Inside France's secret war in Africa

[TithonusSyndrome]

As the article said, the French thought the Tutsis were being backed by the CIA so they had the Hutus massacre them.

Man, Mitterrand was a nasty fucking cunt.

Nasty, insane, or sneaky, some combination of the above all right.

[Thanas]

Thread unlocked.

Continue.

[thejester]

It's an interesting article, but I guess my problem with it is that it decries imperialism whilst simultaneously writing the Africans out of their own story in a totally paternalistic way. It might be 'France's Secret War' but it's the Central African Republic's very real war...just like responses in this thread blaming France or the US for the Rwandan genocide. Yes, they have culpability in both creating the conditions for it to happen and for not moving to stop it but ultimately responsibility lies on the Hutus who committed it.

[Raxmei]

As the article said, the French thought the Tutsis were being backed by the CIA so they had the Hutus massacre them.

But... that's absurd. France is a member of NATO.

They weren't in 1994 when the Rwandan genocide took place. France only recently rejoined NATO. Not that it matters since even American allies have the right to be concerned about the CIA if they feel like it. Not that suspicion of US involvement justifies killing hundreds of thousands of people of course. France really did back the Hutus and the US really did side with the Tutsis but it's hard to say how consequential that really was.

[Siege]

France is a waning power, the future of Africa will likely be determined by US and China and this could get very messy.

You don't need big guns or lots of soldiers or even an awful lot of money to run the kind of game France does on a nation like the CAR. Hell, a multinational could do it; Shell's operations in Nigeria demonstrate this quite well. France has decades of experience manipulating African nations, centuries if you count their time as a colonialist power, and I don't count on China muscling them out somehow just because you claim they're a "waning power". What does that even mean anyway? And how would it prevent the French from, say, funding a coup against a Chinese-backed president?

[Thanas]

^Siege, that tangent was split to the HoS for a reason (but I left the initial post in here because somebody had already replied to it). I'd prefer it not be discussed any more in this thread.

[RedImperator]

It's an interesting article, but I guess my problem with it is that it decries imperialism whilst simultaneously writing the Africans out of their own story in a totally paternalistic way. It might be 'France's Secret War' but it's the Central African Republic's very real war...just like responses in this thread blaming France or the US for the Rwandan genocide. Yes, they have culpability in both creating the conditions for it to happen and for not moving to stop it but ultimately responsibility lies on the Hutus who committed it.

Well, any society can produce a deranged megalomaniac and enough sadistic thugs to keep control. The issue really is that young democracies are fragile, especially if they're also poor (poor with no prospect of getting richer in the near-term, with your entire economy structured around extracting minerals and selling them to one country, as is the case with most former African colonies). If you keep applying your massive economic and military leverage to install deranged megalomaniacs, and then keep using that leverage to keep them in power and snuff out all attempts by the society to correct their own situation, I don't know how much you can blame the society. The dictators themselves and their thugs, sure, but there's always going to be another dictator. I don't know if it's necessarily paternalistic to blame the CAR's troubles on France; they're not failing because they're African, they're failing because they're a small, weak country that's been repeatedly sabotaged by a big, strong one. If the situation were reversed, I doubt the French would be doing much better.

[Siege]

^Siege, that tangent was split to the HoS for a reason (but I left the initial post in here because somebody had already replied to it). I'd prefer it not be discussed any more in this thread.

Ah, I must've missed that. I do apologize.

[Thanas]

No apologies necessary, I should have announced it more clearly.

[Beowulf]

As the article said, the French thought the Tutsis were being backed by the CIA so they had the Hutus massacre them.

But... that's absurd. France is a member of NATO.

They weren't in 1994 when the Rwandan genocide took place. France only recently rejoined NATO. Not that it matters since even American allies have the right to be concerned about the CIA if they feel like it. Not that suspicion of US involvement justifies killing hundreds of thousands of people of course. France really did back the Hutus and the US really did side with the Tutsis but it's hard to say how consequential that really was.

France has been a member of NATO since it's inception. What they weren't part of for some time was the NATO command structure.

[Simon_Jester]

That said, as a member of NATO it's fair to say that they're relatively fractious. And they definitely don't view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the "Team US Cheerleading Squad," which is how Americans tend to think of it. They've been very consistent about pursuing their own interests, both within the NATO framework and outside of the European theater that NATO was originally intended to cover.

[Ryan Thunder]

I hardly think of NATO as a "cheerleading squad" as you put it. It's a mutual defence pact, not some kind of fanclub.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm sorry, that was hyperbole. It is a bad habit in the minds of certain Americans, though, to assume that the NATO countries' assets are at our disposal. And that they're naturally willing to subordinate their interests to ours on account of our self-declared status as "leaders of the free world."

