(UHURU NEWS) France in Central Africa: A history of colonial violence and resistance
Makola Libanga
Published Jan 9, 2014
The people of Central African Republic have been victims of French colonial violence since the late 1800s when France ruled Central Africa as part of the French Congo.
Once again, France has sent more troops into Africa to supposedly bring peace and stability, this time in Central African Republic (CAR). There are now hundreds of French troops occupying CAR along with thousands of African troops sent by the neocolonialist African Union.
French troops are already scattered in Africa, particularly within its former colonies, including CAR. The French government is reported to have sent more troops to halt the violence, which was triggered when the alliance of “rebel” groups took power in March 2013, removing the neocolonial president Francois Bozizé.
The current violence has left more than 1,000 dead in Bangui alone, the capital city, with thousands more displaced and injured.
Imperialist media primarily blame the violence on the Muslim Seleka rebels who they accuse of looting, raping and killing since seizing power. Their leader, Michel Djotodia, who has been installed as CAR’s interim president, has admitted he has no control over the Seleka soldiers.
France is behind the violence
Imperialist media present French troops as saviors, but the truth is the French government and their companies are behind the violence. The people of Central African Republic have been victims of French colonial violence since the late 1800s when France ruled Central Africa as part of the “French Congo.”
The Africans were forced to labor for different European companies, who looted ivory, diamonds, rubber and now oil. Many Africans resisted French control, notably the Kongo-Wara rebellion (1928–31), however they were met with French brutality. The leaders were imprisoned or executed, with the population forcibly moved to “designated villages” and suppressed.
During flag independence, the French government broke up the colony into segments (Congo Republic, Gabon, CAR), thus creating mini economically ineffective states with tiny populations surrounded by mineral wealth.
To maintain the looting of CAR after flag independence, the French government occupied all of its colonies imposing neocolonial leaders loyal to France, who agreed with the terms set in the “Colonial Pact.”
This pact allows France to determine the currency value, hold the countries’ currency reserve and take a large share over all profits made from exports and imports.
The “Colonial Pact” also demands that France has the first right to buy or reject any natural resources found in the land, even if the country could get better prices elsewhere. The countries cannot sell to other nations unless France decides not to buy the natural resources and determines who can buy our resources.
The French government also controls CAR by playing off various neocolonial forces against each other, using its military on the ground to ensure the outcome. CAR president Francois Bozizé was removed by the French government because he allowed Chinese businesses to buy oil fields in CAR without French consent.
France’s looting of CAR has left it one of the poorest countries in Africa, with life expectancy at just 47 years, and deeply under-populated with only five million people, less than the city of London, but with a land mass bigger than France!
France’s re-colonization of Africa
The rise of India and China as well as the oppressed nations taking back their resources, is behind Europe’s economic crisis. France has massive public and bank debt. It has the largest exposure to both Greek and Italian debt (among others). Last year it lost its AAA status credit rating, which the capitalists use to determine where to invest and store their cash.
France’s unemployment figure is at 3.29 million—that is 10.5 percent of the working population.
The French government will increase its looting of Africa to solve its economic problems. France is hoping to create 200,000 jobs over the next five years by increasing its “trade” in Africa.
In December 2013, France held a two-day summit between France and 40 African leaders. French finance minister Pierre Moscovici said, "We have to speak the language of truth: African growth pulls us along, its dynamism supports us and its vitality is stimulating for us... We need Africa."
So the wars in Ivory Coast, Libya, Mali and in CAR are part of Europe’s long-term plan to re-colonize Africa and stop the rise of other countries including Africa itself.
France out of Africa!
The French government is being supported by the U.S. army. On December 9, U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel authorized military transport aircraft to carry troops from Burundi to support the French.
Africans in CAR, however, are isolated in their resistance against the French and the Seleka rebels who have been allowed to kill and rape civilians to impose a new president.
Despite this, on Tuesday December 31, thousands blocked the airport runway calling for the French-imposed president to step down. This protest took place even though several protestors were killed during a previous protest in Bangui.
The African Union soldiers cannot bring peace in CAR. They are under French military command.
French soldiers cannot bring peace in Africa regardless of the lies they report in imperialist media. The French military controls the Seleka rebels, and are disarming African youth who are defending their communities from Seleka attacks.
It is the task of ordinary Africans in and outside of Africa to lead an international struggle against France’s re-colonization of Africa by exposing their real aims in Africa and by shutting down French businesses wherever we are.
Imperialism Out of Africa!
Labels: FRANCE, NEOCOLONIALISM, URANIUM
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(HERALD ZW) France breaks ranks
November 21, 2013
Felex Share Herald Reporter
French companies are eager to invest in Zimbabwe in light of the political stability ushered in by Zanu-PF’s decisive victory in the July 31 harmonised elections, French ambassador to Zimbabwe, Mr Laurent Delahousse said yesterday.
President Mugabe romped to victory with 61,09 percent of the vote to MDC-T leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai’s 33,94 percent while Zanu-PF clinched 197 seats in the 270 member national Assembly to MDC-T’s 49. In the Senate Zanu-PF controls proceedings with 37 seats to MDC-T’s 21 and MDC’s two.
Mr Delahousse, who was speaking after meeting Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo and his deputy Cde Supa Mandiwanzira in Harare yesterday, said the elections were a closed chapter and it was time to focus on the future.
While Britain and its dominions – Australia and Canada – have refused to recognise the harmonised elections, several European countries have made positive overtures in recent months with the EU lifting sanctions on the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and its joint venture companies.
The sanctions on ZMDC were scrapped after Belgium, the seat of the EU, lobbied for their removal saying they hindered trade and the selling of Zimbabwe’s gems on the world market.
Sources in the diplomatic community say EU member states were now divesting themselves of the strictures of group solidarity to individually engage Zimbabwe.
“France has commended the elections, we said what we had to say and we are not saying it again,” said Mr Delahousse. “We want to look ahead in the future and we have taken good note of the reports by the African Union and Sadc on the elections and they have pointed out some recommendations for the Government to follow to prepare for the next elections in the future.”
Mr Delahousse said France wanted to improve economic relations with Zimbabwe and the two countries were already working towards that end so that foreign direct investment could improve the economy.
“A lot of French companies want to come to Zimbabwe and others who were here also want to come back,” he said. “They are satisfied with the stability in the country though there are still some uncertainties regarding the macro-economic situation.
“The Government is addressing those issues and I hope it will take all the appropriate decisions for investments to come back from abroad. They desperately need foreign companies and investors to help them and we are working towards that end with my colleagues in the diplomatic corps in Zimbabwe.”
Mr Delahousse said they discussed with Prof Moyo areas of divergence, including the illegal economic sanctions. He said the embargo would be reviewed “constantly”.
“There are some areas Europe, France and Zimbabwe are at odds,” he said. “Those are for instance the issue of measures that Europe has adopted against Zimbabwe which you call illegal sanctions.
“We are reviewing those measures constantly and I hope that the new dispensation in Zimbabwe will help us to take a right decision when the right time comes and to engage in a more positive cooperation.”
Mr Delahousse said each of the two countries had a role to play for the cooperation to fully materialise.
“To do this, everyone must do one’s homework,” he said. “It calls for decisions to be taken in Zimbabwe, decision to be taken in Europe, but I am happy to see that everyone is working towards that positive framework to improve our economic relations.”
Mr Delahousse said they had also discussed media cooperation.
“There will be a major change in your television in the future as there will be the switch to digital television,” he said.
“France has experience working with African countries. We have switched to digital and we have presented the minister with documents that have been drafted by French and African specialists with a view to addressing those specific questions for Africa that are presented by digitalisation.
“This is one area of cooperation. Another area of possible cooperation will be technical cooperation with the media, that is ZBC radio and television. Some of the equipment is older, we need to see how we can modernise this equipment and also help training your technical people to improve the quality of the media in this country.”
Asked why France did not want to channel its development aid through Treasury, Mr Delahousse said it was a result of the “shortcomings” that Government had.
“There is no contradiction between the NGOs and Government to work in partnership,” he said. “It is very important for the Government of Zimbabwe to be accountable for the policies that it has to pursue in accordance with the Constitution and with the will of the electorate.”
Labels: FRANCE, SANCTIONS, ZANU-PF
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(NEWZIMBABWE) France likelyX to cancel Zimbabwe debt
05/11/2013 00:00:00
by Gilbert Nyambabvu
ZIMBABWE has been named among the so-called highly indebted poor countries likely to benefit from debt cancelations by the French government next year.
France’s social economy minister Benoît Hamon confirmed the plan Tuesday, saying: "In 2014, an estimated five countries could see their debt completely erased: Somalia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Ivory Coast and Sudan.
“The debt relief is almost immediate, since we are transferring loans made in the past into donations".
It could not be established how much Zimbabwe owes France but the country is chocking under a debt pile estimated at more than $10 billion
The obligations include some $3 billion owed to the Paris Club, about $2 billion to the World Bank and US$600m to the African Development Bank.
Direct support to the government all but vanished after 2002 when western countries imposed sanctions against Harare over allegations of vote fraud and human rights abuses which are denied by President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu PF party.
Mugabe believes former coloniser Britain coerced allies to gang-up and punish his administration for its land reforms which he insists were needed to address historic imbalances in the ownership of the key resource.
The veteran leader, who is banned from travelling to western capitals under the sanctions, recently appealed to France to end the strictures which he blames for the country’s economic problems.
"Can France have a national introspection and see whether it's right to continue to pursue the policy of sanctions against Zimbabwe," Mugabe said last month while meeting diplomats from France, Germany and Holland.
"We must now look at the future and the need for sanctions to go. We want the removal of economic sanctions so we can export beef to Europe. Let's get to trade.
"We do not want to visit France. I do not want your girls. I do not want to visit France for romantic purposes. I want to develop relations between us.”
The French government is expected cancel $2.42 billion of poor countries’ debt in its 2014 budget, up from $819 million the year before.
Countries in the French debt cancellation programme continue to pay their debt back to France but when the refund is completed, France transfers the corresponding amount back by assigning it to programmes to fight poverty.
Labels: BENOIT HAMON, FRANCE, HIPC
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France: The Rise of the "Left Front"
by Murray Smith
Global Research, August 22, 2012
Socialist Project and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
The Left Front (Front de Gauche) emerged onto the political scene at the beginning of 2009. As the Left Front to Change Europe, it was established by three organizations – the French Communist Party (PCF), the Left Party (Parti de Gauche, PG) and the Unitary Left (Gauche Unitaire, GU) – with the aim of standing in the European elections of June 2009.
These three organizations were not of anything like equal weight. The Communist Party, though much weakened over the previous 25 years, was nevertheless still a mass party with well over 100,000 members and thousands of elected representatives at every level. More than that, it was an inseparable part of the history of the French workers’ movement, which it had largely contributed to defining. The Left Party was a recent split from the Socialist Party, numbering at the time at most 2000 members. The Unitary Left was even smaller, having left the newly formed New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) just after its founding congress.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the Left Party, and a leading candidate of the Left Front.
