THE NYT'S LOOK AT A NIGHTMARE
Ill Will Grows in a Former Colonial Region as France Consorts With the Powerful
Friday, November 13, 2009
By ADAM NOSSITER, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world/africa/13francophone.html
DAKAR, Senegal -- A waiter, reacting to the mosquitoes plaguing a customer on a recent hot night here, said sharply, "Those aren't mosquitoes; those are French people!"
Two thousand miles away, in another coastal African capital, Libreville, in Gabon, a crowd yelled: "We're sick of the French! Let's kick them out! Let's kill them!" after learning this fall that their nation's reigning autocracy was staying in power.
It is not a good time to be French in Francophone Africa, except if you are a high official from Paris privately visiting a strongman's palace. As democracy slips in country after country in the region, France often quietly sides, once again, with the once-and-future autocrats.
All summer long, while African opposition figures were protesting, demonstrating and fleeing, men in power were coolly visiting Paris, or receiving visits in return.
Nicolas Sarkozy, now France's president, promised a departure in relations with Africa three years ago. Instead, the nation appears to be reverting to historic type, looking past unsavory rulers for the sake of a uranium mine in Niger, oil interests in Gabon and a deep-water port in Cameroon.
On the region's streets, where people have been clamoring for democracy, this choosing of sides -- the side of power -- by the region's old colonial ruler has led to attacks on French structures, rock-throwing at French people and warnings for French citizens to stay indoors or evacuate.
For decades, France played a preponderant role in the making and unmaking of governments and economies in this part of the world. And while perception now outstrips current reality, France is still a principal commercial partner. Three French banks accounted for nearly 70 percent of the banking business in the African franc zone in 2007, according to a prominent French political scientist, Philippe Hugon, and the French government itself says that 60 percent of its foreign assistance goes to sub-Saharan Africa.
The antigovernment demonstrators think France still pulls the strings, and while French officials deny this, their actions often suggest otherwise. In Gabon, where the election of an autocrat's son dashed hopes for ending 40 years of rule under the Bongo family, Mr. Sarkozy's man in Africa, Alain Joyandet, showed up at Ali Bongo's pomp-filled inauguration, telling reporters that Mr. Bongo "must be given time."
Publicly, France said it had no horse in the Gabonese elections; behind the scenes, Robert Bourgi, a Paris lawyer with documented access to Mr. Sarkozy's entourage, openly supported the candidacy of Mr. Bongo, his client. Mr. Sarkozy even accorded Mr. Bourgi one of France's highest honors, the Legion of Honor.
In Africa, "opposition to power also means opposition to France," said Mamadou Diouf, the director of Columbia University's Institute of African Studies. "We find ourselves in a paradox: The champion of the rights of man practices a politics absolutely contrary to its principles," Mr. Diouf said of France's policies in Africa.
Mr. Joyandet, the secretary of state for cooperation, disagreed sharply. "It's not right; we absolutely don't uphold the existing power at whatever cost," he said. "Everywhere, we are asking for a return to democracy."
Mr. Joyandet pointed to Ivory Coast, where France has been pushing for long-delayed elections. "France supports institutions, not candidates," he said. He insisted that France had gone beyond "practices of another age that we don't do anymore."
When Mr. Sarkozy promised "a new relationship" with Africa three years ago, he said it would be "equal, and freed of the scars of the past." His first cooperation secretary, Jean-Marie Bockel, later reinforced the message, saying he wanted to "sign the death warrant" of the old France-Africa relationship, which he called "ambiguous" and "complaisant."
But Mr. Bockel was soon out of his post after offending Mr. Bongo's father with his anticorruption declarations. His replacement, Mr. Joyandet, has been careful to moderate his tone when speaking of African autocrats.
Last month, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the general who staged a coup in the desert nation of Mauritania and consolidated his power with an election this summer, was cordially received in Paris and abundantly photographed with a smiling Mr. Sarkozy.
In Niger, President Mamadou Tandja has methodically rolled back civil liberties, locked up opposition figures and prolonged his stay in power beyond his electoral mandate; his picture with Mr. Sarkozy is on the French Foreign Ministry's Web site, and a spokesman in Paris said two weeks ago that "high-level contacts were being maintained with the Niger political class," though he added, "especially" with the opposition.
France was "much more prudent with respect to Tandja than the other democracies," said Mohammed Bazoum, a Niger opposition leader. "They tried to dissuade him, but not with the firmness that was necessary."
Even leaders in Guinea's military junta, international pariahs since a massacre of unarmed demonstrators on Sept. 28, were cordially received in Paris less than two weeks before the killings, at a time when American officials were shunning all contact. A close associate of Mr. Sarkozy's, Patrick Balkany, was quoted by the French press as saying at the time that "the candidacy of Moussa Dadis Camara is not a problem," referring to the junta leader now widely blamed for sanctioning the killings.
In July, President Sarkozy cordially received the president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982 and removed presidential term limits last year. Mr. Sarkozy praised the country as a "pole of moderation."
Amnesty International recently noted persistent human rights abuses by Cameroon officials, including torture, extrajudicial executions, beatings, and the arrest and imprisonment of political opponents. Cameroonian protesters in Paris held up placards reading, "Biya murderer, Sarkozy accomplice."
Mr. Joyandet said that "for us, the relationship with Francophone Africa is especially difficult."
"When we do too much they say we're colonialist," he continued. "And when we don't do enough, we hear complaints."