[Ryan Thunder]

I'm sorry, that was hyperbole. It is a bad habit in the minds of certain Americans, though, to assume that the NATO countries' assets are at our disposal. And that they're naturally willing to subordinate their interests to ours on account of our self-declared status as "leaders of the free world."

Of course.

I don't see how that translates into "makes sense for them to obliterate supposed CIA assets and murder hundreds of thousands of people instead of, y'know, talking to their goddamned allies and sorting it out", though.

[Simon_Jester]

That, I must agree, seems most unreasonable.

[Rabid]

And that is when enter the hereditary distrust between the French and the Anglo-Saxons.

Imagine we were, let's say, backing an anti-American regime in Panama ready to severe all ties with the US. How would you react ?
… Pretty violent, isn't it ? That's the same thing here.

I'm in no way apologizing about the horror committed in Rwanda, mind you. In fact, it's all the contrary. I'm just explaining.

-------------------

Other than that, the French's abuse of its old colonies is hardly fresh new here. We are an Old Empire, after all, and the old habits are hard to kill, as they say.
And, you know, a laaaarge part of the population has sensed the horror of the colonial wars firsthand with the War of Algery, thanks to the conscription of theses days, and the fact that roughly 10% of our population come from there.
We know, but what do you want us to do ? [rhetorical question] It is only by strip-mining Africa and sucking its resources and the blood of the new slaves that we are able to maintain ourselves as an economic power on which you have to count on the Global playground. It is our trading card in the game :
Be friend with us, and we can sell you cheap resources.

It is important to realize that if it weren't for the interference of the Big Powers in Africa, the continent would be now at least at the same level of development that South America now is, at the very least. You have to remember that Africa is, potentially, the richest continent on earth, and that it is only because of various accidents of history that it is in it's today's state. Hadn't the Europeans colonized Africa in the first place, well... let's just say that the big picture would be radically different now !

-------------------

And to answer the question :

Yes, the French People know about it, and there are movement that are fighting against it. But it's hard to really do a difference when you're just a commoner and they are MegaCorporations with a Nation-State for a puppet, you know ?

[Big Orange]

That said, as a member of NATO it's fair to say that they're relatively fractious. And they definitely don't view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the "Team US Cheerleading Squad," which is how Americans tend to think of it. They've been very consistent about pursuing their own interests, both within the NATO framework and outside of the European theater that NATO was originally intended to cover.

The French establishment also want it their own way in the European Union as well. And going back to Haiti, that's a post-French colony that's also in America's back yard and Haiti has apparently been screwed by both powers in the past couple of hundred years (oh-so charmingly many earthquake orphans have been adopted by Christian fundie families in the States). But not to throw bricks out of glass houses I have an inkling that much of Britain's foreign aid is funding to placate a few Third World goons.

And places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic are artificial countries that have not organically grown over the centuries, cultural development had been short-circuited by colonialism, with quickly drawn arbitary national borders not taking violent tribalism into account, with rival tribes sharing the same country or straddling across borders much like the Kurds from the ME (heh, like Iraq and that tribally fragmented place also blew up once the local strongman got removed).

[thejester]

It's an interesting article, but I guess my problem with it is that it decries imperialism whilst simultaneously writing the Africans out of their own story in a totally paternalistic way. It might be 'France's Secret War' but it's the Central African Republic's very real war...just like responses in this thread blaming France or the US for the Rwandan genocide. Yes, they have culpability in both creating the conditions for it to happen and for not moving to stop it but ultimately responsibility lies on the Hutus who committed it.

Well, any society can produce a deranged megalomaniac and enough sadistic thugs to keep control. The issue really is that young democracies are fragile, especially if they're also poor (poor with no prospect of getting richer in the near-term, with your entire economy structured around extracting minerals and selling them to one country, as is the case with most former African colonies). If you keep applying your massive economic and military leverage to install deranged megalomaniacs, and then keep using that leverage to keep them in power and snuff out all attempts by the society to correct their own situation, I don't know how much you can blame the society. The dictators themselves and their thugs, sure, but there's always going to be another dictator. I don't know if it's necessarily paternalistic to blame the CAR's troubles on France; they're not failing because they're African, they're failing because they're a small, weak country that's been repeatedly sabotaged by a big, strong one. If the situation were reversed, I doubt the French would be doing much better.

They're fair points and I certainly don't want to come over as one of those 'fucking Africans can't get their shit together we should leave them to rot hurf durf' types. But equally a bit of googling (with all the limitations that has) suggests that the article omits parts of the story - like Bozize's predecessor being subjected to repeated mutinies within the army in the 90s that revealed a north/south divide within the country. Or the 'disputed' elections only being disputed in the sense that Bozize didn't achieve an outright majority in the first round and had to go into a run off; his behaviour since then suggests he's no champion of democracy but he's at least paying lip service to the process. Interestingly presidential elections were delayed this year and are tentatively scheduled for next year, but the EU just announced 15 million in funding for it (hopefully in Jan next year) and they're in the process of a census with an eye to creating a full electoral roll.

