confederation, went on trial over the McDonald's escapade.
Popular French singer Francis Cabrel has described Bove as "one of the last courageous, natural, honest voices left in a world where the rest are tarnished by compromise."
Ironically, for a man who epitomizes the virtues of the traditional French son-of-the-soil, Bove speaks faultless English, learned when his bourgeois parents spent four years in the United States.
His story is typical of many of the 1968 generation of French students who rose up against middle class conservatism, turning his back on the city in search of a simpler life on the land.
In the 1970s he and his wife Alice were among the leaders of a successful campaign to defend the starkly beautiful Larzac plateau outside Millau against plans to extend a military camp there.
In 1987, he helped set up the Peasant Confederation, whose aim has been to champion the cause of small producers against the interests of big business and agricultural barons.
With his honed sense of publicity Bove once organized the ploughing of the park under the Eiffel Tower in the center of Paris to protest EU farm policies.
In 1995 he was aboard the ship Rainbow Warrior in the south Pacific to protest France's resumption of nuclear tests. Three years later he was convicted of destroying a consignment of genetically-modified maize.
In his statement to a French court during a trial on charges of destroying the genetically modified maize, he said:
“Today, I am present in this court together with Rene Riesel and Francis Roux, accused of committing a serious crime according to the law. The alleged crime is: the destruction of sacks of genetically modified maize.
Yes, this is serious, and that's why I assume full responsibility. I am not going to hide behind collective, anonymous responsibility.
"As a trade unionist in the Confédération Paysanne, I believe in the ability of everyone to act as an individual. There is no place in our trade union for a hierarchy of responsibility. Each member of the union plays a main part in her or his own future, and is fully engaged in this. The strength of our union movement rests on this determination to mobilize free individuals who accept all the consequences of their acts knowing fully the motive for them.
"Yes, on January 8, I participated in the destruction of genetically modified maize, which was stored in Novartis' grain silos in Nerac. And the only regret I have now is that I wasn't able to destroy more of it.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
