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!”
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.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy 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, said 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 anti-government 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, Sarkozy’s man in Africa, Alain Joyandet, showed up at Ali Bongo’s pomp-filled inauguration, telling reporters that 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 Sarkozy’s entourage, openly supported the candidacy of Bongo, his client. Sarkozy even accorded Bourgi one of France’s highest honors, the Legion of Honor.
In Africa, “opposition to power also means opposition to France,” said Mamadou Diouf, 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,” Diouf said of France’s policies in Africa.
Joyandet, who is also the French secretary of state for cooperation, disagreed sharply.
“It’s not right; we absolutely don’t uphold the existing power at whatever cost,” Joyandet said. “Everywhere, we are asking for a return to democracy.”
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 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 Bockel was soon out of his post after offending Bongo’s father with his anticorruption declarations. His replacement, 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 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 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 US officials were shunning all contact. A close associate of 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, Sarkozy cordially received the Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982 and removed presidential term limits last year. Sarkozy praised the country as a “pole of moderation.”
Amnesty International recently reported on 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.”
Joyandet said that “for us, the relationship with Francophone Africa is especially difficult.”
“When we do too much they say we’re colonialist,” he said. “And when we don’t do enough, we hear complaints.”
French officials have discouraged close 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 Republic of Congo 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 week, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.
Reports of the luxuries Biya treated himself to 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 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.”
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics
RSS