Sunset for a crumbling empire An analysis by Serhey Bohdan

This week, France has suffered an unfortunate defeat during its attempt to crack down on the leaders of the Niger. African countries are distancing themselves from participating in the French invasion of a brotherly country for the sake of the imperial ambitions of an old colonial power. Paris is "losing Africa" due to its unwillingness to abandon racism and colonialism.

It is not only Africa they are losing because of this. Racism and imperialism against non-European, non-Christian people regularly create problems in France’s relations with many other countries as well as with a part of its own population. Not surprisingly, the Arab media has been questioning the ethics of holding the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Kiss of death

On August 22, the African Union categorically opposed the military intervention into the Niger by any non-African country, something that Macron came up with. There remains, of course, a loophole for him to formalize his punitive expedition into the Niger through the means of a smaller bloc - the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), yet even there Paris faces challenges.

The other day an attempt to involve the largest ECOWAS country, Nigeria, with a serious army, was stopped. Its president hurried to voice loud support for the invasion, but the parliament intervened and banned the Nigerian military's involvement. So far, only one country that possesses a relatively large army, namely Senegal, is ready to participate. Two other states, Benin and Ivory Coast, are only capable of sending symbolic contingents.

The Niger will not be the only country to oppose such an operation, by the way. Neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso have already promised to consider the attack on the Niger as an attack on themselves. It became known on August 25 that there are specific arrangements for the participation of those two countries' military in the repulsion of the French attack on the Niger. The leadership of the Russian "Wagner" private military company was, most probably, in those countries on the eve of his death and engaged in the deployment of forces there. Surprisingly, in the aftermath of his death at the hands of "an unknown force" near Moscow, the media was not interested in these circumstances.

The liquidation of Prigozhin is perhaps the only good news for Macron, given the mounting problems this week in implementing his plans to punish the Africans. After all, it turned out earlier that one of the key countries of the region and all of Africa - Algeria - has banned France from using its airspace in the war with the Niger, and is opposing the invasion in any form. Given Algeria’s proximity to Niger and the region’s geography, Macron's Napoleonic plan is falling apart.

So far, sanctions have been imposed on the Niger - let us emphasize here, it is on the Niger as such, not the military that came to power. This was done by the advocates of the "restoration of the legal regime" very brazenly: pro-French regimes in neighboring countries have tightly closed the borders. They were starving Nigerians for, purposedly, the sake of democracy and human rights: the country has been left with virtually no fuel and even the United Nations is unable to provide humanitarian assistance, and this while almost every fifth Nigerian (meaning 4 million out of 25 million) depends on humanitarian aid.

All this is because Paris decided to, in the name of "democracy" and "human rights", crush the new leadership of the Niger, which removed the head of the corrupt pro-French regime from power on July 26. The whole justification of this blockade is reduced to the fact that the suspended president was "elected". Elected in a corrupt system of French neo-colonialism - what is the worth of such an election?

Even numerous Western journalists admit that the Niger military, which has driven out "friends of Macron", is enjoying support within the country. After the crisis began, tens of thousands of citizens came to the capital to volunteer in case of war against the French and their minions.

The fact is that Paris has created an extremely negative image in Africa for itself. As Michael Shurkin, an Analyst at one of the key think tanks in the West, the Atlantic Council, noted: "As events in the Niger have shown, everything that France does, good or bad, causes an allergic reaction from the population, accustomed with suspicion towards French motives and expecting the worst. It doesn’t even matter whether this anti-French sentiment is justified. Relations with France have become a peculiar kiss of death for African governments at the moment - an example was the fate of the president of Niger". Shurkin is suggesting that Macron simply leave Africa.

The overthrow of the pro-French puppet regime in the Niger is only the latest example of the rotten regimes that Paris supports. Since 1990, 78% of all 27 coups d'états in sub-Saharan Africa have taken place in French-speaking countries. This interesting statistic clearly denounces Paris. After all, the problem lies not only in the long history of colonial oppression of non-European people - all Western countries (and the Russian Empire as part of the West) have made their hands dirty in this monstrous policy, and Africans still have to deal with its consequences. More importantly, as elementary statistics show, the problems are somehow still much greater in those non-Western countries where there traditionally is a strong French influence, usually associated with French colonization.

Paris is far more involved in the policies of its former colonies than are other former colonial empires. Seven of the nine francophone countries in West Africa do not even have their own currency, but use the so-called "CFA franc", which is being secured by Paris and deprives them of the tools of their own fiscal policy. Paris has not only embroiled the region in a network of military bases, but has also created corrupt puppet regimes there whose leaders, in collusion with the Paris elites, have been stealing and oppressing their people for decades. White gentlemen in Paris love to support regimes on the Black continent that are supported by minorities, such as the Fulani, Tuareg and Arabs. All that while talking about democracy.

