Anti-Globalization Farmer Hopes for a Presidential Pardon

His wife tends to the sheep. José Bové, for many the public face of the anti-globalization movement, doesn't have time for it. And from a prison cell the Frenchman with the bushy moustache won't be able to help her out much either.

This week, France's highest court threw out a bid to overturn two jail sentences that José Bové received for destroying thousands of genetically-modified plants in 1998 and 1999. The spokesman and co-founder of the leftist union Farmers Confederation claims that he and his cohorts were acting in self-defense -- defense against the unknown dangers they believe GM foods present.

Attacking big business

Bové can expect to spend his 50th birthday in January behind bars. He already did a six-week sentence earlier this year for ransacking a McDonald's construction site in the southern French town Millau. In October, the farmer turned activist was force to pay a 3,000 euro fine for destroying GM rapeseed crops. Now he and his supporters are hoping President Chirac will issue a pardon.

The tractor attack on McDonald's first attracted widespread attention to the Roquefort cheese producer. Since then, Bové has become the darling of anti-globalization campaigners, although his life as an activist started decades earlier, in the mid-1970s.

He has organized protests against European policies, hunger strikes for government subsidies and has campaigned against nuclear trials from Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship. In France, Bové has become the champion of anti-corporate

activists.

His followers portray him as a self-less modern-day David fighting corporate greed. His critics say Bové is an opportunist posing as a farmer, and they condemn the violence that often accompanies him. It's not just that he doesn't shy away from laying on hands either. After Bové showed up in front of a Seattle McDonald's during the World Trade Organization meeting there in 1999, for example, the building was vandalized.

Losing touch?

Bové has supported grassroots campaigns from as far away as Mexico. When he rushed to Yassir Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah to show support for the besieged Palestinian leader this spring after a meeting of globalization critics in Porto Allegre, Brazil, critics said he had lost his footing.

Now the French daily "Figaro" writes that Bové has made his second mistake: Instead of becoming a martyr for his cause, appealing for a pardon has turned him into a clown.

Bové, however, says he will take his case to the European Court for Human Rights. Standing on the steps to the court that threw out his appeal, he insisted that injustice had been done. According to the farmer-activist, the last time trade unionists were imprisoned in France was under the Vichy regime during World War II.