France: Mali’s ‘existence’ at stake

France’s President Francois Hollande today announced plans to increase the number of French troops in Mali, marking an escalation in France’s intervention in its former colony.

Despite the socialist president’s efforts to mark a break with a history of French meddling in Africa’s affairs, Paris finds itself back in a familiar role in Africa.

Nearly two years ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy led international campaign to intervene in Libya to oust Muammar al-Qaddafi. He also ordered French forces to help U.N. peacekeepers take down Laurent Gbagbo, the former Ivoirian leader who refused to accept step down after losing his presidential election.

So, was France’s intervention in Mali a return to its past or is it something different? "I don’t think this is more of the same; I think this is part of an emerging model of intervention where counterterrorism is the core," said Bruce Jones, director of NYU’s Center on Global Cooperation. He said the Mali operation bears more similarity with Somalia — where U.S. forces target suspected terrorists while African troops provide security — than it does with historical efforts to intervene to shore up African leaders.

Whatever the similarities, France’s role in Africa was supposed to look different from this under Hollande.

In a recent visit to the continent, the French leader assured African audiences that the era of Franceafrique, a period marked by frequent French military intervention on behalf of Africa’s post colonial autocrats, was done with.

"I didn’t come to Africa to impose my way, or deliver a lesson on morality," Hollande told Senegal’s parliament in October. "The era of Franceafrique is over. There is now a France and there is an Africa. And there is a partnership between France and Africa, based on relationships that are founded on respect," he added during the visit.

But others recalled that Sarkozy had initially vowed to end the era of Franceafrique, only to find himself responding to the French urge to act in Libya and Ivory Coast. That urge reflects the enduring influence of Africa’s traditional interventionists in French politics, and in the case of Mali, the fact that 6,000 French nationals live in Mali, most of them in Bamako.

“If we go back to when Sarkozy came into office and talked about the end of Franceafrique and surrounded himself with a new generation of French Africa advisors those guys lost out and within two years the old guard reasserted itself,” said Todd Moss, an expert on West Africa at the Center for Global Development. “I’m sure the old French guard is very, very powerful if they were able to maintain their influence under Sarkozy. I wouldn’t’ be surprised if it is strong under Hollande.”

But other diplomats say France’s calculation was simpler, noting that one of the Islamist factions fighting in Mali, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, already holds eight French hostages captured in Mali and neighboring states.

“You can’t neglect the fact that the French have a large population in Bamako,” said one European diplomat. “The Islamists were moving towards those people, raising the threat that hundreds more could have been taken hostage. I’m sure the French government felt it had a responsibility to them.”

Still, Mali was supposed to be a model of that new relationship.

When separatist Tuareg fighters, backed by armed Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda, seized control of northern Mali last year, France vowed to keep its expeditionary forces in their barracks. They turned to regional leaders, backed by the United Nations, to help Mali’s troubled army confront the Islamists.

Last month, France championed a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a European-backed, African-led force to train the Malian army and help it reconquer its northern territories. But the effort has been complicated by a number of factors, not least of which is the fact that Mali’s army came to power by staging a military coup against the country’s elected leader.

The planned force was plagued by delays, making it unlikely that it would even arrive in Mali until September or October, providing the rebels with a window of opportunity to strike. Last week, they seized it, and began marching towards the south, capturing the town of Konna, and threatening the strategic town of Mopti. Mali’s U.S.-trained military collapsed.

France’s U.N. envoy Gerard Araud on Monday told reporters outside the U.N. Security Council that France had reluctantly entered Mali.

"Our assessment was that they were totally able to take Bamako," he said. "So, we decided that what was at stake was the existence of the state of Mali and beyond Mali was the stability of all West Africa."

While France’s military action has its critics inside France and beyond (former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin denounced it), the strike has drawn widespread diplomatic, if not military, support.

The Group of 8 political directors today issued a statement welcoming the French military action. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. envoy and a vocal critic of the Western interventions in Libya, said Monday that France’s intervention — which followed a request for assistance from the Malian government — was perfectly legal and that its operation enjoyed unanimous support in the 15-nation Security Council.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had earlier cautioned that military intervention in Mali should be considered a last resort, backed the French move. The reaction from within the U.N. ranks could best be described as "quiet applause," said one senior U.N. official. "So many of us are so relieved, even though we don’t know how this will end."

Jones said that the U.N.’s reticence about military action was driven primarily by concerns about "the limitations of their own capacity" to play a supporting role in an African-led war against Islamists in Mali. "I don’t think the U.N. had any difficulty with having someone deal with al Qaeda in the Maghreb. They just didn’t want to be in a position of doing it themselves. They were worried about taking on more than they could chew."

But having taken charge, France will be confronted with a new challenge: ensuring that its allies in the Malian army don’t follow up any military victories by launching a revenge campaign against its enemies.

"There is no doubt that the human rights situation in Mali before the intervention was already catastrophic, with civilian populations suffering abuses at the hands of all the parties to the conflicts, whether Islamist groups, separatist rebels, as well as the Malian army itself," said Philippe Bolopion, the U.N. representative for Human Rights Watch. "But the risks and human rights challenges that come with military intervention are many. It’s important that neither the French nor [African peacekeepers] empower "the Malian army] to commit more."

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