It is only when these African friends of France are having a fit with Paris that human rights defenders and the liberal media are immediately finding markers of "authoritarianism", cases of "violation of human rights" and evidence of "corruption". It happened, for example, to the former President of Chad, Idris Deby, and the former Leader of Burkina Faso. Both were declared "crooks" despite their decades-long friendship with Paris.

In addition to building puppet regimes in Africa, French leaders are destabilizing entire parts of that continent. In order to shift the blame away from Paris for the recent fall of the pro-French regime in Mali, Western liberal media report that the country has been destabilized by the relocation of extremist groups that have been breeding in Libya since 2011. Who was it that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya and caused the bloody chaos in which the jihadist groups flourished? The president of France at the time did it to cover up the bribes he took from Gaddafi.

The Eiffel Tower at the expense of Haitians

The conduct of the French government in the former French colonies was not an isolated incident or an aberration. It is rather an example for "comme il fault", a norm of French imperialist policy. Parisian politicians and businessmen are profiting from human misery and blood elsewhere in Africa. An example of this was the infamous "Angolan scandal" involving the son of President José Eduardo and French foreign intelligence!

The policy is so far-reaching and inexhaustible because it has deep historical roots. The French government takes time to deal with its own criminal past. A typical example is President Macron. On the one hand, he ordered the transfer of the human remains, namely skulls, belonging to 24 independence fighters to Algeria from Parisian museums, guillotined in the nineteenth century, and in the abstract he called colonialism a crime against humanity. Yet on the other hand, Macron behaved, let's just say, differently when he came to Algeria, a country that the French captured during a series of wars in the first half of the 19th century and released only after a long bloody war. While talking to the people on the streets of the Algerian capital, he spoke with a man who called on French policy "to deal with the colonial past of France in Algeria". In response, Macron said that he had never encountered colonialism, and replied "Why do you burden me with this at all? Your generation must look to the future".

After traveling to the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, Macron told the local people that neither he nor they had ever faced colonialism, and therefore there was no need to talk about it, while the fact that the plundered money or the treasures of Africa are in Paris since then, well, that simply happened like this throughout history - C'est la vie.

There have been many such incidents during Macron’s reign. In recent years, Macron not only refused to apologize for the colonial war in Algeria (1954-62), during which the French and their accomplices brutally killed at least several hundred thousand Algerians. By inviting critics of French colonialism to "better look to the future", he simultaneously began to glorify the French collaborators starting from 2021 - collaborators of the colonial regime, who helped the imperialists kill and oppress their fellow citizens. After Algeria’s independence, those people had naturally fled to France. The then-President de Gaulle, well aware of the nature of the people he was dealing with, refused to help them. Macron received a delegation of collaborators at his residence, apologized to them (for de Gaulle) and began to bustle about paying financial allowances to them and their descendants.

All this is being observed by the inhabitants of the former colonies and are, of course, expecting nothing good from Paris. It is not even worth, talking about monetary compensation. In 2003, the government of one such country that suffered at the hands of the French, namely Haiti, muttered that it would be good to recover some of the money that Paris had siphoned from the country. In response, signs of "authoritarianism" and "corruption" were immediately discovered in President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Paris negotiated with other superpowers (the latter showing understanding, since, theoretically, almost all countries could put forward such demands for the colonial past) and the UN Security Council gave the go-ahead to eliminate Haiti’s recalcitrant president. In a sense, in order to save Haitians from a civil war, we should overthrow the elected head of state. The Paris establishment then managed to do this with the hands of the American army, with Russia, by the way, supporting all this. It was a disgusting sight, as it was a well-documented case of money extortion for over a hundred years. This is not a general accusation, but bank documents indicate in detail how many civilized democratic Europeans robbed the islanders.

Let us recall that after the Haitians were liberated from French oppression in 1804, Paris threatened them with a military invasion if they did not give the French the money lost in the uprising in Haiti, including in terms of the value of the Haitians themselves as slaves! The Government of Haiti was forced to concede, after which, for many decades, until 1947, Paris siphoned as much as 40% of its income from a small Caribbean country in some years, resulting in appalling structural poverty in Haiti. It has still not been overcome, but the Parisian ladies and gentlemen bathed in luxury with this money and erected the Eiffel Tower. This is not a metaphor; part of the money for it came directly from siphoned funds from Haitians. It is very difficult to overcome the consequences of such a large-scale robbery. The Haitian leadership, with no other source of funds to invest in the country’s reconstruction, certainly had every moral and ethical right to demand that Paris return the money obtained through fraud and blackmail at the gunpoint of the Western fleets. Paris repeated this trick in 2004.

It seemed like this would last forever. But as powerful as imperialism and racism may seem, they are condemned to failure sooner or later because they go against the interests of the majority of humanity. The year 2023 has come, and we see that, by trying to stay on course, Macron has already lost the war in the Niger before it even began. He does not dare to invade with only Western forces - these are not the same times, and Africans do not agree to kill and die for the prosperity of the masters of Paris, for they see too clearly the racism and imperialism of French politics, which hides behind the masks of "democracy" and "human rights".