Southern Cameroons Interim Government

CONTINENTAL SHIFT: Colonial-Era Ties to Africa Face a Reckoning in France

Secretive and Powerful 'Cell' Suffers Blows As Controversies Grow

By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS
May 16, 2007; Page A1

On the evening of March 4, 10 French paratroopers reached Birao, Central African Republic, and dropped near an airstrip captured by rebel militia. The paratroopers ambushed the rebels, killing several and reclaiming the airport for the government.

In France, neither the public nor parliament was informed of the attack for three weeks. Coordinating the mission was the "Cellule Africaine," a three-person office nestled behind the Elysée, France's presidential palace. This wasn't the first time the office has been involved in the Central African Republic's internal affairs: In 1979, France toppled the former colony's self-proclaimed emperor and reinstalled his predecessor.

GUARDING FRANCE'S AFRICAN FRONTIER
How French presidents from de Gaulle to Chirac have handled the "African Cell" and France's interests in Africa.

For the past half-century, the secretive and powerful "African Cell" has overseen France's strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France's military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests. In return, these countries give French industries first crack at their oil and other natural resources. Sidestepping traditional diplomatic channels, the Cell reports only to one person: the president.

But with France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy preparing to assume office later today, the African Cell's days may be numbered. There are accusations the French military bears some responsibility for the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, charges the government strenuously denies. There's fierce debate over the French military's continuing presence in the Ivory Coast, where soldiers were dispatched in 2002 when rebels threatened to overthrow President Laurent Gbagbo.

The Cell's close ties to oil giant Elf Aquitaine, where top executives were jailed on corruption charges, were a source of embarrassment. And a former Cell chief is now facing charges related to arms trafficking to Angola. Critics say the Cell's support of non-democratic African regimes, an artifact of France's colonial past, is preventing these nations from making progress to modernity. And Africa, once evidence of imperial grandeur, is now viewed by many French as the source of a continuing flood of poor immigrants.

Farewell, Jacques Chirac

A Leader With a Deep Scorn for Fostering Democracy
By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; A25

(Culled from The Washington Post)

"All political careers end in failure," a British statesman once wisely said. Judging by the wreckage of the famous political career that ended this week, he was even wiser than he knew. With the election of a new president of France on Sunday, the lengthy professional life of Jacques Chirac -- French president for 12 years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, twice French prime minister for a total of four years -- comes to a grinding halt, apparently to the great relief of his compatriots.

Jacques Chirac Leaves Behind One of His Favorite Puppet-Tyrants, Camerounese Governor Paul Biya

In the coming weeks, there will be plenty of time to discuss the virtues and vices of his successor, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. But before Chirac fades from the scene altogether -- or before he becomes embroiled in corruption investigations -- I'd like to take this opportunity to recall some of the highlights of his diplomatic career. Many Americans know him only as the man who made the right decision about Iraq, albeit for the wrong reasons. But try, if you can, to leave Iraq aside: Chirac's more important diplomatic legacy lies elsewhere.

Ponder closely, for example, what Chirac has had to say on Africa, where his country has enormous influence, in many places far outweighing ours: During a visit to the Ivory Coast, Chirac once called "multi-partyism" a "kind of luxury," which his host, president-for-life F?lix Houphouet-Boigny, clearly could not afford. During a visit to Tunisia, he proclaimed that since "the most important human rights are the rights to be fed, to have health, to be educated and to be housed," Tunisia's human rights record is "very advanced" -- never mind the police who beat up dissidents. "Africa is not ready for democracy," he told a group of African leaders in the early 1990s. On Britain: "The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease . . . You can't trust people who cook as badly as that."

President Nicolas Sarkozy: Has a Thug Inherited Françafrique?

IG Research Bureau
May 07, 2007

In mid-June of 1998, just four years after the French genocide in Rwanda, France was again in Africa, this time in Congo-Brazzaville. And like they did four years earlier, the French NGOs: Cimade, Agir ici and Frères des hommes carried out protests in France that were utterly ignored by France’s elite establishment media. Regarding official France, Jean-Arnold de Clermont, the president of Fédération protestante de France would lament in the Fall of 1999 that he was “shocked by the complacent attitude of the French embassy in Congo, and if it is true that the French army was training Mr. Nguesso’s militia, I’ll be very worried about the future. The same thing happened in Rwanda and we know how that turned out.” In a war sponsored by France and ELF, about 250,000 defenseless Africans in the Pool of the Congo will die. Mr. Jean-Arnold de Clermont fears came true. In a morbid conspiracy of silence, there was a complete media black out in France. A journalist for TF1 would say in December of 1998 that “we wanted to mobilize a team in Brazzaville, but we were blocked at both ends.” In Paris and Brazzaville (François-Xavier Verschave). French media barons freely acquiesced to the diktats of the Elysée Palace forbidding any coverage of the carnage in Congo-Brazzaville, a carnage that had the fingerprints of Jacques Chirac and the françafrique village. These are the same media barons French presidential candidate François Bayrou has warned Sarkozy is very close to, in addition to the big businesses like the Bolloré and Bouygues Groups whose thuggish and corrupt practices in Africa has enabled so much deviance on the continent, enabled by French surrogates masquerading as African heads of state.

In 1999, Nicolas Sarkozy proudly stood in court as a character witness for one Charles Pasqua in the latter’s defamation suit against French economist and author, François-Xavier Verschave, regarding the publication of his book on French crimes in Africa, La Françafrique: le plus long Scandale de la République. During the course of the trial, Mr. Pasqua’s networks and dealings with what is now the genocidal regime in Khartoum were exposed. Today, Mr. Pasqua is under indictment for illegal arms dealing in Angola. But he now has as a character witness, the president of France.

France has elevated herself to a nation and people with a global view of life that she believes she must propagate, génocide oblige, to the rest of the world, especially in Africa. They call it their mission civilisatrice. In Africa, institutionalized under Charles de Gaulle’s 5th republic, it is a nefarious and criminal network composed of French politicians, businessmen and journalists along with their African surrogates called françafrique. It is a political disposition that in essence considers the African as sub-human and it is a doctrinaire approach regarding France’s dealings with Africa that Mr. Sarkozy is positioning himself to perpetuate. The command and control of the mafia is the Cellule Africaine at the Elysée Palace under the monopolized direct control of the president of France, that contrary to the promise of the other candidates in the recent French elections, Sarkozy has promised to maintain.

And while Mr. Sarkozy rhapsodizes about a rupture with the past, he has refused any reform of Charles de Gualle's 5th republic that for defenseless Africans has represented repeated coups, massacres, genocides and the institutionalization of a culture of tyrannical corruption, where French advisers still call the shots in countries like Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic and la République du Cameroun. Where Mr. Bayrou speaks of “the 5th republic that no longer works, wherever there is monopoly of power, pluralism should be instituted. Enough of concentrated power,” Mr. Sarkozy is preparing to use the same instruments to achieve the same aims for his business friends and African surrogates. His homage to Omar Bongo Odimba six weeks ago in Paris, a dinosaur of the françafrique salon speaks for itself.

(See video below)