Dr. Iglal Raafat
France has started since the beginning of the 1990s to lay down a new strategy in Africa to adapt to new circumstances and developments in the post-Cold War world order and the internal developments in both France and Africa. The strategy is meant as well to confront the hegemony of the United States and its growing authority in Africa, which in turn affects France's traditional position in the continent. In addition, the growth of fundamentalist Islamic movements in the African horn and in western Africa affects French authority in the continent. This new French strategy aims at fulfilling France's economic, strategic and political interests in Africa.
French economic interests are represented in the opening of new markets for French products. On the strategic level, France is keen to obtain strategic natural resources essential for French heavy industry and to control strategic positions in some African countries. France's political and diplomatic interests are represented in maintaining the stability of the African systems and making use of the close ties binding France and the African states. The aim is to guarantee African diplomatic support for France in the UN, which will help it maintain its position as a super permanent member in the Security Council.
In order to implement its policy in Africa, France is using military, economic and cultural mechanisms. The military policy is crystallised in the reduction of the number of French bases from 1,000 in 1960 to only five. In the light of the of the new world order, France had to develop its military cooperation policy with Africa. It ratified a new plan that relies on the establishment of a power for quick intervention. Roles are distributed among military bases in accordance with the seriousness of the situation.
Other military mechanisms include agreements relating to military defence and technological cooperation. A comprehensive review of French military policy in Africa was carried out as a result of the consecutive failures it had in Rwanda and Burundi. Changes in international conditions urged France to focus on supporting regional security institutions by means of training African soldiers for peacekeeping operations.
On the economic level, France relies on the development of inter-trade relations with most of the countries of central and western Africa and aims to increase the volume of French investment in Africa and maintain the Franc zone. France hailed the establishment of the regional organisations formed in the 1970s and 1980s, which include a number of countries from central and western Africa.
France established a transportation network between itself and Africa with the aim of consolidating economic and commercial relations. This network is the primary infrastructure for French policy in Africa.
On the cultural level, France enjoys a distinguished position in Africa. France bases its cultural ties with Africa on a number of elements, including the common language with some African countries, the French tuition institution, French cultural centres and the francophone summits held biannually either in Paris or in one of the African capitals.
The US cultural and economic hegemony in Africa, enhanced by the globalisation phenomenon, has negatively impacted on the French position. The clash between French and US interests has manifested in a number of areas of investment, especially in the petroleum sector. France proposed a number of ideas to confront its current economic recession in the continent. President Jacques Chirac suggested that African countries exchange debts for investment, which means that the French companies buy quotas in African institutions that equal the amount of debts of the African countries to France.
On the military level, the United States is expanding its military activity in Africa in order to confront French military expansion. Within this framework, France proposed the formation of an African peacekeeping force of 10,000 soldiers, with the participation of significant African states. The idea, however, was rejected by the EU and the Organisation of African Unity.
France, in return, established RECAMP military programme with the aim of supporting regional security institutions in Africa. With the growth of the fundamentalist Islamic trend in Sub-Saharan Africa, French authority started to wither. France is facing this phenomenon even on the internal level, and hence endeavours to curb this phenomenon within its limits of authority and to tighten its control over the area separating the north and south of Africa to prevent the spread of Islamic extremism southwards.
France is now trying, by means of consolidating the francophone organisation and enhancing diplomatic and political missions, to confront the anglophone wave that makes use of globalisation as diffused by the United States. In addition, the EU could help the French role in Africa to survive as France was one of the founding members of the European Community, which calls for unified common security and foreign policy for its members.
The International Politics Journal, July 2001
http://www.siyassa.org.eg/esiyassa/ahram/2001/7/1/STUD1.HTM
How the French Plunder Africa
France's unchallenged political, economic, and military domination of its former sub-Saharan African colonies is rooted in a currency, the CFA franc. Created in 1948 to help France control the destiny of its colonies, fourteen countries--Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Bissau Guinea, and Chad--maintained the franc zone even after they gained independence decades ago.
In exchange for France guaranteeing the CFA franc's convertibility, these countries agreed to deposit 65% of their foreign exchange reserves in a special account within the French Treasury and granted to France a veto over the franc zone's monetary policy whenever this special account was overdrawn. These decisions have had devastating consequences for forty years.
The bulk of the CFA franc money supply comes from trade between France and its African allies. As a result, the franc zone's basic features have always been scarce money and high interest rates. On the other hand, in line with IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs, strict budget discipline has kept inflation low--as if further belt tightening in the name of price stability was the right policy priority in desperately poor countries hit by decades of depressed demand.
The result has been a lethal combination of currency convertibility, skyrocketing interest rates, low inflation, and free capital movement, which merely fuels speculation and capital flight. Speculators transfer huge amounts of money from France to high-interest-bearing local deposit accounts, collect their tax-free gains every three months, and take the no-risk plunge again.
Commercial banks are awash with these volatile short-term speculative funds, which they lend to governments on the most stringent conditions. The banks and speculators reap handsome gains, governments are overburdened with unsustainable commercial debts, the domestic productive sector is starved of medium- and long-term financing, and most people remain mired in appalling poverty.