French officials have discouraged scrutiny of African leaders' corruption, the fruits of which often end up in Paris. A French good-government group's campaign to expose and recover the "ill-gotten gains" of three of the most notorious leaders -- the late Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea -- has been opposed by the prosecutor of the French Republic on the grounds that the group has no standing to sue, and that the facts are "ill defined."
In fact, the group, Transparency International, had set out in detail the leaders' extensive luxury real-estate holdings in Paris. Last month, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.
Reports of the luxuries to which Mr. Biya treated himself on his Paris visit "enormously shocked people," said Jean Faustin Kinyock, president of the National Human Rights League in Cameroon, and the French were seen as complicit.
Analysts said that the sentiment was pervasive. "People don't like France because France isn't helping Africans freely choose their leaders," said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. "And the democratic process is blocked, practically everywhere."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Tattered French African empire looks toward China
By Howard W. French
Published: Thursday, June 7, 2007, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/world/africa/07iht-letter.1.6036001.html
NDJAMENA, Chad — When I last visited this country, in the late 1990's, watching CNN at a French-run hotel here, or for that matter in many former French colonies in the region, meant carrying a screwdriver and readjusting the television's tuner to have some choices beyond French-language fare.
Less than a decade ago, the French claim on this region was still so strong, and Africa's importance to France's view of its own place in the world correspondingly so, that the French were paranoid about expanding American influence on the continent. This went so far as to interpret the American-aided ouster of Zaire's longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, as Washington's bid to supplant France in Africa.
Amid such a climate, even CNN was regarded in Africa by the possessive French as an arm of an encroaching American empire to be held at bay.
Imagine my surprise then, arriving in Ndjamena late at night on a visit from China, when I turned on my television at the French-run Sofitel Hotel to find that the program blaring from Channel 1 was a starchy variety show in Chinese, courtesy of that country's state broadcaster CCTV.
The point here is not to lament the arrival of the Chinese in what has for so long been a pillar of the economic, military and political empire that France has labored to maintain in this part of the world. It is rather to pronounce the inevitable conclusion of its demise.
Virtually wherever one looks in French-speaking Africa today, one finds evidence of a postcolonial policy in tatters, and more startling still, given the tenacity of French claims over the decades, an open sense of failure, of exhaustion and of frank resignation.
There was a time, not long ago, when virtually every car on the street in France's cloistered African client states was French, when no big deal was let without a French contractor's securing a big payday, and where the downtowns of African capitals pulsed with French businesspeople and "cooperants," or aid workers.
Fast forward to the present, and here in Chad what one finds is a U.S.-based oil multinational, Exxon, running the country's biggest and most lucrative business, with Chinese companies investing heavily to match or surpass it.
Despite the recent oil wealth, Chad seems poorer and far more decrepit than when I first visited more than 20 years ago. Nowadays, the only French cars rolling on Ndjamena's dusty streets are battered old taxis of that vintage. All the new vehicles are Japanese.
From oil to telecommunications, all the big new investments seem to be Chinese. And to the extent there is any construction going on, as in so much of the continent today, it is Chinese companies landing the contracts.
A reminder of the French presence comes every morning with the roar of fighter jets that take off from a military base at the edge of town. Americans and Chinese seek riches, Chad gets ever more corrupt, and by appearances poorer, and puzzlingly, even to itself nowadays, France is left holding the bag, maintaining a military base that is probably the only thing that stands between this country and outright warlordism.
"Why are we still here?" said François Barateau, the first counselor at the French Embassy here. "By naïveté, by nostalgia, no doubt, out of solidarity with Africans. I think we're here because we've always been here."
The diplomat went on to make a startling admission: "It must be recognized that 20 to 30 years of cooperation have not produced many results." From there, just as remarkably, he lamented the fact that the U.S. Agency for International Development was not present in Chad, Britain has no embassy, and that other traditional donor countries, from Japan to Switzerland, have only small, symbolic operations.
"Nowadays it is the Chinese who are coming, and I guess we'll see," Barateau said with a sigh.
Chad, in fact, is anything but an anomaly. From next door in the Central African Republic, to Ivory Coast, once Paris's proudest showcase, France's positions in Africa have been overtaken by chaotic events and by competitors, most pointedly of late the Chinese, who recognize a good vacuum when they see one. Here and there, through the deployment of troops, France has been able to hold the line against disorder, if barely, but a country that for so long punched above its weight has proved utterly incapable of helping its African clients move forward.
How did things reach this pass? During the long tenure of Jacques Chirac, France underestimated Africans and China alike, while mistaking America as its rival in a part of the world where Washington has never had grand ambitions or even much vision.
Chirac talked down democracy on the continent as a frivolous luxury and coddled many of its most corrupt dictators, the only conditions for entree at the Élysée Palace were chummy personal ties, flattery of France and business for the clutch of big French companies that have done well for themselves on the continent by hewing close to power.
In the French world, this ruinous condominium, of French politicians who support corrupt African leaders while pushing business deals for their friends, is known as FranceAfrique, and it has cost Africa and France dearly.
Countries like Gabon and Congo Republic and Ivory Coast - one could go on and on - have squandered generations of wealth and development largely because of it. Chirac is gone, and his successor as president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says he is turning the page on FranceAfrique. But France seems morally and economically exhausted by the experience.
Paris's erstwhile clients, meanwhile, are turning to China, whose lack of interest in democracy or even governance should be troubling, but for now seems refreshing, because its business-people bring suitcases of fresh cash and little hypocrisy.
FranceAfrique has lessons for China, too, however: no durable interests can be secured on African soil where institutions are neglected and profit and flattery are the only considerations.
©2003 The African Independent, Inc. All rights to republication are reserved.