More important than numbers, however, were what the three organizations represented politically. In addition to being a mass party, the PCF represented the international current that had for decades been linked to the Soviet regime, though it began to take its distance from Moscow in the 1960s and has now pretty thoroughly settled its accounts with Stalinism. The Left Party came from the tradition of French social democracy, its principal leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, having spent more than 30 years in the Socialist Party and the founding core of activists came from that party. The Unitary Left has its origins in one of the three main Trotskyist organizations in France, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Never a mass force, the Trotskyist movement, and the LCR in particular, nevertheless had considerable political influence, especially after May-June 1968. So the Left Front brought together from the beginning political forces of different origins.
Prehistory
In what political context did it appear? The prehistory of the Left Front was certainly the mass – and successful – campaign against the European constitutional treaty in the referendum of 2005. The key element on the left was the united campaign involving the PCF, the LCR, the current of Jean-Luc Melenchon in the Socialist Party, and a range of ecologist and alternative left forces, whose emblematic figure was Jose Bove. This campaign was innovative in the way it both brought together different political forces. It would be an understatement to say that there is not exactly a tradition of the PCF conducting joint campaigns with Trotskyists. And while a considerable number of Socialist Party members publicly opposed the treaty and some campaigned against it in various ways, only Melenchon's current actively took part in the united campaign with the other forces. At the time people spoke of the campaign of the three Bs (Bove, Olivier Besancenot of the LCR and Marie-George Buffet, national secretary of the PCF). The M, however, was just as significant.
The unitary committees formed to conduct the campaign continued to exist afterwards and sought to be the crucible of a united left campaign for the presidential elections of 2007. The attempt was unsuccessful. It would take too long to go into all the details and the responsibilities of the different forces involved, but the outcome was failure and the unedifying spectacle of the competing candidatures of Besancenot, Buffet and Bove.
Out of this sad spectacle, however, emerged one “winner.” The LCR ran a dynamic campaign with the very capable and articulate Besancenot, who in the end won more than 4 per cent of the vote, as he had already done in 2002, whereas Buffet and Bove each had less than 2 per cent, as did Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere, another Trotskyist party.
New Anti-Capitalist Party
On the strength of this result the LCR took the initiative of proposing the creation of a new anti-capitalist party, seeking to channel the combativeness and desire for unity expressed in the campaign. It had a very considerable echo and when the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) was formed in February 2009, it claimed, credibly, to have more than 9000 members, more than three times the forces of the LCR. The NPA was at the time widely perceived to be a broad party and comparisons were made with such formations as the Denmark's Red-Green Alliance and Portugal's Left Bloc. Wrongly, as it turned out, and it started to become obvious very early on. The moves toward building a credible force of the radical left were taking place elsewhere, in the Left Front, and the NPA, rather than contributing to the process, set itself in opposition to it, an orientation for which it would pay a heavy price.
At the beginning of the 2009 European campaign the Left Front was trailing well behind the NPA in the opinion polls. But at the finishing line it got 6.05 per cent in metropolitan France and the NPA 4.88. The difference was not enormous and the NPA failed by a whisker to get a member of the European parliament (MEP), while the Left Front got four. But the significant fact was that the dynamic of the Left Front was accelerating, while the NPA began to falter.
PCF
Let us now look at how the three forces that launched the Left Front got there. For the PCF, the creation of the Left Front was a decisive step in a process that had begun several years before. The party had experienced a long decline from the beginning of the 1980s with several causes, political and social, domestic and international, accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. From 1994, under the leadership of Robert Hue, the party underwent a process of political and organizational “mutation.” Some sort of mutation was certainly needed, but the treatment further weakened the party.
This was reinforced when in 1997 the PCF entered the “plural left” government led by the Socialist Party's Lionel Jospin. Unable to seriously influence a government that remained within the neoliberal consensus, the experience was negative for the PCF, electorally and within its own ranks. When Hue stood as PCF candidate at the 2002 presidential election, he achieved the exploit of being beaten by not one but two Trotskyist candidates. Many PCF members had openly announced their intention of voting for Olivier Besancenot.
At that time no one would have bet much on the survival of the PCF. Its future seemed to lie in gradual social-democratization and satellization by the Socialist Party. Indeed, if Hue had continued to lead it, that is no doubt what would have happened, with splits and fragmentation along the way. Hue himself left the party in 2008 and founded a small group that followed precisely that road. He supported the successful Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande this year. Marie-Pierre Vieu, a leading PCF member and former supporter of Hue, recently remarked ironically: “In his great humility, Hue compares himself to Gorbachev and considers that the future of communism is social democracy.”
However, Hue was replaced as national secretary in 2001 by Marie-George Buffet, and after the debacle of 2002 the PCF began to reorganize and discuss its future. The first decision was to maintain the party. But that in itself would only have served to slow, but not stop or reverse the party's decline. For that there gradually emerged, under the leadership of Buffet and her successor Pierre Laurent, an orientation that combined a willingness to work with other forces to the left of social democracy, a radical political orientation and an independence from the Socialist Party. It turned out to be a winning combination, and the decline was halted and reversed.
Melenchon
Melenchon, after a brief spell with the Trotskyist OCI in the 1970s, had spent the rest of his political activity in the Socialist Party, in a series of left currents. But after 2002 he began to reconsider his political perspectives. In 2004, he and his supporters took a step that was already putting one foot outside the party. They formed “For a Social Republic” (PRS). This was not an internal current of the PS but a political association or club that intervened both within and outside the Socialist Party and recruited some people who were not members of the PS. There followed the decision to take part in the unitary campaign over the European constitutional treaty. In the movement of committees that tried to find a joint candidate for 2007 Melenchon was present, but was not taken too seriously because he was still in the Socialist Party, though the idea of himself as a unity candidate was floated at one point.
Melenchon was looking for a way out of the Socialist Party, but lacked a credible perspective. The turning point was the evolution of the PCF. In the run-up to its 34th congress in December 2008 there was discussion as to how to formulate the party's willingness to open up to other forces on the left. The initial draft spoke of forming “fronts on the left with personalities.” Later, and after discussion with PRS, the words “and organizations” were added. For Melenchon that was important. That meant that the PCF was ready to ally with the party he intended to create, not just to put some ex-Socialist Party members on its lists as individuals. On the PCF side, it needed to be sure that Melenchon would actually break with the PS, and apparently doubted it until the last minute.
Melenchon announced his departure from the Socialist Party on November 6, 2008. He left the PS with essentially the forces of PRS (though some refused to leave), plus the deputy Marc Dolez and a few supporters. But the PRS members were largely experienced political cadres. The rapid creation of the Left Party was criticized by some who thought Melenchon should have taken time to discuss with and regroup broader forces.
But the decision was probably right. The fact that a new political force existed acted as a force of attraction, for existing Socialist Party members and former members, for former supporters of Jean-Pierre Chevenement and for people who had never been in the Socialist Party. The party grew quite rapidly to around 2000 members. A significant addition to the party came a year later with the entry of Greens deputy Martine Billard and her supporters. This reinforced and made more credible the ecological dimension of the Left Party.
UNIR current forms Unitary Left
A parallel process occurred with the principal minority of the LCR. One of its main leaders, Christian Picquet, had been part of the majority leadership of the LCR until 1999, when there was a recomposition of alliances within the party. He had been responsible for relations with other parties and as such had established good relations with the PCF and in particular those of its members who were the most open to working with the far left. As the LCR moved toward the orientation that would eventually lead to the NPA, Picquet became a leader of the UNIR current, which continued a dialogue with other forces including both the PCF and PRS. UNIR also began to recruit outside the LCR, often ex-members. Within the LCR it represented just under 30 per cent in 2003.
The dynamic of the NPA led many LCR members who were critical of the leadership to go along with it. Only about 15 per cent of delegates at the congress where the LCR dissolved itself opposed the majority position by proposing a broad alliance for the European elections. Subsequently Picquet and a group of leading members of the ex-LCR left and formed the Unitary Left. They were not the whole of the UNIR current, perhaps not even a majority, but they were sure that a Left Front would be formed and were determined to be part of it. Subsequent events vindicated the choice, but at the time it was far from guaranteed that the Left Front would make the breakthrough that it did.
Electoral Success
From 2009 on the Left Front went from success to success electorally. It was not a smooth, seamless progression but involved debates and choices. When the 2010 campaign for the regional elections loomed, the PCF consulted its members on the course to follow, via regional conferences and then a vote of all party members. In five regions the choice was to ally with the Socialist Party from the first round. In the 17 others it was to pursue the strategy of the Left Front, as the party leadership proposed. In the five pro-PS regions dissident PCF members allied with the Left Party and others to present unofficial Left Front lists.
It is worth comparing the 2010 campaign with the elections of 2004, when 14 regions chose a first round alliance with the Socialist Party. Among those who did not was the Parisian region where Buffet led a list that was genuinely open, with non-PCF candidates who were really independent, not just fellow travellers. It was a harbinger of things to come, and it was successful. But the evolution between 2004 and 2010 did not take place without discussion; party members had to be convinced of the new orientation. The success of the 2009 campaign helped.
After success in the regional elections and in local elections in 2011 the Left Front had to face up to the big test, the presidential election of 2012. First of all it was necessary to define and plan the campaign. The choice of candidate was not the least important. Over and above Melenchon's personal qualities, which largely contributed to the success of the campaign, there was the fact that he was not a PCF member. If the candidate had been a PCF member, given the weight of the party and the fact that it had 80 per cent of the candidates in the legislative elections, the Left Front would have appeared as simply as a front for the PCF. As it was it appeared as a front of which the PCF was part, a big part, but that there were other forces. The difference was important, and the vote of PCF members by a 60 per cent majority to accept Melenchon as candidate was a decisive step.
As with the elections in 2009, the only comparison could be with the previous results of the PCF, the only part of the Left Front that existed before, and in each of those years, in those terms, progress was made. But in 2012 just doing better than Buffet's 1.93 per cent in 2007 would hardly do. Or even equalling or slightly surpassing Besancenot's scores. The ambition of the Left Front was not to be a protest force. It was to constitute a new force on the left, one that could eventually contest the hegemony of the Socialist Party. For that the Left Front fixed the objective of reaching double figures, and with 11 per cent they attained it.
2012 Elections
The subsequent legislative elections were something of a disappointment. After the second round the Left Front had 10 MPs, as against 19 before the elections. This was clearly not a good result, but it was not as bad as one might think by just looking at the seats lost. In comparison with the results of the Communist Party in the 2007 elections there was a gain of around 600,000 votes, which is not so bad. But the result came as a shock to the Left Front. It had been widely expected that on the strength of the result of the presidential election not only would it keep its seats but win more. The figure of 30 seats was considered a reasonable objective.