Capital flight, meanwhile, stems from free transfer of profits, debt payments, and the propensity of the elite to exile their assets. This massive hemorrhage of foreign currency is channeled exclusively to France, thanks to a capital control it put in place in 1993. As a result, some of the poorest countries in the world are financing part of the French budget deficit.
The only rational reason for the CFA franc's existence is connivance between France and the governing elites of its former colonies in order to plunder the franc zone states. Even the common currency's beneficial effects on trade among member countries were nullified by the paradoxical decision taken by the former sub-Saharan French colonies to dismantle the federal governmental structure and the single market of colonial times and to erect trade barriers in their place.
As though all of this were not bad enough, the CFA franc's exchange rate, which had remained unchanged since 1948, was devalued by 50% in 1994. What better time--from the prospective of foreign investors, that is--to undertake a vast privatization of state assets? Under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank, lucrative sectors such as energy, telecommunications, water supply, and banks were sold off at knockdown prices to western companies.
So the end result of the partnership between France and its former African colonies has been spectacularly lopsided. France has secured a vast market for its products, a steady supply of cheap raw materials, repatriation of the lion's share of local savings, unrivaled political influence, a strategic presence with military bases occupied free of charge, and the certainty that it can rely on its African allies' diplomatic support. But for the Africans, the partnership has meant weak trade performance, tight money, high interest rates, massive capital flight, and mountains of debt whose repayment prevents higher investment in education, training, health, food production, housing, and industry.
This arrangement's negative effects extend, moreover, to the entire African continent. At the political level, France and its allies opposed the concept of a continental government advocated in the late 1950's and early 1960's by the likes of Nasser and Nkrumah. They helped block the project and establish the notoriously inefficient African club of heads of states, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), thus setting back the clock of African integration by decades.
When the OAU mandated the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to promote regional economic and monetary union, France and its allies moved quickly to impede it by spearheading the creation of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Union (CEMAC). This partly prevented ECOWAS from emulating the economic performance of it sister organizations, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market of East and Southern Africa (COMESA).
But for France's African allies, grafting a program of economic integration onto a pre-existing artificial monetary union is delusory and unworkable. Indeed, it has been tearing apart the fabric of these societies ever since so-called independence came in 1960. No wonder that nowadays most of these countries face civil unrest, rebellion, and risk of implosion.
If French Africa is to grow, the franc zone must be dismantled. The euro's birth provided an opportunity for these former colonies to break free of France's suffocating embrace. They missed it. Instead, they shifted the peg for the CFA franc to the euro while keeping the same rules, institutions, and mode of functioning. For the citizens of Francophone Africa, this will certainly have tragic consequences.
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Sanou Mbaye was an economist with the African Development Bank
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© Project Syndicate January 2004
Mitterrand's son held in African money-laundering inquiry
By John Lichfield in Paris
The Independent - 24 June 2004
Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the late French president, has been arrested as part of an investigation into alleged money-laundering and arms-trafficking in Africa.
M. Mitterrand, 58, who has been investigated since 2000 over illegal arms sales to Angola, faces new claims that he set up a bogus fish-processing factory in Mauritania.
The former journalist, who became an African adviser and informal envoy for his father, the Socialist president, François Mitterrand, was released by police yesterday without being charged. He had been held overnight for questioning.
Mitterrand's son held in African money-laundering inquiry
By John Lichfield in Paris
24 June 2004
M. Mitterrand has denied the allegations and accused Judge Philippe Courroye of being part of a campaign to sully the memory of his late father. He wrote that Judge Philippe Courroye was "sweating with hatred before he even opened his mouth" when he questioned him in December 2000 on his alleged part in a conspiracy to break an embargo on arms sales to Angola.
While that continues, M. Mitterrand's bank accounts are frozen and he is officially penniless. Judge Courroye is said to be questioning the late president's son on how he came to make large payments - allegedly totalling €600,000 (£400,000) in cash - to a company called Iwik in Mauritania.
This company was created by M. Mitterrand in 1997 to build a fish-processing factory but evidence presented to the judge shows it remained inactive until after Jean-Christophe was arrested in December 2000.
Leaks to the French press from what is supposed to be a confidential investigation claim that the judge believes the "factory" was a means of laundering funds and making illegal cash transfers.
In March, Judge Courroye raided the apartment of M. Mitterrand, and his 80-year-old mother, the president's widow, Danièle Mitterrand, to search for incriminating documents.
M. Mitterrand insists that he created the factory as part of a personal initiative to boost the economy of one of the world's most destitute countries.
During his father's double term as President from 1981 to 1995, Jean-Christophe became a well-connected figure in Africa. As head of the president's special African unit at the Elysée palace, he made frequent trips to African leaders.
It is alleged that he became involved in illegal arms-trafficking to Angola in the 1990s with the French businessman, Pierre Falcone. Neither have been charged.
The new accusations arise from evidence given to Judge Courroye by Olivier Collonge, a former director general of the Mauritanian company, Iwik, who said he was given cash.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=534593
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