![]() “Imperialist and neocolonialist forces are no longer welcome on our national territory,” the junta announced. After seizing power in July, that country’s new military junta had demanded just such a French departure and, to drive the point home, closed its airspace to France. Then, last month, French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to announce that he was pulling his troops and his ambassador out of Niger as well. And in August, following back-to-back coups in Mali, that country’s ruling junta grew resentful of the 2,400 French troops stationed there and forced them to withdraw into neighboring Niger, which became the new main base for their operations in the Sahel region. Yet just last December, French troops left the Central African Republic after Paris decided that the local government there was “complicit in an anti-French campaign allegedly steered by Russia.” In February, Burkina Faso’s new military government simply expelled French forces and hailed its new “strategic partnership” with Russia. As terrorists affiliated with ISIS first became active in 2014, France deployed some 5,000 elite troops for Operation Barkhane in collaboration with six nations of Africa’s arid Sahel region, the strip of territory extending across the continent, largely south of the Sahara Desert. In less than a year, in fact, the sudden withdrawal of French troops from individual African nations has turned into a full-blown retreat from much of the region. How to end the war in Ukraine: Sanctions against Russia won't work - but this might As French colonial and postcolonial dominance over this vast region moved ever deeper into its second century, unease bordering on open hostility against that country’s presence began to build. Recently, however, a rising nationalist consciousness in many of those relatively new countries has begun chafing against that European land’s repeated transgressions of their sovereignty. By dispatching paratroopers from its many African bases (or secret agents for the occasional assassination), Paris provided a rough version of stability - even if at the price of endemic corruption, entrenched autocratic rule and deep economic exploitation. While the rest of that continent frequently suffered from wars, coups and chronic instability, Françafrique long enjoyed comparative peace. Over the past 60 years, France has used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate some 14 African nations into a neocolonial imperium called “ Françafrique” - a vast region covering a quarter of Africa and stretching for nearly 3,000 miles from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to Chad in the continent’s center. Yet precious few in the media have reported on this extraordinary event, much less offered any analysis of its implications for the fast-changing shape of global power. One of modern history’s major empires is falling apart right now, right before our eyes. ![]() This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.
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