Blowup of Ivory Coast pact shows limits of French power
iht.com
PARIS Just when it was reveling, downstage-center, as a marquee player in international discussions on Iraq, France has collided with an African crisis that may more cruelly mark out the limited character of its diplomatic and practical powers."
This reality bites: A French-engineered peace agreement meant to bring to calm to the Ivory Coast after a months-long rebellion - signed here with the trappings of inviolability over the weekend in the presence of President Jacques Chirac and a handy phalanx of plumed Gardes Republicaines - has imploded.
After returning Monday to the Ivory Coast, the government of President Laurent Gbagbo disavowed the agreement with rebel factions as "null and void," while anti-French rioters swept through Abidjan's streets, and radio broadcasts that were beamed back to France echoed with the voices of French expatriates asking when they would get the protection of a nearly invisible force of 2,500 French troops in the country.
Virtually no one in France, Africa, the United States or the United Nations has attacked France's involvement in the Ivory Coast, its richest former colony in Black Africa, as neo-colonialist or unwanted. Indeed Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, and a number of West African chiefs of state, came to Paris as part of the supporting cast over the weekend that was meant to give the Ivory Coast accord a look of gravitas.
But on Wednesday, after news agencies reported 10 dead in rioting the day before, questions tacitly linking Iraq and the Ivory Coast began to be asked here about whether France's interest in projecting its image as a decisive factor in the world had anything to do with its real capabilities.
In an interview with RTL Radio on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin sounded almost jostled when an interviewer, summing up a discussion that had touched on the Ivory Coast and Iraq, suggested a contradiction between "a France that wants to be more present and one which perhaps doesn't always have the means."
"We absolutely have the means," de Villepin responded, "and we're proving it in the Near East and in the whole of the Middle East."
He did not make clear exactly what proof he was referring to, with France militarily absent from the region except for a base in Djibouti, and largely a non-player in the Gulf or in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. But de Villepin insisted that if Saddam's military defeat could be imagined (while giving no hint of a French military role), peace would have to be won afterward, and in that respect, France was "incontrovertible!"
Possibly as painful for the country's governing elite, delighted with France's widely acknowledged demonstrations of diplomatic skill within the Security Council in the debate on Iraq, was a question about whether it had been plain outfoxed in Africa.
When de Villepin called on the Ivory Coast parties to respect the French accord, it was pointed out by the RTL interviewer that the government side had declared it nonexistent. Then de Villepin replied, "But they both signed it!"
Interviewer: "So does that mean that France was had? Or does it mean that France was naive, or having an off-day?"
De Villepin: "Ruth Elkrief [the interviewer], that simply means the situation is difficult!"
The political confrontation showed no sign of subsiding Wednesday as police reinforcements from the gendarmerie, a unit of the French defense forces, were dispatched to Abidjan.
France's deep involvement in the Ivory Coast relates to the perception of French influence in West Africa. For decades France regarded the Ivory Coast, with its modern commercial capital and vast cocoa revenues, as the showplace of its African policy. Over 16,000 French expatriates remain.
As the country's success served as an amplifier for the notion that France retained some kind of specially advantageous involvement in Africa, so the Ivory Coast's relative decline in recent years diminished the significance of French-African connections to the international community.
The current chaos strengthens this trend, and the apparent failure of the agreement may be seen as a further sign - intensified by the irony of it coming in the context of French positioning in the Iraq discussion - of the limits its African leverage. The irony goes further because there is no international mandate for the presence of French troops in the Ivory Coast, only a state-to-state agreement, comfortably accepted without additional comment by the international community.
The situation in the Ivory Coast is particularly tortured because the national armed forces refuse to accept the provisions of the Paris agreement that require the presence of rebels in the future government, and would turn over the posts of defense and internal security ministers to people drawn from the rebel ranks.
So how does France recommend achieving peace anew under these circumstances?
De Villepin had this answer: "Everyone has simply to discuss it with his own people, making it understood by everyone that things have to go forward." PARIS Just when it was reveling, downstage-center, as a marquee player in international discussions on Iraq, France has collided with an African crisis that may more cruelly mark out the limited character of its diplomatic and practical powers. |
