Recasting France’s Role in Africa

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/world/europe/recasting-frances-role-in-africa.html

Version 0 of 1.

LONDON — The imagery is likely to be the same as it has been for decades — foreign troops in battle fatigues lugging backpacks and assault rifles, confronting mayhem.

But when French soldiers reinforce their small existing garrison in the Central African Republic in coming weeks, their presence will probably be depicted as a departure from a long tradition of military muscle as the prime instrument of postcolonial power.

The Central African Republic — its territory larger than metropolitan France, with only a small fraction of its population — has occupied an anomalous place since independence from Paris in 1960, ruled by a procession of despots and even an emperor — Bokassa I — who was accused not just of profligacy but of cannibalism, too.

But in more recent weeks, it has become the newest focus of an effort by President François Hollande to recast and revive his nation’s influence on a continent where its erstwhile clout has been challenged by the growing ascendancy of China and others eyeing Africa’s natural resources from oil to diamonds.

Far from unilateral action, the new approach draws on the twin notions of international approval, preferably with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the rapid embrace of African forces to take over, or augment, the kind of rapid French deployment seen earlier this year in Mali, another former colony.

“The challenge of this intervention,” wrote Pierre Haski, a co-founder of the Rue89 news website, “lies in the ‘return’ of France to the dark continent after decades of interference followed by a period of relative indifference or misstatements.”

“If France succeeds in its Central African mission, it will have recovered a good part of its influence,” he said, “positioning itself as an indispensable partner in those places where it risked becoming a vague memory.”

A year ago, as yet another government in the Central African Republic teetered toward collapse, Mr. Hollande refused entreaties from Bangui, the capital, for decisive military support, sending only a token force of around 400 to protect the small French community and the international airport — a potential escape route.

But this week, France has led efforts at the United Nations to establish a more potent force, supported and initially led by French reinforcements that will bring the number of its troops there to over 1,000 tasked with stemming what rights groups and others describe as a descent into chaos.

The shift, said Paul Melly, a researcher at the Chatham House policy institute in London, came after the French authorities “have seen in Mali that their intervention is welcome in a way it was not in the past.”

For one thing, he said in an interview, French interventionism was no longer designed to “prop up, install or depose” protégés as it was in the immediate postcolonial era. In the 21st century, he said, France had tended toward a more consultative approach, particularly since Mr. Hollande came to power. “The nature of the operations has changed,” he said, as has “the way Hollande has handled the diplomacy.” So, too, have the challenges.

The Mali campaign at the beginning of the year drew France into a struggle against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, as well-financed and ideologically committed Islamist insurgents from the north pressed on the capital, Bamako, meeting no challenge from ineffective government forces.

In the Central African Republic, by contrast, the overthrow in March of the previous government by rebel militias, many composed of Muslim fighters from Chad and Sudan, has precipitated growing lawlessness among rival warlords, raising the prospect of sectarian war spilling beyond its borders.

It is, of course, easier to deploy than to withdraw, as France discovered in Mali, where it still has 3,000 troops.

And in the newest campaign, “the French gamble is hazardous,” Mr. Haski wrote, based on the principle “that the appearance of these European soldiers will calm a situation that seems more like acts of violence by out-of-control rogue soldiers than a real war. That remains to be seen.”