So what happened? In the first place there was what might be called the objective factor of bi-polarization. There was a strong drive by left voters to give Hollande a good working majority. Whereas 30 per cent of Hollande's voters in April 22 first round are estimated to have hesitated between him and Melenchon, 38 per cent of Melenchon's voters voted Socialist Party in June 10 second round. However, there were also weaknesses on the part of the Left Front. In the presidential campaign, which was a national campaign par excellence, the difference in program between the Left Front and the Socialist Party was very clear. The legislative campaign was of course a national campaign, but it was also a sum of more than 500 local campaigns. And it appears that the central, national aspect was not sufficiently emphasised and that the case was not sufficiently made as to why it was necessary to have a strong group of Left Front MPs and not just a presidential majority in general. This was particularly necessary given that the first measures of the Socialist Party government led by Jean-Marc Ayrault were well received on the left – 70 per cent of Left Front voters were fairly satisfied with them and 23 per cent very satisfied.
It should also be underlined that the electoral system, one of the most undemocratic in Western Europe, completely distorts the relationship between votes and seats. With proportional representation the PCF would have had 25 seats in 2007 and the Left Front 40 in 2012. Today the Socialist Party would have less than a third of the seats in parliament, as against more than half. When we look at the Left Front results in terms of votes the picture looks brighter. Compared to the PCF in 2007, the Left Front progressed in 90 per cent of the constituencies in metropolitan France. In 330 it scored more than 5 per cent (135 in 2007). In 69 constituencies the score of the Left Front was between 10 and 20 per cent (37 in 2007). In 26 out of the 95 departments in metropolitan France the score in 2012 was more than double that in 2007 and in eight it more than tripled. However, at the top end of the scale the number of constituencies where the score was over 20 per cent fell slightly from 23 to 20, thus not reversing a long-term trend.
As the historian Roger Martelli put it in an analysis of the first round, the foundations are becoming stronger, but the roof is fragile. You don't need to be an architect to know that that is better than the other way around (which was the tendency before). But that's a long-term view and in the short term seats were lost. However, they were mostly narrowly lost. Less than 5000 votes, distributed in the right places, would have secured six more MPs, mostly the sitting ones who were defeated despite their vote rising by between 2 and 4 per cent compared to 2007 – but the Socialist Party vote rose more.
Following on the legislative elections the PCF took a decision on whether to participate in the Ayrault government. Whereas the other components of the Left Front had made it clear during the campaign that they would not go into government with the Socialist Party, the PCF had always said that it would take its decision after the legislative elections. However it was pretty clear what the decision would be for anyone listening to what PCF leaders were saying during the campaign.
The SP was not going to modify its program to accommodate the Left Front and the PCF was not going to go into government to apply the program of the Socialist Party. The only thing worth noting was the scale of the refusal. At a PCF National Council meeting on June 18, 2012, a three-point resolution was adopted. The first point stressed the importance of taking political initiatives and mobilising to impose radical policies. Second, it was decided that the conditions did not exist for the PCF to take part in the government, though leaving open the possibility that these conditions could change in the future. Third, the continuation and reinforcement of the strategy of the Left Front was reaffirmed. The resolution was adopted by 93 for, 11 against and 17 abstentions. A consultative vote of party members in their branches on June 18-19 produced a majority of 93.44 per cent. The final decision was taken by 500 delegates at a national conference on June 20, with four against and 16 abstentions.
Where Next?
Where does the Left Front go from here? It is faced with a number of challenges. First of all, there are no more elections until 2014. It will therefore have to act and build its forces and support through extra-parliamentary mobilizations. The circumstances in which it will have to do this are those of a left government with a solid majority in the National Assembly (less solid in the Senate, where it depends on the Left Front). Obviously no one expects Francois Hollande to conduct an anti-capitalist policy. He wasn't elected to do that. But he was elected to break with Sarkozyism and take measures in favour of working people.
In fact he is trying to conduct a policy where there will be some austerity for working people but also to repeal or modify Sarkozy's measures, raise taxes on the rich and seek to protect employment. He is much criticized for this, both by employers’ circles in France and internationally. So far he has sometimes wobbled; he has certainly not done enough, but not completely capitulated.
But he has capitulated on one thing. He has not succeeded in renegotiating the treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG) and he is nevertheless proposing to have it ratified by parliament in September 2012. In this he is not only going back on his electoral promise, he is making a stick for his own back. He is giving the European Commission the right to exert pressure on his budget. And that is important in a situation where Hollande and his government will be subject to all sorts of pressure from European institutions, from other national governments, from the markets to get into line, to carry out labour reforms, pension reforms and cuts in the public sector – the well-worn litany. Some people in the Socialist Party will relay this pressure, some will resist it.
How should the Left Front act now? Carefully. The odds are that as time passes, the Hollande government will gradually cede to the pressures and get into line, and the Left Front will have to oppose that. But announcing today that it will be a left opposition to Hollande, as some on the far left do, is not the answer. The danger in the present situation is that the Socialist Party government will disillusion and anger its supporters and the right will come back in 2017, as it did in 1986, 1993 and 2002. And it will be a very dangerous right wing, closer to the extreme right. The Left Front cannot necessarily stop the drift of the Socialist Party. But it can oppose it from the left and not just oppose but systematically present the outlines of a left alternative. That implies being lucid as to the Socialist Party's limits, but ready to support any move in a left direction and only to move into sharp opposition as it becomes clearly (to many of those who voted for Hollande) necessary. Let us recall the figures already quoted: 30 per cent of those who voted for Hollande on April 22 hesitated about voting for Melenchon; 38 per cent of those who voted for Melenchon on April 22 voted Socialist Party on June 10.
That shows that there is a large body of opinion between the hard-core support of the Left Front and the Socialist Party, enough to shift the balance of forces on the left, one way or another. Indeed, within the PS itself there is a left current of about 22 deputies led by Benoit Hamon who may decide to vote against the fiscal pact, as did 23 SPD deputies with whom they are in contact. It would be unwise to have too many illusions there, but would be equally wrong to write them off in advance.
An indication of the tactical choices facing the Left Front is given by how it votes in parliament. When there was a vote of confidence in the Ayrault government, the choice was to abstain – no overall confidence, but not frontal opposition. As the government now presents a much revised (compared to the preceding government's) budget for the remainder of 2012, particularly concerning taxes on companies and wealthy individuals, the Left Front parliamentarians are voting for it, while pointing to the contradiction of adopting the fiscal pact. When the pact comes before parliament, the vote will certainly be against.
Organization
The other problem for the Left Front is how it will organize itself. The original three components have now grown to eight. They include the ex-Chevenementists of Republic and Socialism, the Federation for a Social and Ecological Alternative (FASE), and two currents from the NPA – Convergence and Alternative and the Anticapitalist Left. The first broke away after the regional elections and the 2011 NPA congress and involved mostly people already critical of the leadership. The second has only just joined the Left Front and involves about half of the leadership that led the process of dissolving the LCR and founding the NPA.
One challenge is to get all these components working harmoniously together. The other is what to do with the not inconsiderable number of people who support the Left Front and would join it individually if it were possible. That would be a step forward, but a big step. It is one thing to organize individual supporters during an election campaign, as was done. It is another to say that what began as a cartel of organizations will now have individual members. But calls for this are being made and it might happen.
Of course, the simplest thing would be for the Left Front to become a party. But that would be a huge step and it seems clear that most members of the PCF in particular are not ready for that. It might also be difficult to reconcile the different ways of functioning of the PCF and the Left Party. But things can evolve. Speaking of the process that is underway of transforming Greece's SYRIZA coalition into a party, now supported by an overwhelming majority, party spokesperson Panos Skourletis remarked that “the crisis has changed all political parties, and things that would have once taken decades to achieve come to fruition much more quickly.” Let us hope it will not take decades for the Left Front to become a party, but if it happens, it will certainly take more than a few months.
Left Criticism
In the criticisms of the Left Front by the NPA and others, in France and internationally, we find characterizations that range from it being “left reformist” and “anti-liberal” (hence not anti-capitalist) to “institutional.” This is essentially sterile and designed to draw a line of demarcation, implying that those who make such criticisms are themselves the real revolutionaries and anti-capitalists.
“A revolutionary party is not a party which is for the revolution, it is a party which has a program and a strategy for making the revolution. ”
Guillaume Liegard, a leading member of the NPA and now of the Anticapitalist Left group wrote last year, in a contribution to the debate on strategy in the NPA, that “a revolutionary party is not a party which is for the revolution, it is a party which has a program and a strategy for making the revolution. It is an understatement to say that it is quite presumptuous of us to think that we have those two things.”
Liegard is quite clearly right, and what he says punches a hole in the idea that there are “strategic differences” between the NPA and the Left Front. If you do not have a strategy how can you have strategic differences? You can of course have concrete differences; you can also have ideological generalizations and preconceptions which do not take you very far.
Does the Left Front itself have a worked-out strategy and a program? Not at this stage. But it has a definite anti-capitalist objective and a practice that combines electoral campaigns and work in representative institutions with extra-parliamentary mobilizations, seeking to combine the two, and it can evolve further. It will be judged now by its ability to face up to the challenges in the new political situation. The first test will be to see how strong a campaign can be waged against the signing of the fiscal pact.
Lastly, the Left Front is part of a process of a new rise of the radical left in Europe. It is uneven, there are difficulties in Germany and Italy, for example, and successes in Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and above all Greece, as well as in France. But the overall trend is positive, the contacts are regular, particularly through the European Left Party, and people follow and analyse what is happening elsewhere. That, as well as the effects of the ongoing European crisis, can serve to accelerate the process. •
Murray Smith is a member of the anti-capitalist party Dei Lenk (The Left) in Luxembourg. This article first appeared on the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal website.
Global Research Articles by Murray Smith
Labels: FRANCE, SOCIALISM
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Hollande's election progressive - Chitala
By Allan Mulenga
Thu 10 May 2012, 17:40 CAT
DR Mbita Chitala has asked newly-elected France President Francois Hollande to come up with progressive policies towards African countries.
Commenting on Hollande's election as France's first left-wing President in 17 years, Dr Chitala, who is Zambia Research Foundation executive director, said the victory was a clear testimony that social democracy was on the rise.
"The election of Francois Hollande as France President is obviously very progressive. You can see that social democracy is on the rise.
They had this issue of austerity and making people suffer should not be the function of governments and states. The purpose of governments is to make people happy and that is why even the conservatives in London, United Kingdom during the last elections lost by more than 400 councils and Labour Party, which has a social programme was elected," he said.
Dr Chitala, who is also former ambassador to Libya, said Nicolas Sarkozy was rejected because of bad policies, particularly towards African countries.
"As you know he was a person who even caused the invasion of Libya, where I was last ambassador in a sphere where the African Union was seeking for diplomatic solutions. For us really it is good for Africa and we also hope that Mr Hollande can come up with progressive policies towards Africa. He has not yet announced what programmes he has for Africa particularly in Franco-Africa where they had used troops in Ivory Coast and we need to know," he said.
