"The French newspaper Libération said of Ivory Coast that “even if wrapped in a U.N. resolution and supported by countries in the region, this French mission resembles the interventions of the past and risks being seen as such by young Africans.” Fifty years after African independence, the paper said, France has “found itself anew on the front line in a continent to which Nicolas Sarkozy promised a ‘renewed’ relationship, the end of old privileges and a military disengagement.” Achille Mbembé, a Cameroonian-born historian and critic of French involvement in Ivory Coast, said that France continued to support African dictators, mentioning the leaders of Gabon, Cameroon, Congo, Chad and Togo. He saw “a continuity in the management of Françafrique — this system of reciprocal corruption, which, since the end of colonial occupation, ties France to its African henchmen.” Albert Bourgi, a professor of law and brother of Robert Bourgi, a lawyer who helped manage African matters for France for Jacques Chirac and his successors, wrote in Le Monde that Ivory Coast “reawakens the memory, sometimes damning, of numerous excesses of French African policy between 1960 and today.”
PS Full disclosure. ALbert and Robert Bourgi are my first cousins: their late mother is my late father's sister.
PS Full disclosure. ALbert and Robert Bourgi are my first cousins: their late mother is my late father's sister.
