Inside France's Secret War
For 40 years, the French
government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not
only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to
slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator and to fund
and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war
is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the
Central African Republic into Darfur seeking sanctuary in the
world's most notorious killing fields.
By Johann Hari in Birao, Central African Republic
...But I couldn't find anyone in the CAR not a single person, not
even the most pro-French who thought Sudan had anything to do
with the rebels. So I arrange to meet up in Bangui with Louise
Roland-Gosselin, an Anglo-French director of the group Waging
Peace, who has been studying the Central African Republic.
"The policies here in the CAR are part of a much bigger approach by
France towards Africa," she says. "We call this system
'Franceafrique', and it was set up by Charles de Gaulle to replace
the former colonial system. There is clear continuity from the
imperial system to the present day."
The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in
dollars and euros and uranium.
"The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them
towards French corporations," she says. "The CAR itself is a base
from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is
why it is so important.
They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad,
the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the
country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium,
which the French badly need because they are so dependent on
nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but
the CAR is their back-up plan." So this is, in part, a war for
nuclear power? " Yes, but also a lot of this money has been
funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French
political process. Say somebody needs a road built here in the CAR.
The French government will insist on a French company and the
French company back home donates a lot to the 'right' French
political party."
This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when
the French government used the CAR as a base to fund and fuel the
Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf
Hitler.
Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French
organisation monitoring its government's actions in Africa. He
explains: "The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There
were French troops there before, during and after the genocide,
backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis.
You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population
into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were
printed in Paris."...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18516.htm
See also:
Imperialist France Destroys an African Air
Force
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11132004.html
France History in Africa
http://www.africaresource.com/content/view/418/68/