The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium.
"The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them towards French corporations."http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3030349.eceInside France's secret war
For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world's most notorious killing fields
By Johann Hari in Birao, Central African Republic
Published: 05 October 2007
I first heard whispers of this war in March, when newspapers reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far north-east of the CAR. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in Central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers here – so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France's forgotten war.
On the battlefield - Birao
I am standing now on its latest battlefield, looking out over abandoned mud streets streaked with ash. The city of Birao is empty and echoing, for the first time in 200 years. All around are miles of burned and abandoned homes, with the odd starved child scampering through the wreckage. What were all these buildings? On one faded green sign it says Ministry of Justice, on a structure reduced to a charcoal husk. In the market square, the people who have returned are selling a few scarce supplies – rice and manioc, the local yeasty staple food – and talking quietly. At the edges of the town, there are African soldiers armed and trained by the French, lolling behind sandbags, with machine guns jutting nervously at passers-by. They are singing weary nationalist anthems and dreaming of home.
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The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium. "The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them towards French corporations," she says. "The CAR itself is a base from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is why it is so important. They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad, the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium, which the French badly need because they are so dependent on nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but the CAR is their back-up plan." So this is, in part, a war for nuclear power? " Yes, but also a lot of this money has been funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French political process. Say somebody needs a road built here in the CAR. The French government will insist on a French company – and the French company back home donates a lot to the 'right' French political party."
This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when the French government used the CAR as a base to fund and fuel the Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf Hitler. Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French organisation monitoring its government's actions in Africa. He explains: "The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There were French troops there before, during and after the genocide, backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis. You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were printed in Paris."
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