Dr Chitala hoped that President Hollande would be supportive to the AU and the entire continent.
"By and large, the election of President Francois Hollande appears to be a progressive thing. We are looking forward that he will be much more supportive of the African Union and formulate programmes which powerful countries are involved in," said Dr Chitala.
Labels: ELECTIONS, FRANCE, MBITA CHITALA, SOCIALISM
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‘Libya funded Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign’
Friday, 04 May 2012 00:00
TUNIS —
The late Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime funded French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign, lawyers for former Libyan prime minister Baghdadi al-Mahmudi said yesterday, quoting their client.
“Muammar Gaddafi, his regime and the officials who worked with him
financed Sarkozy’s election campaign in 2007,” lawyer Bechir Essed told reporters in Tunis, where Mahmudi is detained, mentioning the sum of some 50 million euros (US$65 million). Essed’s claims came after
the French Mediapart website published a document on Saturday which it said showed Libya’s financing of Sarkozy’s campaign.
Sarkozy has angrily dismissed Mediapart’s document as a deliberate forgery timed to destabilise his re-election campaign and is taking legal action against the website.
According to Essed, the deal was concluded by former Libyan intelligence chief Moussa Kussa on the instructions of Kadhafi and that “documents proving the transaction exist.”
Another lawyer for Mahmudi, who is facing two demands for extradition to Tripoli, confirmed the claim, adding that his client believes Sarkozy is behind his detention in Tunisia.
“My arrest and my detention in Tunisia were instigated by the French president so that the details of the financing of his 2007 campaign are not revealed,” Mahmudi said, according to his lawyer Mabrouk Kourchid.
A Tunisian court in February cleared Mahmudi of crossing illegally into Tunisia as he fled Libya last year but kept him in prison.
He remains the subject of two extradition requests from Libya, and Kourchid said he had been admitted to hospital on Wednesday after suffering a haemorrhage.
Mediapart on Saturday posted what it said was a 2006 document signed by Kussa referring to an “agreement in principle to support the 2007 campaign for the candidate for the presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy, for a sum equivalent to 50 million euros.”
Sarkozy, who faces a tough second-round vote on Sunday against Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in his bid to win a second presidential term, dismissed it as a “crude forgery” and said he was taking legal action against Mediapart. — AFP.
Labels: FRANCE, LIBYA, MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, SARKOZY
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May 25: Africa's denouement or upward dash?
Friday, 27 May 2011 22:15
THIS week - the week of Africa - saw the MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, paying a visit to an unusual quarter, Gabon.
For those of us not too familiar with maps and places, Gabon is a beautiful coastal central African state abutting the Atlantic, and standing between the two Congos and the aforesaid ocean.
Apart from being an African country, there has not been much traffic between Gabon and Zimbabwe, although there was quite some warmth between its long long-serving President, one Omar Bongo, now late, and President Mugabe.
The late Omar Bongo was succeeded by his son, Ali Bongo, in August 2009, getting formally sworn in on October 16 after resolution to disputed elections. Until now, the last contact between Zimbabwe and Gabon was in 2007 in Portugal, in the context of the EU-Africa Summit when the late President sought Zimbabwe's support for the candidature of Jean Ping as Chairman of the African Union Commission.
In February 2008, Ping succeeded Alpha Konare as AU Commission Chairman, with the support of Zimbabwe.
The irony of representation
Apart from producing a high-ranking official for the African Union, Gabon, alongside South Africa and Nigeria, represents the African sub-continent in the United Nations Security Council.
Both Gabon and Nigeria won the right to represent Africa in the powerful world body when Libya was President of the General Assembly. Read against the subsequent decision by these three African countries - Gabon and Nigeria included - to support Resolution 1973 which legitimised the Nato assault on Libya, nothing could be more ironic.
Important, classified!
As should be apparent already, there is little connecting Zimbabwe and Gabon, which is what made the MDC-T leader's visit there quite curious. Importantly, the visit evolved after it became clear Tsvangirai was not going to be invited to the Windhoek Sadc Summit held last week, towards which his party had invested and deployed heavily. The information that Tsvangirai would not be invited to Windhoek, reached him while in South Africa, which is where he then picked a private jet to get to Gabon. That leg of his private jetted itinerary kept him away from the all-important Tuesday Cabinet meeting. That suggests whatever he was transacting in Gabon must have been important, very important.
Back home that same Tuesday, Tsvangirai never shared with the media what it is that had taken him to this striking destination. To this day, he has not done so. That, too, suggests that whatever it is he transacted in Gabon must have been classified, very classified. I will come back to both points.
Africa Day
I called this week Africa Week. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was launched on May 25, 1963 in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Then on, May 25 became an important day for the continent.
We call it the Africa Day and all countries endeavour to mark it variously as the continent's birthday.
Zimbabwe did no less this year and heartily, one notes that the national media went out of the way to educate the public on the importance of the day.
When the burkhah ornaments someone's war
But what marks off this particular commemorative day from preceding ones is that it found a part of the continent under armed attack from Nato countries, led principally by the United States of America, France, Britain and Italy, apart from smaller states from the enlarged EU, including one or two from the Nordic.
I am referring to the UN-sanctioned attack on Libya by Western countries, which is thinly legitimised by the participation of little Arab states of Jordan, UAE and Qatar. Turkey, a big Muslim country, is proving a difficult customer, but has, nevertheless been used to sell the invasion.
It has refused to lift any of its fighter planes, battle ships, to drop any of its ordinances, against Libya, even though it stands with the invaders, Jordan, Qatar and UAE have made a combioned contribution of 125 soldiers in a campaign whose personnel strength is 12 909; contributed 32 fighter crafts to a combined total of 309; have not made made a single sortie between them since the beginning of hostilities, as against 5 857 done until May 5.
Headache on creation day
Read all this against 8 507 US servicemen, 1 300 British military personnel, 800 Frenchmen, 560 Canadian, 500 Spaniards, 170 Belgians and 120 Danes, and then you know whose war this is.
Read all this against 153 American warplanes which have done combined 2 000 sorties; 28 British warplanes accounting for 1 300 sorties; 29 French crafts with 1 200 sorties and Italy's 12 crafts with their 600 sorties, and you have an idea who is incinerating that portion of the continent.
US' 12 battleships, France's 6, Italy's 4 and UK's 3 have lobbed 246 missiles to reduce Libya to a finer, well-scorched desert. This is the little homework that the West has served Africa on the eve of its creation day.
The Obama of Mayflower roots
The beauty of the cynicism does not end there. On Africa day, Obama and Cameron paid more tribute to Africa by announcing they would ratchet up pressure against Gaddafi who must be found and killed, in the name of founding and launching a new Libya.
Attack helicopter gunships would now be dispatched to engage units of Libyan Government troops while insurgents of the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council (TNC) would be trained and equipped by Nato, so as to tilt the balance towards a "democratic outcome".
With costs surpassing the 100m-pound mark, Libya is beginning to play home for Cameron whose generals and admirals are getting agitated by a Muammar Gaddafi who won't fall quickly. They want the UN mandate expanded to allow boots on Libyan soil, which means boots on African soil.
Obama, our Obama, is an aggressive part of the piece, the most aggressive part in fact. You would think his grandparents stepped out of Mayflower, this first black President of America, roots well bedecked by lumpy nodes of Kenyan soil. What a way to mark Africa day!
Did this column not make the point in that speculative phase of Obama's presidency? That America had given itself an Afro-Arab president so it can assault both peoples without the charge of racism? How sad it is to be vindicated! Any cynicism, good Lord!
All those buzzing fighter planes are enforcing a no-fly zone threatened by a Libya that has not a single plane in the air, that cannot have a single plane in the air without being foolhardy and quixotic!
And, civilians are protected by massive bombs and eyeless missiles lobbied on Tripoli from the sea! A brave new world indeed!
A French president for Africa
The preceding would make Africans, any thinking African, hopelessly existential. Misanthropic even. You cannot celebrate your being this way without feeling your own humanity collapsing.
Few weeks back, the continent faced another bout of humiliation in Ivory Coast when another war, little this time, was settled by France's Force Republic, bearing UN helmets and epaulettes.
I don't care what you think about Gbagbo, but no one - no one - has the right to be put in an African office by volleys from the same guns that colonised us. Ouattara can win many times, become Ivorian a thousand times but the fact is he is France's president for Ivory Coast whom Sarkozy picked in neighboring Burkina Faso, gave over to the IMF for training, before foisting him on Ivorians through force of French arms.
Ecowas acquiesced, Africa acquiesced. Both were unclear that far, far worse than an undemocratic Africa is an enslaved neo-colonial Africa. So overall, there was lots of food for thought for Africa on it's creation day, but hardly any for its stomach, to adapt words of a well-known Nigerian writer.
When misanthropy does not make history
As Africans, we must resist pessimism or misanthropy. Both sentiments do not make history. After all, Africa today cannot be worse than Africa of the 1960s when most of it was under colonialism and when all seemed bleak.
Someone surmounted that engulfing bleakness to see the hope beyond. Almost 40 years later, Africa became politically free, creating the new situation we now have today. It was precisely those stolid challenges in the 1960s which defined struggles for the founding fathers of the continent.
Similarly, it is the challenges of today - Libya included - which must define present struggles. And these struggles are being fought gallantly, with real victories registering.
The only difference is that these fights are still incipient and isolated, vis-a-vis the scope of the problem, and the extent of the continent.
The week preceding Africa's week, and the African week itself saw two major breakthroughs which are indicative of brighter things to come, against the backdrop of the seeming bleakness.
Dismantling the UK Tribunal in Sadc
The recent Sadc Extraordinary Summit held in Windhoek, Namibia took a far-reaching decision regarding Southern Africa's restitution programme, especially as this relates to the land question.
Simply, it dismantled the so-called Sadc Tribunal, which in its working reality had become UK or White Colonial Farmer Tribunal, reinforced of course by German and Afrikaner landed interests.
As always, we stumble and stagger our way to correctness. Having been tasked to re-examine the role of the Tribunal and its judgments, ministers of Justice and the region's Attorneys General inexplicably decided to farm out this most sensitive assignment to a white Briton - as a consultant - regardless of all considerations of history and ethnicity, sorry, of kith and kin. I had forgotten children of the Missis have no ethnicity. Only natives do! As expected, the report and its recommendations were just outrageously offensive, but helpfully defined how-not-to-do-it for the Grouping. After all it takes an ugly girl to appreciate a village beauty! That bad report stirred regional nationalist feelings which guided Sadc to the correct decision.
Wholly British funded
A Tribunal which had no law to guide it, had catapulted itself to transnational, trans-justice status that made it a court of first and last instance. Before its ethereal stool, all Chief Justices and all Supreme Courts in the region had become mere groveling mortals, mere buildings respectively. For here was one Court, wholly British funded, wholly white in legal sensibility, wholly anti-liberation in politics, perched at the helm. Its jurisdiction would be as expansive as God's, all not just in current and forward time, but also in time past. This explained why its judgments on Zimbabwe challenged the goals of our founding process, the liberation struggle, to three cheers from Rhodesians first, and Afrikaners and Germans who saw whirlpool events in Zimbabwe as a terrible augury of things to come.
