I don't hear France's frequent overseas military actions mentioned anywhere critically.
Mention them, then. Who's stopping you? Launch a thread on the subject of French "crimes", if you wish.
I would be especially interested to hear your case about how France's current efforts in Cote d'Ivoire are a "crime", especially since it looks like they are trying for an agreement between the factions in the country, rather than an invasion, seizing of its natural resources, or a "regime change".
By the way, here's an article I saw today in International Herald Tribune on this subject.
Intervening in Africa: A thankless but necessary effort
William Pfaff
IHT, Friday, January 31, 2003
PARIS The affair in Iraq, in its way, is banal, just another story of a Third World despot, victimizing principally his own people, who will come to a bad end. In Africa there is no avenging Captain America waiting to do justice.
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Captain America has very little interest in Africa at this moment. Africa's wars are intimate and communal, motivated by threats to identity and collective survival. The world is largely indifferent.
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Technological war in Iraq a decade ago produced the "highway of death," pictures of which were prudishly left unpublished by the Western television and press. It consisted of the calcified remains of countless Iraqi soldiers in their vehicles, arms akimbo and rictus faces, seized in a moment of mass incineration.
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The spectacle of past war in West Africa is merely missing limbs, stumps, children bearing half-healed slashes. West African war has been waged with machetes and hatchets, as well as firearms, sometimes among former friends, conducted by impressed adolescent or pre-adolescent soldiers, in a way meant to spread terror.
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That was in Liberia and Sierra Leone. There was also the genocide in Rwanda. And terrible as all this was, it possessed no essential difference from what went on in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, or in Central Europe in the 1940s. Thus do we share a common humanity. Sierra Leone and Liberia are uneasily pacified after their wars. Ivory Coast is on the brink. The three countries have overlapping and rival ethnic groups, exploited and manipulated across artificial frontiers by ruthless or reckless leaders to sequester and exploit the products of the region's natural wealth.
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Added to this is the ancient and crucial division separating sub-Saharan Africa, generally Christian or animist and agricultural, from the pastoral and often nomadic Muslim people to the north.
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Ivory Coast was once France's showcase of neocolonialism, under the charismatic and brilliant Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who held the country together until his death. A military coup thereafter introduced a period of troubles in which the ethnic issue became dominant, as it remains today under President Laurent Gbagbo.
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The current crisis sees regional rebellion in the west and north, essentially ethnic in character but political in origin, and in recent days there has been Muslim-Christian violence.
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The insurgent groups, whom the French have tried to bring into a coalition government with Gbagbo, all have ethnic or political ties to neighboring countries. Left alone, the situation risks falling into the anarchic and murderous conflict already experienced in neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia.
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After more than 10 years of civil war in the former British colony of Sierra Leone during the 1990s, British troops intervened to support a hapless UN peacekeeping force, and successfully stopped the war, establishing conditions in which, in 2000, a new government could be formed.
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The French, under their Socialist coalition gov-ernment in the 1990s, renounced African neocolonialism, which had culminated in President François Mitterrand's complacent relationship with what proved the genocidal government of Rwanda. Now the French are back, with an intervention force of more than 2,500 men in Ivory Coast, in part because of the successful British example in Sierra Leone. Whether they will be as successful is uncertain. The spell of colonial power is weakened, and the beleaguered government is playing the anti-French card against brokered compromises with ethnic rivals.
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But what is the alternative? Africa lacks educated peoples, responsible middle classes, the institutions of education and socialization that are essential to what has come to be called civil society, which in turn is necessary to successful self-government. Its economic problems pale by comparison.
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The former colonial powers are the only ones with a real ability to effectively help, whatever their responsibility in the creation of today's conditions.
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More important, they are the only ones likely to help. International assistance, the United Nations, the African regional associations all no doubt have parts to play in the African struggle toward maturity, but today French troops are the only force available to prevent a catastrophe in Ivory Coast.
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It took the British army to put an end to a decade of terror and pillage in Sierra Leone. The UN force lacked the mandate, means and morale to succeed.
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To intervene in Africa in today's conditions is a thankless undertaking. If the former African colonial powers as a group were to set up a structure of intervention, in collaboration with the successful African states, the task might become less thankless and more effective. Without outside help, much of Africa will continue to founder.
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