Sarkozy’s boldness rejuvenates French diplomacy in Africa
By Michael Deibert
PARIS: When the government of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi freed five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor after eight years in prison last month, it marked not only the latest twist in Qadhafi’s idiosyncratic rule, but was seen as the opening salvo of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s new diplomatic modus operandi in Africa and beyond.
Following long negotiations by the European Union (EU) to secure the release of the medical workers, who had been sentenced to death following the Libyan government’s accusation that they intentionally infected more than 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus, Sarkozy’s wife Cecilia swooped into Tripoli to leave with the six prisoners on a plane to Bulgaria.
EU commissioner for foreign affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner who was on the plane was left to appear as if she were hitching a ride.
The Libyan leader was not left empty-handed, however. Immediately after the release, it was announced that European aerospace giant EADS, 15 per cent owned by the French state, had inked a deal to supply anti-tank missiles to Tripoli, the first such contract since a weapons embargo imposed by the EU was lifted in 2004.
Though Sarkozy has denied there was any quid pro quo, and has supported calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the arms deal, the episode suggested an energetic, bold and sometimes brash foreign policy approach which is already making Sarkozy stand out from his immediate predecessors at the Élysée Palace.
“Sarkozy is really stepping on the gas pedal in ways that are politically dangerous,” says Charles Kupchan, director of Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think-tank, and former director for European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration.
“The previous government was very much of a status quo government, not pushing the boundaries in any significant way, but the Sarkozy administration is the opposite, it sees its mandate of one of radical change, and France not as a status quo power but as a revisionist power.”
Throughout the 1990s, foreign policy under former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac drew criticism for what many viewed as at best paternalistic attitudes in traditional spheres of influence, particularly in Africa and Asia.
Before Chirac’s popular opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, perhaps his most well-known foreign policy foray was the resumption of nuclear testing in French Polynesia at the outset of his term in 1995. The action provoked a storm of criticism.
Looking back to the Mitterrand era, the picture becomes even darker.
France was the key international backer of the ethnic Hutu dictatorship of Juvénal Habyarimana, the Rwandan leader whose assassination in April 1994 served as the opening shot in the genocide that swept through Rwanda that year. French paratroopers had fought alongside Habyarimana’s forces to defend the regime against an invasion by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) beginning in 1990.
The decision of French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière last year to indict Rwandan President Paul Kagame, former RPF leader, for allegedly orchestrating Habyarimana’s murder further inflamed tensions between the two countries, with Kagame repeating charges that France helped perpetrate the genocide which ultimately claimed at least 800,000 lives.
Rwanda unilaterally severed diplomatic ties with France following the indictment. The release by a French court of two genocide suspects wanted by the Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda this month did not help matters.
For his part, on a recent trip to Senegal, Sarkozy called for an end to Franco-African diplomacy based on personal relations between leaders (a hallmark of the Chirac and Mitterrand presidencies), and called for a “partnership between nations equal in their rights and responsibilities”.
Somewhat more contentiously, on the same trip Sarkozy also stated that “colonisation is not responsible for all the current difficulties of Africa,” not the “bloody wars that Africans make among themselves”, nor the “genocides”, “dictatorships” and “fanaticism” that he said often plague the continent.
Sarkozy’s appointment of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) as foreign minister was seen by many observers as the opening salvo of what could be a more activist approach to foreign affairs, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Kouchner has announced his intention to visit Africa in the near future. One of his first destinations, Rwanda.
“In the majority of the former French colonies which are not in a state of endemic crisis, I don’t know how much is going to change,” says Jolyon Howorth, professor of political science at Yale University. “But what is going to change is the commitment to humanitarian intervention as a principle; that is one of the most powerful motifs in all of Sarkozy’s campaign literature. I think the appointment of Kouchner is quite significant.”
Kouchner for many years has been an outspoken supporter of what is sometimes dubbed humanitarian military intervention, and, in a highly controversial position in France, supported the US-led invasion of Iraq. He has also called for an international force in Darfur region of Sudan, where fighting between government and rebel groups has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003. International human rights organisations have accused the Khartoum government of genocide.
France currently maintains a force of 1,200 troops in neighbouring Chad.
France’s largest visible foreign military commitment remains Africa. Nearly 3,500 soldiers are stationed in the Côte d’Ivoire, attempting to maintain a tenuous peace between Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and the Forces Nouvelles rebel army.
Tensions have remained high since a November 2004 incident in which Ivorian warplanes killed nine French soldiers, and France responded by bombing the country’s air force, leading to violent anti-French riots in Abidjan, the commercial centre.
France has also contributed 1,700 troops to the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, currently overseen by a French commander.—Dawn/The IPS News Service