It did not need to be deterred by the region's multiple legal traditions: Roman Dutch, French, Portuguese. It did not need to be detained by the question of which body of law, which tenets from these diverse legal traditions it was going to rely on for adjudication. But on that ordinary Friday in Windhoek, Sadc took a decision for Africa and its founding goals.
When democracy is a sovereign challenge
The following week on a Wednesday, itself Africa Day, Africa convened in Addis Ababa. More history was made and we must take note. I isolate three decisions and the accompanying sentiments.
The Western assault on Libya, much like the British consultant's report, got Africa to examine its values, instruments, accession and membership to international treaties and bodies respectively.
Africa grappled with the issue of democracy, arguably for the first time deeply from the perspective of her own interests, as opposed to the interests of prescriptive, overweening imperialists.
Examples were summoned: Uganda under Idi Amin; South Africa under apartheid; and, Ethiopia itself under Mengistu. In all these situations and many more, democracy came from internal forces in struggle. It never dropped from Nato fighter crafts, rained on democracy-starved climes like missiles off the Mediterranean, as is the case presently in Libya.
That kind of democracy, underlined President Zenawi, himself a symbol of post-independence armed democratic struggles, is simply bogus. He went further: the achievement of democracy in a country is the sovereign right and challenge for those who belong to it.
If they want it now, well and good; if they want it much later in generations to come, tough luck. But no country, great or small, neighbouing or faraway, friendly or hostile, has a right, any right, to demand, struggle for, or impose democracy on another.
The Constitutive Act, our Koran as the AU, shall be revisited to clinch that principle which is consistent with the UN principle of non-interference. Anyway, Africa had the same principle before the ill-wind of donors blew it away.
Protests of insurrections
Balancing off that major point of principle, was a recognition that a people to whom avenues to peaceful protest, assembly and expression are closed, reserve the right to take up arms against an unjust, oppressive system.
But Africa drew a clear distinction between bona fide protests - themselves legitimate avenues in a democratic society - and armed insurrections, as happened in Libya.
Attacking army barracks and aligning oneself with foreign forces amount to a new situation which the AU cannot condone in the name of democracy or that of ousting a dictatorship.
Africa is opposed to coups; Africa is opposed to invasions. This could not have come any clearer than it did in Addis.
Challenging Africa's geography
Foreign interference in the affairs of Africa was roundly decried, with the Summit lamenting the sidelining of Africa in the resolution of the Libyan situation. A few days before, security councils of both Africa and EU had met in the same city. It became very clear Europe had little respect for the natives whom it collectively and contemptuously regarded as "its natives".
Challenged on the sidelining of Africa on the issue of Libya, the Europeans stated bellicosely that Libya was no just African; it was Mediterranean and Arab also. It then became clear to sleepy Africa why Sarkozy was pushing for an association of Mediterranean states a few years back. It also became clear why the resolution of the Arab League was pushed for by Europe in the run-up to aggression against Libya.
In that meeting, Europe challenged Africa's view of its own geography, of Africa, the extent of its territorial claims and integrity. Besides, Nato had also stopped an AU ad-hoc committee from reaching Libya, just a day or so before the attack on Libya.
French Ambassador to Mauritania, itself leader of the AU Committee, told African leaders they could no longer reach Libya as hostilities would commence shortly. In other words, the AU could not reach a part of Africa without a say-so from Nato!
The fools who rushed
But that is not the issue, painful though that is. The issue is Africa took a decision to forcefully oppose what is happening in Libya, including forcing a review action in the United Nations.
Africa showed the courage to confront its past naivety when it shared signatures with imperialism, all against itself and its well-being. It also emerged from that meeting that countries who committed Africa to UN Resolution 1973 are now regretful of their actions, more or less the same way the three countries which had ratified the Sadc Tribunal regretted and recanted positions in Windhoek.
As the Mauritian leader said in Windhoek, like a fool, Africa was now paying the price of treading where angels fear to!
ICC, another string on an unholy bow
Matters went much further. As if pulverising Libya was not bad enough, the assaulting nations also deployed the International Criminal Court against Gaddafi, to make sure if he is not killed in action, he is put out of circulation through phony legal processes.
It has become clear to Africa that apart from soldiers, guns, warplanes, battleships, helicopters and missiles, ICC is another string on the western bow. Its history, its victims, does illustratively tell the sorry story. Africa is contemplating a drastic and dramatic one against this western kangaroo court.
Africa needs courage and the intervening months will definitely show and test Africa's resolve to be anything but an underdog.
Endnote and our Prime Minister
Back to our Prime Minister and his Gabonese peregrinations. What is the man up to? What is he looking for in the beautiful marshes of Gabon? To answer this, you have to know why the two MDCs and their Western handlers hailed their preferred reading of the Troika Summit held in Livngstone. Britain, helped by France and the US, badly needs and is frantically cultivating a rupture between Zimbabwe and Sadc in a way reminiscent of a similar one between Ivory Coast and Ecowas, or Libya, the Arab League and, cirumstantially, Africa.
Divest of its regional cover, any country becomes vulnerable, although not necessarily conquerable. The latter depends on its resources, on its defences. France is or has taken over the presidency of the UN Security Council. It thinks it can return the British favor on Ivory Coast and on Libya. Sarkozy has already given Zimbabwe notice. But, these countries need the UN in the Zimbabwe situation, if not by way of peacekeepers and election supervisors, certainly by way of a resolution, preferably under Chapter VII.
South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon become key. In the case of Gabon, it is doubly key in that it delivers a UN vote and a Jean Ping. A second Libya on the continent needs a fumbling AU. The hope is that Gabon becomes another Burkina Faso in the 2008 attempt to put Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council, an attempt which collapsed so spectacularly, but without foreclosing any such attempts in future.
The dangerous blunder-and-regret approach of our southern neighbor means Zimbabwe's eggs need a wider African basket, need a wider world basket than it needed under Thabo's South Africa.
After all, as became very clear in the case of Libya, Resolution 1973 could have been defeated with better African judgment, coupled with a more progressive Libyan policy than that of futilely seeking to appease the West.
There was enough goodwill and readiness to vote against or veto 1973. What lacked was Afro-Arab leadership, and better diplomacy from Libya. What also lacks now is creative national defence strategies on the part of Libya. As for our Prime Minister, well, well, well! He has no blood on his clean hands, has he?
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: FRANCE, LIBYA, NEOCOLONIALISM
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Wikileaks reveal U.S. conspired to retaliate against European nations if they resisted GMOs
Global Research, March 10, 2011
Natural News - 2010-12-10
by Mike Adams
Wikileaks continues to rock the political world by shedding light on conspiracies, corruption and cover-ups. The latest batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveals what can only be characterized as a U.S.-led conspiracy to force GMOs onto European countries by making those countries pay a steep price if they resist.
The cable reveals the words of
Craig Stapleton, the US ambassador to France, who was
pushing the commercial interests of the biotech industry by attempting to
force GMOs into France. In his own words (below), he expresses his
frustration with the idea that
France might pass environmental laws that would hamper the expansion of GMOs:
"Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue with France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the [European] Commission... Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voice."
Got that so far? His own words: "Retaliation" as a way to "make [it] clear" that resisting GMOs will have a price.
Stapleton goes on to say something rather incredible:
"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory..."
As you read these words again, remember that these are the words of the U.S. ambassador to France who is suggesting the US "calibrate a target retaliation list" in order to "cause some pain across the EU" that must be "sustainable over the long term."
The global GMO conspiracy is no longer a theory
Need we say anything more? This cable proves, once and for all, that there is a global GMO conspiracy where government operatives work in secret to push Monsanto's GMO agenda while punishing opponents of GMOs and adding them to a "target retaliation list."
This cable also proves that NaturalNews has been right all along about the GMO conspiracy, and that GMO opponents such as Jeffrey Smith are battling what can only be called an evil conspiracy to control the world's food supply. It also proves that when Alex Jones talks about the global conspiracy to control the world food supply, he's not just ranting. He's warning about the reality of the world in which we now live.
As Jeffery Smith said today in a Democracy Now interview:
"We’ve been saying for years that the United States government is joined at the hip with Monsanto and pushing GMOs as part of Monsanto’s agenda on the rest of the world. This lays bare the mechanics of that effort. We have Craig Stapleton, the former ambassador to France, specifically asking the U.S. government to retaliate and cause some harm throughout the European Union." (Source: Democracy Now)
Military terms
Do you notice something about these words used by the US ambassador to France? "Calibrate a target retaliation list" sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? It's the kind of language you might find tossed around in a military bombing war exercise.
That's no coincidence: These government operatives quite literally consider themselves to be at war with the world, and they intend to conquer the world with their genetically modified poisons. They will do anything, it seems, to force-feed their deadly crops to the public.
Eight important realizations from these leaks
This Wikileaks cable brings up all sorts of issues that each might deserve a separate article, but here are the highlights of what comes to my mind on this issue:
Realization #1) Wikileaks is valuable for exposing the government lies in our world. Without Wikileaks, we never would have known about these cables which prove the existence of this GMO conspiracy.
Realization #2) US government diplomatic officials are working for the corporations! It's just as we've described here on NaturalNews numerous times -- Big Government is really just an extension of the most evil and most powerful corporations that now dominate our planet: The drug companies, the weapons manufacturers, the agricultural giants and so on. Here's what Jeffrey Smith had to say about governments conspiring with Monsanto:
"In 2009, we have a cable from the ambassador to Spain from the United States asking for intervention there, asking the government to help formulate a biotech strategy and support the government -- members of the government in Spain that want to promote GMOs, as well. And here, they specifically indicate that they sat with the director of Monsanto for the region and got briefed by him about the politics of the region and created strategies with him to promote the GMO agenda."
Realization #3) The US is willing to retaliate against European countries if they try to block GMOs. This brings up the question: Why is the US so desperate to push GMOs on Europe? Clearly there is another agenda behind all this (maybe we'll learn more in future Wikileaks releases).
Realization #4) No wonder the US government has declared war on Wikileaks because these dark secrets and "conspiracy notes" are never made public through any normal means. It takes a whistleblower to expose the true government corruption taking place in our world today.
Realization #5) The GMO conspiracy reaches to the highest levels of global control. This US ambassador Stapleton wasn't just a nobody. He was, in fact, the co-owner of the Texas Rangers with former President George W. Bush! His wife, by the way, is George Bush's cousin. This is a conspiracy involving the highest-ranking officials across multiple countries who are pushing a GMO agenda that's poisoning people across the planet.
