Why is France still propping up Africa's dictators? BY BOUBACAR BORIS DIOP | 
JULY/AUGUST 2010 Almost as soon as they had been elected, Nicolas Sarkozy and 
Barack Obama began planning high-profile trips to Africa. Surely the French and 
American presidents had more pressing priorities than addressing a continent so 
long ago judged unimportant to global affairs. But as it turned out, this 
curious exercise of "talking to Africa" offered the perfect opportunity for 
these two novice Western heads of state to prove that they embodied exactly what 
they said they did: leadership unwedded to the conventionalities of business as 
usual. So our two guests came, portraying themselves as friends of the continent 
-- and indeed possessing an affection so profound that they were unafraid to say 
out loud all the unpleasant truths about Africa usually reserved for whispers in 
private. Like the gentleman who fondly lectures the beggar before dropping a 
meager coin into his jar, they came to Africa with an innate sense of 
superiority. Their sentiment derived, of course, from a conviction that they had 
done all in their power to avoid making such a mess of things, unlike the 
beggars -- the African countries themselves. Obama and Sarkozy, it seemed, were 
tormented by the desire to restore reason to the world's most irresponsible 
nations. COMMENTS (21)SHARE: Twitter Reddit Buzz More... But what a shameless 
rewriting of history! Certainly, Obama was courteous enough in his trip last 
year to Ghana. Yet even he needed reminding of the extent to which Cold War 
America pushed so many countries toward becoming today's "failed states." 
Between the two presidents, however, Sarkozy is surely the leader most deserving 
of rebuke. For never in modern political annals has there been anything close to 
the powerful, inseparable synergy between France and its former empire. At the 
very moment it realized decolonization was historically inevitable, Paris 
concocted a true masterpiece of political genius: undertaking all that was 
necessary in pulling out of Africa -- and doing so in such a way as to, in fact, 
not budge an inch. Gen. Charles de Gaulle's trusted advisor, Jacques Foccart, 
was the architect of this neocolonial ruse. His methods were simple: install 
trusted African politicians, some with French nationality, as the heads of these 
14 new states and maintain the firm, French grasp on their natural resources. It 
was a system that naturally bred corruption and instability -- and could hardly 
persist without massive abuses of human rights. ________________________________ 
France's Colonial Days in Africa Are Long Past But no matter; Africa's new 
dictators could rest easy. Thanks to its almost 60,000 troops on the continent, 
the French Army could rush to their aid at a moment's notice -- and had already 
agreed to do so as part of defense agreements in which certain key clauses were 
kept secret. The French secret service was also poised to undertake, if 
necessary, the liquidation of the dictators' most formidable rivals. The list of 
African opposition figures who perished this way is dreadfully long. In truth, 
the greatest fault of the French model was not that it existed in the first 
place, but that it so unabashedly survived the Cold War. At the time, when 
Moscow and Washington were behaving even more savagely in their respective 
spheres of influence, Paris's meddling in Africa seemed relatively benign. But 
today, it would be unimaginable to see the British prime minister interfering in 
the succession of the Ghanaian or Kenyan heads of state. And Sarkozy? He did 
exactly that last year when Ali Bongo emerged victorious in Gabon's disputed 
presidential election -- with the endorsement of the French president to succeed 
his father. No wonder: Bongo senior was himself installed by de Gaulle back in 
1967. Jacques Chirac similarly backed the son of Togo's Gen. Gnassingbé Eyadéma 
in 2005. And so it goes: France destabilizes and destroys the countries of 
Africa, as if nothing in the world had changed. Indeed, among all the former 
European colonial powers, France is unique in its refusal to decolonize. And the 
countries that have refused this "friendship" with Paris -- Vietnam, Madagascar, 
Cameroon, and Algeria -- have paid for their liberty with many hundreds of 
thousands of lives. Consider Niger, where France is not content to simply 
extract uranium from the country while paying Third World prices; it does so 
under such exploitative conditions -- sucking the groundwater dry -- that 
agriculture has become an impossibility in this agricultural nation. Suicidally 
focused on supplying 40 percent of France's uranium needs, Niger may be the 
world's second-largest uranium producer, but it is also today one of the poorest 
countries on the planet. And Paris will have it no other way; the French secret 
service was widely rumored to have ousted the country's first president, Hamani 
Diori, in 1974 after he said that his country benefited not one bit from the 
mineral's extraction. Niger's current instability -- three coups since 1996 and 
an ongoing internal rebellion -- is directly linked to the French imperative to 
control its strategic resource. For years, many assumed that this Françafrique 
had become an anachronism, one that would eventually wither and die a natural 
death. Yet somehow or another, the marriage keeps on working, in Gabon and Chad, 
Niger and the Republic of Congo, with no apparent sign of duress. France is 
content to pull the strings from behind the scenes in such a way that no popular 
African revolt could ever take aim at its involvement. 
________________________________ The Failed States Index 2010 Photo Essay: 
Postcards from Hell In the Beginning There Was Somalia Instead, French leaders 
have done all in their power to nourish a profound emotional complicity in their 
African counterparts. In his memoirs, de Gaulle's advisor Foccart insisted upon 
the importance of maintaining deeply personal relationships with African 
presidents, far beyond what protocol requires. De Gaulle was irritated that 
Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic always called him "Papa," but 
he held his tongue, surely so as not to compromise France's provisions of 
tropical wood and diamonds. African counterparts felt more at ease, it was 
believed, with Chirac, less snobby about good food and even an aficionado of 
bawdy jokes -- in short, not a very complicated man. Such a philosophy rests 
upon the uncomfortable notion that Africans, "joyous by nature," as Chirac once 
said, are simply big children. That assumed immaturity authorizes France to act 
in a way so undemocratic in Africa that its practices would be unimaginable back 
home. Unfortunately, my continent doesn't have to imagine those realities 
because we live them every single day -- with every deprived citizen who wants 
for education, for health care, or even, at times, for so much as a bowl of rice 
to eat. France, meanwhile, is satiated.




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