The collapse of Mobutu Sese Seko’s control in Zaire has highlighted declining French influence. Chris McGreal in Kigali and David Harrison in Cameroon report
ZAIRE’S cancer-ridden president, Mobutu Sese Seko, was carried to his latest television interview on a stretcher. Propped up in a chair in the plush French villa he may never leave, Zaire’s despot was prodded into bursts of lucidity in a futile attempt to pretend that he is still in control of his war-ravaged nation and will one day go home.
Earlier this month President Jacques Chirac of France was in Africa, making an equally vain effort to persuade his country’s former colonies that its influence on the continent is not withering with Mobutu.
France has stood by powerless as one of the nations central to what Paris considers its domain in Africa has imploded. Rwandan soldiers, Zairean rebels and Ugandan troops have driven Mobutu’s army from large swaths of eastern Zaire.
It is not that Paris does not wish to intervene. It did all it could to try to engineer international approval for a force similar to the one it led into Rwanda in 1994 in an attempt to keep that tragic nation under Paris’s wing.
That move backfired badly, not only producing a government in Kigali deeply hostile to France, but also laying the ground for the civil war in Zaire. But this time France was forced to confront new limits to its neo-colonial adventurism in Africa. The US ambassador to Zaire, Daniel Simpson, put succinctly the new realities. “France is no longer capable of imposing itself in Africa,” he said in an interview with a Zairean newspaper.
“Neo-colonialism is no longer tolerated. The French attitude no longer reflects the reality of the situation.”
Paris spluttered its protest, but its former African colonies took note at a Francophone summit in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, last week. Although they went along with Chirac’s call for a multinational force to protect civilians in eastern Zaire, it was a token demonstration amid an unusual air of defiance.
France, more than any former colonial power, has maintained ties that bind Africa. It props up regional currencies and economies in return for markets and investment. But the relationship also helps France to maintain its self-perception as a major power, especially at the United Nations.
Underscoring French resolve that its former colonies should remain loyal is a deep- seated fear of the spread of Anglo-Saxon culture. But Chirac appears to have recognised that the days of French unilateral intervention in Africa are over.
Last week he told Zaire’s Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo, that France would help to drive out foreign forces, but only when Zaire had “restructured its army”, an unrealistic hope according to rueful French diplomats.
Three years ago President Mobutu would only have had to ask, and French troops, advisers and equipment would have been defending Mobutu Sese Seko’s cities.
The naked self-interest of French intervention in Rwanda in 1994 put paid to all that. Paris was not alone in standing by while hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were murdered. But it continued to support the extremist Hutu regime which oversaw the genocide.
Three months after the slaughter started, Paris persuaded the UN Security Council to authorise it to occupy western Rwanda, ostensibly to save Tutsis. But it was far too late. Almost all the Tutsis in the region were dead or gone. In reality, France was making a last bid to prop up the defeated Hutu regime against Rwandan Tutsi rebels whom Paris viewed as little more than an Anglophone front because the bulk of the leadership had been raised in English- speaking Uganda.
Paris was not only unable to prevent the collapse of the former government, but it also laid the groundwork for the present crisis in eastern Zaire and the undermining of France’s influence in Africa. French soldiers helped to provide an escape route for soldiers of the defeated Hutu army and extremist militias into Zaire, where they used the refugee camps to attack and threaten the new Rwandan government. The Tutsi-led government responded with the recent invasion.
If eastern Zaire has demonstrated the new limits on French adventurism in Africa, it was the US that willingly drew the line. The US orbit in Africa has grown since the end of the Cold War.
In October, Washington and Paris got into a spat over sarcastic remarks by a junior French minister about the first trip to Africa by the then US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, shortly before the American election.
But the real tension lay elsewhere. A few days earlier, France had frustrated US plans for a standing African intervention force, saying it was ill thought out.
By the time Rwanda invaded eastern Zaire, the US was more than willing to block French adventurism. Paris pushed to lead an intervention force, again claiming it was only motivated to save civilian lives. But Chirac recognised that the political climate would not permit France to act on its own, and to others, including Britain, it smacked too much of 1994.
The French Foreign Minister, Herv de Charette, accused the Americans and the British of being spineless and, by extension, racist for failing to want to help Africans. But Washington was buying time for its Rwandan allies to whip their opponents in Zaire and, in “the process, lay to rest French aspirations.