Realization #6) Governments are literally trying to kill their own people. It is widely known in the inner circles of power that GMOs are deadly, but governments keep pushing them anyway. As Jeffrey Smith explains in his interview with Democracy Now:
"...the person who was in charge of FDA policy in 1992, Monsanto’s former attorney, Michael Taylor, he allowed GMOs on the market without any safety studies and without labeling, and the policy claimed that the agency was not aware of any information showing that GMOs were significantly different. Seven years later, because of a lawsuit, 44,000 secret internal FDA memos revealed that that policy was a lie. Not only were the scientists at the FDA aware that GMOs were different, they had warned repeatedly that they might create allergies, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems. But they were ignored, and their warnings were even denied, and the policy went forth allowing the deployment GMOs into the food supply with virtually no safety studies."
Realization #7) The GMO conspiracy is always reframed as "science". At one point in the leaked cables, Stapleton warns that in opposing GMOs, France would "roll back established science-based decision making." The GMO conspiracy, you have to remember, is always hidden behind the term "science" so that anyone who opposes GMOs can be characterized as being somehow against "scientific thinking."
All this gives science a bad name, of course, but I suppose that since the history of science is filled with arrogant scientists poisoning people in the name of science (mercury, vaccines, radiation, plastics, medications, etc.), we shouldn't be all that surprised to observe this.
Realization #8) Spain has been a key co-conspirator to push the U.S. GMO agenda. Much of the conspiring taking place in the EU has been spearheaded by Spain, whose officials met personally with the head of Monsanto to plot their push of GMOs into Europe.
All of a sudden the Blackwater story adds up
This all reminds me of a story published a few months back by The Nation in which Jeremy Scahill exposed a link between Monsanto and the military contractor known as Blackwater. His article claimed that Monsanto had hired Blackwater spies to "infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm." (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/16/disney-monsanto-discovered-blackwaters-hidden-clients/)
Monsanto vehemently denied the allegation. I looked hard at covering that story at the time but could not substantiate the accusations to my satisfaction. However, given the new information gleaned from these leaked diplomatic cables -- which blatantly state that the GMO conspirators plan to "calibrate a target retaliation list" -- all of a sudden the Blackwater story adds up.
This is the verbage of a military-style retaliation campaign, and that's exactly the business of Blackwater. Remember how Stapleton said the US needed to "cause some pain?" That's Blackwater's calling card!
Although these cables don't prove any connection between Monsanto and Blackwater, they do lend credence to the idea that such a link is not only possibly, but perhaps even probable. It clearly deserves additional investigation.
Regardless of whether the Blackwater / Monsanto link is ever proven, what's crystal clear from all this is that the global GMO conspiracy is very real and that GMO conspirators plot retaliatory actions against any nation that refuses to allow GMOs into their country.
The whole thing is then disguised as "science" so that anyone who opposes it can be branded as "non-scientific." This is the same sick way in which vaccines are pushed, too: They're called "scientific" even when they're based entirely on scientific fraud (as are GMOs).
How governments really operate
Above all, what these Wikileaks cables really reveal is that government conspiracies are, of course, not only real but that they are taking place right now. Diplomats and ambassadors are, in effect, government thugs who engage in the most unethical actions, full of threats and retaliation, in order to serve the financial interests of their corporate masters.
That's how the world really works, despite the Disney-like image portrayed by the mainstream media. Behind the scenes, the U.S. government is literally plotting with Monsanto to take over the world's food supply. That is not an exaggeration. It's not conjecture. It is a statement of fact based on the words of the government's own operatives (who obviously didn't know their words would ever be made public).
Through Wikileaks, we have been given a glimpse into the truth behind the Great Wall of government lies. And that truth, it turns out, is a lot uglier than most people could have imagined. (It's no surprise to me, because I've seen things that most regular people have never witnessed. But to a regular Joe Blow working his J.O.B. and watching the evening news, the hard-core truth about the world is a bit too much to handle...)
Personally, I can't wait to see what other dark secrets are buried in these Wikileaks cables. And it all makes me wish we had a Wikileaks for the FDA, too. Can you imagine all the dirty secrets that would come out of the FDA's offices if we could read their emails? We need an FDA leaker.
The other thought that comes to mind is how much I wouldn't want to be Julian Assange right now. His head is now the world's most powerful bullet magnet... especially when government rifles are anywhere nearby. If the U.S. government would conspire to create a "retaliation target list" of nations that are merely resisting GMOs, can you imagine what they will do if they ever get their hands on Assange?
Read the leaked cables right here:
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2008/02/08MADRID98.html
and
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/05/09MADRID482.html
(Note: These links may not be active for very long because the governments of the world are obviously trying to shut down all the websites that post this information. The truth, it seems, is just too dangerous to allow it to be openly published.)
How to turn all this around
Don't let all this get you down. You can take action to help turn this around!
Action Item #1) Don't buy GMO foods! Look for the non-GMO "Project Verified" label on foods.
Action Item #2) Urge lawmakers to oppose GMOs or require honest GMO labeling of foods.
Action Item #3) Help support the Institute for Responsible Technology and other non-profits working to oppose GMOs.
Action Item #4) Stay informed! Read NaturalNews and our Facebook GMO Dangers page (www.facebook.com/GMO.dangers) to stay up on this issue. The IRT (above) will keep you even more deeply informed on GMOs.
Action Item #5) Share what you know! Share videos, cartoons, articles and websites with your friends and family members who also care about protecting their health from GMOs.
Action Item #6) Don't trust the government! They are pushing a GMO conspiracy. They don't want you to have natural food, and the FDA is now being unleashed under the new food safety bill to destroy small farmers who tend to use non-GMO crops. Fight against government encroachment of our natural right to grow honest food. Support food freedom!
Global Research Articles by Mike Adams
Labels: FRANCE, GMOS, NEOLIBERALISM, USA
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France under pressure over Mugabe invitation
By: TH-tzg
Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 1:00 am
PARIS has found itself in a quandary over its hosting of the France-Africa Summit because it does not want to offend fellow EU members by inviting President Mugabe. Britain, Holland and Germany are reportedly pressuring France not to invite President Mugabe.
Elysee Palace — the seat of the French government — has already succumbed to pressure not to invite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. The summit had to be moved from Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak said he would not host it if his Sudanese counterpart was not present.
The West has been trying to isolate President al-Bashir over an International Criminal Court indictment that many feel is contrived and baseless at international law.
Yesterday, Charge d’Affaires at the French Embassy in Harare Mr Dietmar Peprausch said he could not yet comment on President Mugabe’s participation at the summit.
"It is unfortunately too soon to answer to these questions. The invitations for the summit have not yet been sent out."
However, Reuters has reported that invitations have started being sent out with Sudan already receiving such a letter for the May 31 to June 1 meeting in Nice.
President Nicolas Sarkozy recently invited President al-Bashir to send a representative in his stead.
Mr Petrausch responded: "To be more exact, it is not an invitation that President Sarkozy sent to President al-Bashir, but a mere letter to ask him to designate a representative.
"Once we have the name of this representative, we will formally invite him.
"As you know, President al-Bashir is a particular case as he is indicted before the ICC, which is not the case with President Mugabe.
"There are still many other countries for which we did not send the invitations."
Yesterday, diplomatic sources said: "France is still considering what position to take on Zimbabwe.
"They want to go by the African Union position as much as possible and this means inviting President Mugabe.
"That is why they have decided not to invite Niger and Madagascar because the AU does not recognise the governments in those countries.
"But the AU recognises President Mugabe as Head of State and Government and France has found its ego, which wants a large turnout, running contrary to its obligations as an EU member.
"They have been targeting certain countries to find a way of assuaging them in the event that Zimbabwe is not invited.
"They have offered President (Hifikepunye) Pohamba and President (Jacob) Zuma State visits in exchange for their silence on the matter."
The sources said the Namibian and South African leaders had declined to be bribed by something as "cheap" as a State visit.
Another diplomatic source said: "On the last France-Africa Summit, the French position was determined by the majority EU position.
"This time around the rules, so to speak, have changed and they are proceeding by way of consensus.
"So this means if Britain and company can present a compelling case then Zimbabwe will not be invited and vice versa if they can’t.
"But if the case against Zimbabwe was weak for the EU-Africa Summit in Portugal, it is even weaker now.
"France essentially wants to make an omelette without breaking any eggs by having a great turnout while disrespecting AU positions."
In 2007, Zimbabwe rejected a conditional invite to the France-Africa Summit in Cannes.
The French at that time sent former Mozambique president Joachim Chissano with an invitation for President Mugabe.
They wanted him to persuade President Mugabe to decline the invite and instead delegate a representative.
Zimbabwe attended France-Africa summits in 2003 and 2005 as a courtesy.
In 2003, France invited President Mugabe despite Britain’s insistence not to.
In 2007, Portugal invited President Mugabe to the EU-Africa Summit, prompting British Premier Gordon Brown to boycott that meeting, a stance that was dismissed as a damp squib.
Labels: FRANCE, MUGABE
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The hate and the quake in Haiti
January 23, 2010 by: Africa Speaks
By Sir Hilary Beckles
January 23, 2009
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES is in the process of conceiving how best to deliver a major conference on the theme “Rethinking And Rebuilding Haiti”.
I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude and corruption.
Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence, which shows that Haiti’s independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.
The evidence is striking, especially in the context of France.
The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans 50 years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice and liberty.
In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state.
The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation. The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place.
The French, also, declared freedom, fraternity and equality as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.
They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery.
The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony.
As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it — and the people.
The people won a 10-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.
Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.
For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.
The French refused to recognise Haiti’s independence and declared it an illegal pariah state. The Americans, whom the Haitians looked to in solidarity as their mentor in independence, refused to recognise them, and offered solidarity instead to the French.
The British, who were negotiating with the French to obtain the ownership title to Haiti, also moved in solidarity, as did every other nation-state the Western world.
Haiti was isolated at birth — ostracised and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development. It was the most vicious example of national strangulation recorded in modern history. The Cubans, at least, have had Russia, China and Vietnam. The Haitians were alone from inception. The crumbling began.
Then came 1825; the moment of full truth. The republic is celebrating its 21st anniversary. There is national euphoria in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
The economy is bankrupt; the political leadership isolated. The cabinet took the decision that the state of affairs could not continue. The country had to find a way to be inserted back into the world economy.
The French government was invited to a summit. Officials arrived and told the Haitian government that they were willing to recognise the country as a sovereign nation but it would have to pay compensation and reparation in exchange.
The Haitians, with backs to the wall, agreed to pay the French. The French government sent a team of accountants and actuaries into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands, all physical assets, the 500 000 citizens who were formerly enslaved, animals, and all other commercial properties and services.
The sums amounted to 150 million gold francs. Haiti was told to pay this reparation to France in return for national recognition. The Haitian government agreed; payments began immediately. Members of the cabinet were also valued because they had been enslaved people before independence.
Thus began the systematic destruction of the Republic of Haiti. The French government bled the nation and rendered it a failed state. It was a merciless exploitation that was designed and guaranteed to collapse the Haitian economy and society.