I guess we'll see. I suppose my initial complaint was more of an observation about this thread than the situation in CAR; OP starts with 'the moral high ground just got a bit more murkier' and then it dissolves immediately into great power strategic analysis. A bit ironic, I think.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Before I go any further I'd also like to say that it's a fucking relief to finally have a French contributor on the board to get firsthand perspective from, so thanks for pitching in, Rabid.

We know, but what do you want us to do ? [rhetorical question] It is only by strip-mining Africa and sucking its resources and the blood of the new slaves that we are able to maintain ourselves as an economic power on which you have to count on the Global playground.

Germany doesn't have to to this, and it has less land to work with than France. Why can the largest country in Western Europe not remain on a level playing field with a country only recently reunited 20 years ago, unless it plunders a third of a continent?

Yes, the French People know about it, and there are movement that are fighting against it. But it's hard to really do a difference when you're just a commoner and they are MegaCorporations with a Nation-State for a puppet, you know ?

The article mentions Waging Peace, but there are nothing like widescale protests against French intervention in Africa the way that the Iraq War was protested. How common knowledge is this among the average citizen in France, with Algiers fading from living memory? And if it is commonly known, why does the famous French inclination to protest not spring up in defense of those who could benefit the most from it?

[K. A. Pital]

Germany doesn't have to to this, and it has less land to work with than France. Why can the largest country in Western Europe not remain on a level playing field with a country only recently reunited 20 years ago, unless it plunders a third of a continent?

Actually, I'd like to chime in here. I read several years ago that U.S. and German banks, using their dominant position, unleashed a brutal suck-out in Eastern Europe, in nations like Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. Because of this, East Europe's and some South European nations. A lot of companies went bankrupt (especially after the WTO ascension of the poorer East European nations), and East European companies took on lots of debt. Meanwhile, West European and primarily German banks and large corporations penetrated the East European market and scooped up lots of assets. There was a stream of stories in that vein during 2006-2008, and after the crisis even more of this became known. I'm not sure Germany does not use some heavy outsourcing for its corporations, and since the 1990s, it also made strong reductions to corporate income taxes (I'm not sure, once again, that France did the same).

Perhaps people can tell more.

[Shroom Man 777]

Running East European nations out of business isn't quite in the same ballpark as funding murderous regimes and supporting the Hooters to massacre the CIA-backed Tootsies or whatever, though. It's just capitalism, your Germany examples. The glories of free market.

[Artemas]

Well, people seem to be forgetting that up to '93 rwanda was fighting a civil war, where the Hutu government was fighting a Tutsi invasion. I think that selling weapons and training Hutu militia should be seen in that context, France protecting it's puppet. The French facilitated the genocide, and allowed the situation to develop leading to those events, but it was never the intention to murder a bunch of people.

[Rabid]

Germany doesn't have to to this, and it has less land to work with than France. Why can the largest country in Western Europe not remain on a level playing field with a country only recently reunited 20 years ago, unless it plunders a third of a continent?

Well, you have to take into account the fact that in France, contrary to Germany, and this since the "Triumph of Capitalism", our industrial sector faded into oblivion piece by piece, offshoring after offshoring... Leaving us with only, what ? 35%-40% of our people working in the Secondary Sector [1]. Almost all the remaining people work on services like banking, maintaining our infrastructures, etc... Because we almost don't build anything now, except for our cars, "our" planes, our armament, and generally what we can't outsource, our ability to make money, and I mean real money, wealth, not financial money, is reduced.
It's by having an uninterrupted flow of cheap resources, minerals, oil, etc. that we are still able to make a difference...
Like a governmental slogan said back in the days of the first Oil Crisis in the 70' :
"In France, we don't have Oil, but we have Ideas !"

The article mentions Waging Peace, but there are nothing like widescale protests against French intervention in Africa the way that the Iraq War was protested. How common knowledge is this among the average citizen in France, with Algiers fading from living memory? And if it is commonly known, why does the famous French inclination to protest not spring up in defense of those who could benefit the most from it?

