Macron Tours Africa as Latest French Leader Getting Bogged Down

By Gregory Viscusi

Bloomberg

March 12, 2019, 8:00 PM EDT

Past French presidents have arrived in office promising to move France’s African policy beyond its focus on propping up former colonies. Each one has gotten dragged back in.

Emmanuel Macron’s three-day trip to Africa this week is meant to boost trade with Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries that were never controlled by France. Still, the trip takes place against a backdrop of deepening French military involvement across West Africa, where France has been battling militants since 2013, and recent airstrikes in Chad to support President Idriss Deby. Former colony Djibouti, the third country he’s visiting, hosts France’s largest foreign military base.

In contrast, the U.S. military recently announced plans to scale down defense personnel and anti-terrorism units across the continent.

“Macron wants to fully turn the page, but he hasn’t and he can’t,” said Francois Gaulme, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations. “He just can’t afford any instability in Chad.”

France maintained close links with most of its former African colonies after they gained independence almost six decades ago. The shadowy network of money and power that’s widely known as Francafrique, as well as frequent military operations, has often led to accusations of neocolonial interference. Macron’s predecessors, Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, both said they wanted to put a halt to Francafrique and expanded French relations with English-speaking Africa. Hollande also got rid of the special African office that successive presidents had kept at the Elysee palace.

Islamist Militants

Yet in early 2013, Hollande rushed troops to Mali to prevent a loose alliance of separatist insurgents and Islamist militants from marching on the capital, Bamako. That mission has been through several name changes, but still mobilizes 4,500 soldiers along with Rafale and Mirage 2000 ground-attack aircraft at bases across the Sahel to combat militants.

Its purpose is to hunt down jihadists across the southern edge of the Sahara desert and back up a regional anti-militant force known as the G5 Sahel that consists of troops from Mali, Chad, Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

But the Barkhane mission diverted from its original mission last month, when French planes stopped rebels in northern Chad from advancing on the capital, N’Djamena. A terse statement from the French armed forces simply said they struck “a column of 40 pickups of an armed group from Libya.” Chad’s government said the vehicles were from the Union of Forces of Resistance, a Libya-based group of Chadian dissidents, and completely obliterated with help from France.

“This was very clearly an intervention in internal affairs,” said Tony Chafer, a professor at the University of Portsmouth who has written books on France in Africa. “They weren’t terrorists, but rebels opposed to an authoritarian regime. The security situation in the Sahel allows for all sorts of amalgams.”

Targeted Killings

Visiting a military base in Djibouti Tuesday, Macron praised the work of the French army, navy, and air force in controlling piracy, stabilizing Somalia, and fighting terrorism.

Barkhane forces have also been busy with their traditional mission. On Feb. 21, French troops in Mali killed Yahya Abu Hammam, an Algerian top commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Two days later, a combined French-Malian air-ground operation killed 15 members of the Macina Liberation Front, another regional Islamist militant group.

France, which spends at least an estimated 1 million euros ($1.1 million) a day on Barkhane, would eventually like to turn over more responsibility to the G5 Sahel force. That’s impossible without Chad, which has the most able military in the region and has hosted French troops for years. In turn, France has supported Deby since he took power in a 1990 coup.

“The Barkhane mission is about anti-terrorism which can mean everything and nothing,” said Thomas Borrel, who runs Survie, an activist group that opposes French support for African dictatorships. “The French army is in Chad to fight terrorism but the stability of Chad is important to that effort. It’s a new discourse to cover up old ways.”

U.S. Pullback

While France’s involvement in Africa is unlikely to change anytime soon, the U.S. military’s Africa Command recently said it plans to cut at least 10 percent of its defense personnel and contractors across the continent by 2022.

Donald Trump has already announced troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, and while he’s mentioned nothing specific about Africa yet, the U.S. president clearly wants fewer military personnel overseas and more burden sharing from allies.

French military and political advisers say the U.S. has assured them they will continue to provide intelligence to Barkhane, as well as logistics such as air freight and refueling. The U.S. military is completing a huge drone and airbase in Niger and has defense and training personnel in several West African countries, including Cameroon.

“It’s unclear what Trump’s plans will actually amount to,” said Portsmouth’s Chafer. “The U.S. operates largely independently so I don’t expect the U.S. draw down to impact French policy, apart from -- possibly -- making it just a little more difficult for France to start to draw down.”