Haiti was forced to pay this sum until 1922 when the last instalment was made. During the long 19th century, the payment to France amounted to up to 70 percent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.
Jamaica today pays up to 70 percent in order to service its international and domestic debt.
Haiti was crushed by this debt payment. It descended into financial and social chaos.
The republic did not stand a chance. France was enriched and it took pleasure from the fact that having been defeated by Haitians on the battlefield, it had won on the field of finance.
In the years when the coffee crops failed, or the sugar yield was down, the Haitian government borrowed on the French money market at double the going interest rate in order to repay the French government.
When the Americans invaded the country in the early 20th century, one of the reasons offered was to assist the French in collecting its reparations.
The collapse of the Haitian nation resides at the feet of France and America, especially.
These two nations betrayed, failed and destroyed the dream that was Haiti; crushed to dust in an effort to destroy the flower of freedom and the seed of justice.
Haiti did not fail. It was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition.
The sudden quake has come in the aftermath of summers of hate. In many ways the quake has been less destructive than the hate.
Human life was snuffed out by the quake, while the hate has been a long and inhumane suffocation — a crime against humanity.
During the 2001 UN Conference on Race in Durban, South Africa, strong representation was made to the French government to repay the 150 million francs.
The value of this amount was estimated by financial actuaries as US$21 billion. This sum of capital could rebuild Haiti and place it in a position to re-engage the modern world. It was illegally extracted from the Haitian people and should be repaid.
It is stolen wealth. In so doing, France could discharge its moral obligation to the Haitian people.
For a nation that prides itself in the celebration of modern diplomacy, France, in order to exist with the moral authority of this diplomacy in this post-modern world, should do the just and legal thing. Such an act at the outset of this century would open the door for a sophisticated interface of past and present, and set the Haitian nation free at last.
*Sir Hilary Beckles is pro-vice-chancellor and Principal of the Cave Hill Campus, UWI.
Labels: COLONIALISM, FRANCE, HAITI, NEOCOLONIALISM, REPARATIONS
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France criticizes US over Afghan policy
AFP.
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:29:00 +0000
FRENCH Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner hit out at the United States and Germany for failing to co-ordinate on Nato policy and branded Afghan President Hamid Karzai "corrupt", in remarks reported yesterday.
According to the New York Times, Kouchner complained that President Barack Obama’s US administration was trying to draw up a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan without consulting its European allies in Nato.
At the same briefing, according to the Financial Times, Kouchner told reporters that Europe had failed to agree its own policy on Afghanistan, partly because German soldiers "are not there to fight". "What is the goal? What is the road? And in the name of what?" Kouchner asked, according to the New York Times report.
"Where are the Americans? It begins to be a problem . . . We need to talk to each other as allies."
Asked about Nato policy, Kouchner said: "It’s not working at all."
"Even as Europeans, we are not talking to each other," he said, according to the Financial Times’ account of the meeting. "This is ridiculous. This is shameful because our soldiers are dying."
The French minister said any new strategy would involve working closely with newly re-appointed Afghan leader Karzai, despite concerns about ballot rigging and corruption at the heart of his regime.
"Karzai is corrupt, OK," he said, according to the Times’ report. "We have to legitimise him."
Karzai was named president for his second term on Monday after a chaotic election in which the first round was marred by massive fraud and the second round abandoned after his main opponent dropped out in disgust.
Nevertheless, Kouchner said the allies had no choice but to work with Karzai in order to get the mission in Afghanistan back on track and build a state capable of protecting its people and holding of the Taliban.
Kouchner’s spokesman Bernard Valero did not deny the frank comments had been made, but sought to put his criticism of allies in a broader context.
On Germany, whose forces in Afghanistan operate under tight rules which limit their ability to go on the offensive, he said: "Bernard Kouchner had the opportunity to talk on this subject with his German counterpart on Monday.
"They publicly reaffirmed their identical views and analyses. Each country sets its own rules of engagement. It’s a subject we talk about. These rules evolve to reinforce the coherence of our collective action." — AFP.
Labels: AFGHANISTAN, FRANCE, HAMID KARZAI, NEOCOLONIALISM
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COMMENT - Africans must be in complete control of their own resoures. They must only be exploited for the benefit of the people, and no one else - no secret deals. When that happens, wars like in the DRC, which are over access to the local people's mineral resources, are going to disappear. Also, it might be helpful to rationalize the national borders and put traditional authorities in charge as heads of state with extremly limited powers, and put most powers in the hands of a prime minister, instead of having a President be both head of state and head of the government (constitutional monarchies).
Rwanda: obscuring the truth about the genocide
Barrie Collins
Wednesday 13 August 2008
Far from being radical, the attacks on France for its role in the 1994 war are designed to whitewash Western intervention more broadly. Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians – including former president François Mitterand – complicit in the genocide.
Considering that the current Rwandan leadership has vilified France ever since it launched its bid to seize power in Rwanda in October 1990, eventually winning power in July 1994, it is not surprising that it should now up the stakes against its long-time enemy. The new strongman of Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, is fortunate that he has unswerving support from the United States, Britain and Belgium, and a cheerleading media in these countries which can be counted upon to give his report into France’s role in the genocide maximum impact.
But the truth is that France’s major mistake was to find itself on the wrong side of the moral parable that has been imposed by Western observers on Rwanda’s recent tragic history. A war that was complicated by considerable international intervention has become over-simplified into a morality tale of good versus evil, in which France has been branded as part of the ‘evil side’. Such a simplification further obscures the truth about what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and whitewashes the role of Western intervention more broadly.
According to the moral parable of Rwanda, the good guys were the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 because it had no other means of protecting the persecuted minority of ethnic Tutsis inside Rwanda and of making the then Hutu-led government accept the right of return of Rwandan Tutsis living abroad as refugees. The bad guys were in the Rwandan government and armed forces. When the international community had helped Rwandans achieve a negotiated settlement, the worst elements among the bad guys drew up a plan to secure Hutu domination once and for all by planning and then implementing genocide against Rwandan Tutsis.
By the time the good guys – the RPF – had fought them off, their evil mission had been largely completed. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis were dead. Genocide had occurred, and the Western world had simply looked on passively. The United States refused to label the war that took place as a genocide in order to resist the clamour for international intervention to save lives. France was the only force on the United Nations Security Council to respond by sending in French forces under Operation Turquoise. But France’s real motivation was not to save lives, but to shore up its erstwhile allies: the bad guys. The French helped them escape Rwanda so that they would not have to answer for their crimes.
A moral analysis like this is compelling because it provides a clear pathway through a maze of complicating factors. For journalists, this moral signposting of the Rwandan genocide leads the way to great copy about the bravery of the heroes and the moral turpitude of the villains. For governments, it provides the crucial element of legitimacy that is the essential underpinning of their right to rule. The Rwandan regime under Paul Kagame depends on this version of events for its support and survival. And so do its principal sponsors, the United States and Great Britain.
As the force that relieved Rwanda from genocide, the RPF - whose leadership currently runs Rwanda - has exploited this version of events to remind Western governments that they failed to live up to the ‘Never Again’ principle that was the driving force behind the passing of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations in 1948. While they battled the genocidaires in 1994, the Western world simply looked on. Except France, that is. But as a supporter of the former, pre-RPF regime, France’s motives for intervening were highly questionable.
It may be the most widely told story of Rwanda, but this version of events is deeply flawed. While the US may have been embarrassed by this account, appearing less than heroic during the months of Rwanda’s greatest torment, it is far easier for it to live with this embarrassment than to be confronted with the facts of how it did intervene in this region of Africa in the early 1990s and since Kagame came to power.
The ‘plane crash’ debate
In fact, the three most influential Western players in Rwanda at this time – the US, France and Belgium – all intervened in ways that created the conditions that made mass slaughter inevitable. Contrary to the prevailing version of events, after its initial deployment of troops defending Rwandan leaders against the RPF’s October War in 1990, by means of Operation Noroît, France recognised that the US and Uganda were behind the RPF and had no desire to become isolated as the sole defender of the Rwandan government. So it increasingly made its military support conditional upon the government’s commitment to serious negotiations with the RPF. According to an informant from the French Ministry of Cooperation, France’s decision to disengage was already evident in 1990: ‘We did not want to remain alone…there were great powers behind the RPF. Uganda could send 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers.’ (1)
The Kagame government’s latest salvo against France, in the shape of its commission report fingering the French for their support for the genocide, is in fact part of an increasingly desperate search for political legitimacy. The weakest point of the Rwandan moral parable is the question of what caused the re-eruption of the war in 1994 and the subsequent descent into mass slaughter. The start of the bloodiest stage of the war is far more complicated than the moral storytellers – who blame it on the then evil government’s determination to secure Hutu domination – would have us believe.
It was an act of international terrorism that triggered the return to war. In early April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana was blown out of the sky by a missile attack that had been planned for several months. Apologists for the RPF have tried hard to blame the attack upon hardline Hutu conspirators, but they have produced nothing of substance to back up this claim. Rather, there is an accumulating amount of evidence that the RPF was responsible for the missile attack – and it is this evidence that has put the current RPF government, led by Kagame, on the back foot. It is the government’s defensiveness on this issue that lies at the heart of the current France-bashing.
The UN’s own investigator, Michael Hourigan, first came across compelling evidence of the RPF’s responsibility for assassinating President Habyarimana and the other unfortunate occupants of his plane. However, it appears that under pressure from Washington, the UN agreed to shut down its investigation into the missile attack. Another UN investigator, Robert Gersony, came across evidence of RPF atrocities and was also silenced; the UN even stated that his report ‘did not exist’.
These inconvenient truths threatened to muddy the clear waters of moral certainty that the Rwandan parable provides. The Rwandan regime has lived behind the shield of international powers which have worked hard to keep the matter of the plane shooting off the agenda. For all of its 13 years of operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), whose brief is to establish the truth of what happened in 1994, has ruled that the matter of the President Habyarimana’s assassination (which it chooses to refer to simply as a plane ‘crash’) is not within its remit. When one of the ICTR’s chief prosecutors, Carla Del Ponte, expressed her desire to dust off the investigation into the allegations against the RPF, stating that ‘if it is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of genocide must be rewritten’ (2), she was abruptly relieved of her position and moved to The Hague.
Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, the Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow, subsequently confirmed that the shooting down of the aircraft is ‘not a case that falls within our jurisdiction’ (3). It is ironic that the ICTR’s first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, has expressed his view that the plane attack does fall within the remit of the court and ought to be investigated. ‘It is clearly related to the genocide, by all accounts [it was] the trigger that started the genocide and it would have been very, very important from a justice point of view, from victims’ point of view, to find out.’ (4)
However, the ICTR’s deputy prosecutor, Bernard Muna, felt cavalier enough about the issue to tell the ICTR’s legal adviser, Kingsley Moghalu, that ‘after all, there was a state of war, and Habyarimana could be considered a legitimate target’ (5). This is an extraordinary statement from such a senior figure. The missile attack was, among other things, a deliberate violation of Article 1 of the Arusha Accords of 4 August 1993, which stated: ‘The war between the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front is over.’
