Tribune. There is perhaps no more mobilizing feeling in the Sahel today than hostility to France, as the somewhat Dantesque adventures have shown. [en novembre] a supply column of the “Barkhane” force engaged on the “sacred way”, [une route stratégique] leading from Côte d’Ivoire to northern Mali via Burkina Faso and western Niger. How did we get here ? There are at least three main reasons for this.
First, France is paying the Sahel for half a century of military intervention in sub-Saharan Africa. About forty in all, or one every fifteen months, from the manu militari recovery of the Gabonese despot Leon Mba, overthrown by his army in 1964, to the recent “Serval” and “Barkhane” operations. Until these last two, all French military interventions in Africa were part of the vast policy of neocolonial control in black Africa decided by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, and continued relentlessly by the various French governments at least until the end. from the 1990s.
This policy combined the promotion of “Strategic interests” of France to the protection of “Friendly diets”, which were generally odious to their people. For the past thirty years, France’s neocolonial policy has been in decline in a context of globalization, multilateralism and the country’s economic and political exhaustion in the international arena. Nonetheless, France has invested so much in it in the past, and in a way so often cynical and arrogant, that it has come to define it more than any other attitude in the eyes of Africans.
Disproportion of means
The second reason is more specific to the Sahel. It is the failure of the fight against jihadists who, not content with regularly storming state forces, have become accustomed to massacring or looting civilian populations. This has, of course, considerably reduced the patience of the said populations towards those who claim to lead the struggle. The local armies supported by a slew of international forces – not only “Barkhane”, but also the European special forces units of the “Task Force Takuba”, the UN forces of Minusma and the Americans armed with drones – appear to be incapable. to prevent jihadists from roaming the territories as they please.
The disproportion between the enormous resources mobilized and the apparent insignificance of the results obtained is fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Given its well-rooted bad image, France is the practically exclusive target of these theories, even if the one which makes it the accomplice of the jihadists has lost its attractions thanks to the backfires of the rulers in Niamey and Ouagadougou (Bamako is a other matter).
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