I'd say that easily 1 to 2 on 10 people know about it. The rest 'don't care' about what happen so far away from Home. Mind you, we all know we are at war right now, except for some clueless moron, we all have them ; but for a lot of French, the only question about Afghanistan is akin to "Why were we there, yet ? When are we going home, exactly ?". That's why each time there is ONE soldier killed in 'Stan it makes the first pages of the press. It's the government reminding us of "Why we fight".
About Africa, who care ? What almost all people do know is that we have a base at Djibouti, that we intervened in the Côte-d'Ivoire some years ago, and that stops there. It's only the die hard alter-globalization or the hard-left or even the 'ultra-leftist anarchist' who care and do something about. All the other have more important things to care about in their ordinary life, like "How will I pay all these bills ? Don't tell me I'll have to take a second Job ? Man... I have to cut spending on something...". Don't forget that we still have a high level of poverty and that a laaaarge portion of the population live in precarious condition, so it hold us in line, somehow.
Yes, it's unjust, I agree on this. But that's how it is : we have our own shits to put together. That's how the government hold us, in a way : we have too many things to worry about in our ordinary life without even trying to change the world out of our borders.
The fact is that our 5th Republic, somehow, has been built around that. Its roots goes so deep into the way our state function that protesting against it, now, is a bit like protesting against the weather... So, we will have to change the system itself before we can hope to change something. In the meantime, we will have some more million of carcasses to hide into our skeleton-locker.


Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité


[1] [Primary sector : natural resources harvesting, like farming ; Secondary sector : transformation industry, manufacturing ; Tertiary : Services]. Please note that "generating electric power" is a secondary sector activity, so it boosts the figures...

[Thanas]

Actually, I'd like to chime in here. I read several years ago that U.S. and German banks, using their dominant position, unleashed a brutal suck-out in Eastern Europe, in nations like Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. Because of this, East Europe's and some South European nations. A lot of companies went bankrupt (especially after the WTO ascension of the poorer East European nations), and East European companies took on lots of debt. Meanwhile, West European and primarily German banks and large corporations penetrated the East European market and scooped up lots of assets. There was a stream of stories in that vein during 2006-2008, and after the crisis even more of this became known. I'm not sure Germany does not use some heavy outsourcing for its corporations, and since the 1990s, it also made strong reductions to corporate income taxes (I'm not sure, once again, that France did the same).

Perhaps people can tell more.

I really doubt this had such an adverse effect on the economy of those nations, the most recent studies of corporate takeover have said that in the general sense, it does not really damage the company that is being taken over.

Furthermore, the Eastern countries gained access to the EU and billions in subsisides, so I doubt it was a net-negative game for them.

[folti78]

Actually, I'd like to chime in here. I read several years ago that U.S. and German banks, using their dominant position, unleashed a brutal suck-out in Eastern Europe, in nations like Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. Because of this, East Europe's and some South European nations. A lot of companies went bankrupt (especially after the WTO ascension of the poorer East European nations), and East European companies took on lots of debt. Meanwhile, West European and primarily German banks and large corporations penetrated the East European market and scooped up lots of assets. There was a stream of stories in that vein during 2006-2008, and after the crisis even more of this became known. I'm not sure Germany does not use some heavy outsourcing for its corporations, and since the 1990s, it also made strong reductions to corporate income taxes (I'm not sure, once again, that France did the same).

Perhaps people can tell more.

I really doubt this had such an adverse effect on the economy of those nations, the most recent studies of corporate takeover have said that in the general sense, it does not really damage the company that is being taken over.

Furthermore, the Eastern countries gained access to the EU and billions in subsisides, so I doubt it was a net-negative game for them.

In case of Hungary the main cause was the disastrous liberalization of lending regulations around 2002-2003 by the "socialist-liberal"1 government, which allowed banks to lend in foreign currency without too much oversight2. This was coupled by their retarded economic policy stiffling the economy while trying to do their retarded "welfare revolution"3.

Their attempts to fix the decline, after they forced to admit that they lied about the state of the economy after their 2006 reelection, put heavier and heavier tax burdens on the small and middle sized businesses, while the multinationals, banks got off rather lightly. This brought the economy to the brink of default in 2008 September.

1: The socialist part's (MSZP) leadership was mostly businessmen who started their political careers in the commie era MSZMP and used their contacts to get wealthy during the privatization in the '90s. In the 2002 and 2006 elections they banked their success on the masses of pensioners and older unemployeds who fondly remembered the "good days" of communism, when everyone had a job and job security.
The junior member of the coalition(SZDSZ) had a similar setup, where wealthy businessmen (esp. János Kóka) took control of the party to further his business friendly goals.

2: Pretty much every bank, foreign owned and local jumped on the gravy train with much enthusiasm. Followed by the consumers going after real-estate and cars because of the loans lower interest rates and the fairly strong Forint. Then they got assraped by exchange rates, when the Forint lost it's value to the Swiss Franc and Euro. For those who are not familiar to foreign currency loans: you take out the loan in the foreign currency (say 10000 CHF) and pay your installments in the foreign currency too (say 100 CHF/month). The bank converts the loan to the local currency for you and takes every installments' value in the local currency according to the current exchange rate from your account.

3: in short raise welfare and pensions from government debts, to buy the votes of unemployeds and pensioners.