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the UN at the time of the Rwanda tragedy, is also emphatic about the cover-up of the investigation into the plane shooting: ‘It is a very mysterious scandal. Four reports have been made on Rwanda: the French Parliament Report, the Belgian Senate Report, Kofi Annan’s UN report, and the Organization of African Unity report. All four say absolutely nothing about the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane. That just goes to show the power of the intelligence services that can force people to be quiet.’ (6)
Building upon the evidence received by the UN investigator Michael Hourigan, the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière conducted his own enquiry on behalf of the family of the French pilot who died in the missile attack, along with the presidents of both Rwandan and Burundi and senior government and military figures. Bruguière’s report is thoroughgoing and detailed. I have interviewed one of the several RPF dissidents who briefed the judge: Aloys Ruyenzi. A former member of Kagame’s guard, Ruyenzi states categorically that he was in the room when Kagame gave the order to shoot down the president’s plane, and names all those who were present. The meeting was between 2pm and 3pm on 31 March 1994 (7). The Kagame government reacted in its customary fashion to these revelations about the shooting down of the plane: it launched a character assassination of all the Rwandan contributors to Bruguière’s report, and condemned Bruguière for being, well, French.
Western complicity: what about the US?
Yet there is more than the legitimacy of the Rwandan government at stake in this latest retelling of the moral parable on Rwanda. The RPF would not have sustained its war without diplomatic support from Washington. The US intervened to legitimise the RPF’s war, even though the justifications for it had by that time proven to be baseless. The first invasion in 1990 was timed, not to force a reluctant Rwandan government to allow refugees to return, but to disrupt arrangements already in place to accommodate returning refugees.
Rather than being a desertion from the Ugandan military (the RPF leadership were in top positions in the Ugandan state), the invasion of Rwanda in 1990 was a joint Ugandan-RPF venture. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was keen to have an ally in power south of the border. More importantly, he wanted to be rid of his Rwandan refugee ‘problem’. The issues of land occupation by Rwandans, and suspicions about the leverage that Rwandans in top official positions enjoyed in the Ugandan government, had generated Museveni’s first political crisis since he took power in 1986.
Behind Uganda was its closest international ally and sponsor, Washington. It was US intervention, in the person of secretary of state for African affairs Herman Cohen, which chose not to condemn the RPF’s invasion and Uganda’s support for it, but rather to support the military recovery of the RPF upon its initial defeat. Cohen coerced President Habyarimana not only to negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but to enter negotiations with it in order that a stake for the RPF in a new government be agreed.
By July 1992, Rwanda no longer had a single-party regime but a coalition government and a new democratic constitution. The constitution guaranteed freedom of political organisation and prohibited discrimination on any grounds, ethnic or otherwise.
Of course, it takes more than a constitution to bring about democracy, but it was a promising start and presented another opportunity for the US to tell its Ugandan ally Museveni to pull the plug on the RPF or face the end of the privileged ‘New African Leader’ status that it had bestowed upon him. There was nothing to prevent the RPF from campaigning for support inside Rwanda alongside the other opposition parties. Nothing except the fact that the RPF was feared and loathed by the majority of Rwanda’s population.
And yet, Washington was happy for the RPF to intensify its war. In February 1993, the RPF violated the Arusha ‘peace process’ with its heaviest offensive to date. It is arguably the case that if there had not been French forces around the capital Kigali, the RPF may have succeeded in seizing power at that time. The offensive resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of nearly a million people, living in miserable conditions in makeshift camps. This offensive did more than anything else to generate hatred for the RPF and, tragically, for the local Tutsi population who were assumed to be in league with the overwhelmingly Tutsi RPF.
How human rights lobbyists boosted the RPF
The RPF had violated the negotiations process with another round of death and destruction. But thanks to coordinated human rights lobbying, the RPF returned to the negotiating table unapologetic about its own conduct and full of moral indignation at the evils of the Rwandan government. A suspiciously well-timed human rights report was published in 1993, accusing the Rwandan government of gross violations of human rights. Some of its authors even accused it of genocide. The government had been responsible for atrocities against civilians in response to the RPF’s initial invasion, and had admitted to them. It objected to the report’s bias: the investigators had made only a token effort to investigate allegations of atrocities committed by the RPF, spending only a few hours interviewing people in the presence of RPF soldiers.
Thanks in large measure to the impact of this report, the RPF was able to take the moral high ground and use the negotiations as a vehicle for translating its military gains into political gains. RPF intransigence and military strategy was facilitated in no small measure by the human rights crusade that was launched against the Habyarimana-led coalition government.
But France, too, played a vital role in prodding the Rwandan government to reach a political settlement with the RPF. According to the French writer Agnes Callamard, it was not just pressure from the US that was applied to get Habyarimana to sign the Arusha Accords in 1993 – ‘it is doubtful if Habyarimana would have signed the peace accords, which gave heavy concessions to the RPF, without pressure and guarantees from the Elysée through François Mitterand’s personal emissaries, and possibly from representatives of the Military Mission of Cooperation, specifically Général Huchon, Colonel Cussac – the French military attaché and head of the French military Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Maurin.’ (8)
Having secured a virtual coup in the 1993 negotiations – the RPF had won 50 per cent command of the envisaged unified army and enough seats in the proposed transitional government to block anything that was against its interests – the RPF had emerged as the strongest party. The problem it now faced was the scheduled elections where its unpopularity would have been exposed. Local elections in the demilitarised zone that was created in the wake of the February 1993 offensive pointed the way – the RPF was massively defeated at the hands of the former ruling party.
Faced with the prospect of being downsized to a small party by the Rwandan electorate, and with clear support from the US and Belgium, it would appear that the RPF’s interests could only be further advanced with a return to the battlefield. With the promised departure of French forces from Kigali in December 1993, the military path to the capital was clear. What was needed by the RPF was a justification for resuming the war.
The Rwandan war re-erupts
The assassination of President Habyarimana by means of the missile attack upon his plane set off a round of killings of opposition political figures by elements of Habyarimana’s Presidential Guard on one hand, and killings of members of the former ruling party by the RPF on the other. Massacres of Tutsi civilians by Hutu militia soon followed in Kigali, and then spread across the country. But, contrary to the conventional story, RPF forces were on the march long before any massacres occurred.
Peter Erlinder, the lead defence council for the ICTR, stated categorically in a letter to the Canadian prime minister in 2006 that the final offensive of the RPF was ordered by Kagame within minutes of learning of the successful missile attack, ‘long before any retaliatory, civilian killings had occurred anywhere in Rwanda’ (9).
Three years of mounting fear, insecurity and material deprivation (much of Rwanda was by this time in the grip of famine) came to a head. Rwanda’s hastily (but constitutionally) appointed government of surviving ministers fled the capital. The army was pinned down in one losing encounter with the RPF after another. In these anarchic conditions, Rwanda’s defenceless Tutsi population bore the brunt of murderous hatred generated by an ethnically polarising war.
The RPF won the war and took power in July 1994. Africa then witnessed the largest mass exodus in its history. Over two million Rwandans voted with their feet and moved to former Zaïre and Tanzania. The United States, Britain and Belgium in particular rushed to recognise the new regime in Kigali.
Even greater numbers were still to die. The new Rwandan regime’s invasion of various refugee camps and its forced repatriation of refugees, the massacre of internally displaced people in Kibeho in April 1995, and two invasions of what became the Democratic Republic of Congo by the ruling RPF – all of this has brought the death toll of civilians to a level that is the highest of any conflict since the Second World War. The number of ministers leaving the new government and later dying in mysterious circumstances continues to rise.
Accountability on the part of the Rwandan regime for these violations is waived by its sponsors in Washington, London and Brussels. Whenever challenged on these matters, officials from these capitals will reply that this was the force that liberated Rwanda from genocide, and continued Western backing for it is necessary to ensure that the genocidaires never return to power.
The truth behind the moral parable
But facts are stubborn things. Bruguière’s charges will not go away. The matter of the assassination of two heads of state is the Achilles heel of the Rwandan government. If the RPF’s responsibility for the plane shooting as a planned move towards reigniting the war in Rwanda is proven, what can be said about the diplomatic protection given to the RPF by the US and other Western powers? How can the leader of the ‘war against terror’ – America – explain its suppression of the facts about the assassination of two heads of state? What do we make of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s brief to foster reconciliation by establishing the truth and ending a culture of impunity?
In The Times last week, Linda Melvern wrote about ‘a large room in the French Embassy in Kigali filled floor to ceiling with shredded documents. This was probably the paper trail that might have revealed the depth of involvement between the Elysée Palace and the Hutu faction responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and opposition Hutu’ (10). Holding on to the moral parable of Rwanda and endorsing Kigali’s invective against France may work for now. But facts – about the start of the war, the actions of the RPF, and the role of Western intervention more broadly in pushing Rwanda to the brink – are stubborn things…
Barrie Collins is a writer on African affairs and author of Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question published by Sheffield Hallam University Press in 1998.
Previously on spiked
Barrie Collins reported from the waiting room of the Rwandan genocide tribunal. Tara McCormack criticised the indictment of Sudanase President Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Julie Hearn looke at Kenya and the myth of Afrian barbarism Brendan O’Neill said Somalia is a case study of the dangers of moralism in international affairs, and that Darfur has been damned by pity. Or read more at spiked issue Africa.
(1) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 178, note 19
(2) Interview with Carla Del Ponte, Aktuelt, 17 April 2000. Cited in Le drama rwandais : Les aveaux accablants des chefs de la Mission des Nations Unies pour l’Assistance au Rwanda, E Karemera, Editions Sources du Nil, 2006
(3) Bush and Other War Criminals Meet in Rwanda: The Great “Rwanda Genocide” Coverup, P Erlinder, Global Research, 20 February 2008
(4) April 6th 1994 Attack Fits ICTR Mandate – Goldstone, Hirondelle News Agency, accessed 12 December 2006
(5) Rwanda’s Genocide: The Politics of International Justice, K Moghalu, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 p.52
(6) Second Thoughts on the Hotel Rwanda, Philpot, R, Race and History, 26 February 2005
(7) ‘Major General Paul Kagame behind the shooting down of late Habyarimana’s plane: an eye witness testimony, 2nd Lt. Aloys Ruyenzi Press release, 18 January 2005 (Ruyenzi re-affirmed his statement to the author in an interview in Paris)
(8) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p.163
(9) Open letter to Prime Minister Harper: Regarding state visit of current President of Rwanda, P Erlinder, 6 April 2006 (Copy passed on to author by Erlinder. Emphasis in the original)
(10) The murky truth about France and genocide, L Melvern, The Times, 8 August 2008
Labels: COLONIALISM, COLTAN, FRANCE, GENOCIDE, NEOCOLONIALISM, PAUL KAGAME, RWANDA, UK, USA, YOWERI MUSEVENI
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