FRANCE'S tattered African policy suffered another defeat this week when President Jacques Chirac's proposal for a military/humanitarian intervention force for eastern Zaire was snubbed by the UN Security Council. "France was humiliated," an African diplomat in Paris said. "She was all alone in the Security Council; nobody supported her."
Mr Chirac based his proposal on sketchy reports of massacres by Laurent Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire France ostensibly wanted to stop these killings. By demanding intervention, Paris was also hedging its bets if the massacre stories turned out to be true. In months to come, France may say: "We told you so."
Last November the Security Council tardily accepted an earlier French proposal for an intervention force. A Canadian officer was prepared to take command. But before this could happen, over a million Rwandan refugees - at last freed from the Hutu militia which fled further into Zaire as Kabila's rebel "forces advanced - returned en masse to Rwanda, and the intervention force was not needed.
This time Mr Chirac's proposal was seen not as a humanitarian gesture but as a French attempt to freeze the front lines in eastern Zaire, prevent the fall of the northeastern town of Kisangani and shore up the deeply corrupt regime of Zaire's dictator, Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko.
"Even when France raises legitimate questions, people say `we can't believe you'," said Mr Roland Marchal, of the Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI). "French policy in Africa is so compromised that domestic and international opinion are sceptical no matter what France does."
It is hard to understand France's 11th-hour support for President Mobutu, who is recuperating from treatment for prostate cancer in his Cote d'Azur villa. The word "cleptocracy" was coined to describe Mobutu's regime in the 1980s, when it was learned that his personal fortune of $5 billion equalled his country's national debt. Mobutu's unpaid army have disgraced themselves in the war with Kabila's rebels, fleeing towns rather than fighting and stopping only to pillage.
Like their officers, the rank-and-file have only one aspiration: to fill their pockets before they are thrown out. At the Atlantic port of Matadi this month, the Zairean army chief-of-staff clashed with Mobutu's special presidential division over control of weapons supplies. Chief-of-staff Gen Mahele wanted the weapons to fight Kabila's rebels; the divisional officers insisted on keeping them for profit.
IN the early 1990s France had joined other European countries in attempting to pressurise Mobutu into reform. The region was thrown into chaos by the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group by the ruling Hutus in neighbouring Rwanda. Under the late President Francois Mitterrand, France had blindly supported the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death in a plane crash prompted the 1994 massacres.
The French-run Operation Turquoise was based"in the Zairean town of Goma to help more than a million Hutu refugees, among them the perpetrators of the massacres. French officers were seen driving around Goma with Rwandan army officers known to have helped orchestrate the attempted genocide.
Having lost its influence in Rwanda - where the new English-speaking leader, Paul Kagame, looked to Uganda, the US and Britain for support - France fell "back on the big francophone power in the region: Zaire. Paris could maintain its Goma operations only with the permission of Kinshasa, and a relationship of mutual support developed.
France is believed to have overseen the dispatch of several hundred mercenaries to fight on the side of Mobutu's troops. These reportedly include war criminals from former Yugoslavia, whom French officers in Bosnia got to know when they negotiated the release of two French pilots captured by Bosnian Serbs.
France's African policy has largely escaped the control of the French Foreign Ministry and is dominated by the Ewse'e presidential palace. Mr Chirac is strongly influenced by his counsellor for Africa, Mr Jacques Foccart, and the French-speaking Presidents of Gabon and Cameroun, Omar Bongo and Paul Biya.
Mr Roland Marchal, the African expert, accuses Mr Foccart of being "30 years out of date" in his understanding of Africa.
Foccart, Bongo and Biya all suffer, Mr Marchal says, from "the anglophone-francophone delirium", which casts Africa as the theatre of a struggle for US and French spheres of influence.
THIS conspiracy theory is widely believed in Paris and in Africa. "When the Americans can cause problems for the French in Africa, they're happy, and vice versa," Mr Marchal said. "But this doesn't mean war. The real stakes in Africa are oil, telecommunications and government contracts. There is severe competition in these areas, but otherwise the Americans don't give a damn, they don't want to get involved."
Paris's support for Mobutu has inspired nothing but opprobrium in the international community. Yet French policy shows no sign of changing. "Our politicians cannot conceive of normal diplomatic relations with African countries," Mr Marchal said.
Generous campaign contributions by African heads of state to French politicians of all parties is one reason. The colonial tradition, an intense desire to preserve Ia francophonie and economic competition, are other factors.
