Hear: “French, get out of the way!” Peremptory, clear, understandable. The peoples, the hungry, the forgotten, the exploited know how to find the right words when they can’t stand it for decades of bullying. In the Sahel, one of the most shady, predatory colonialisms, capable of eternalizing itself through a subtle use of force and disgusting mimicry, the French one, loses its pieces. An atmospheric rage that bursts here and there, irrepressible, smashes it before our eyes in a stench of rot, despair and helplessness.
The pick was held by a new generation of military coup leaders who overthrow the false democracies of corruption that Paris maintains in these suburbs already nibbled by the Islamist jihad: to prolong, with old cunning, its “legitimate interests”.
Yes, coups are raging in West Africa, horrid word: it recalls, especially here, a particularly brutal tradition of crude praetorians in red berets and dark glasses. One would like to join the chorus, led by Paris and his indigenous allies, which calls and demands the return to the barracks and the restoration of the “legitimate” presidents.
But if you walk the streets of Ouagadougou, Conakry, Bamako in these days of tense and violent will, some doubts arise. Gone that dismal indolence in which you felt something more threatening than anger stagnate, the return of the military is hailed by the squares and by young people of desperate countries where the only prospects are to become migrants, to become jhadists or to be killed. Bewilderment: the army is now considered the only organized structure that offers the possibility of salvation, bringing peace, fighting corruption, given that the indigenous elites, the parasitic bourgeoisies and accomplices that Paris pampers and maintains, do nothing but line their pockets and see elections as only the easiest way to extend power and get rich with complete impunity. When the votes reduce them, they resort to fraud.
The coups serve at least to break, in these unchanging terms of the world, the passive recognition that there is nothing to be done against the reality of injustice. The military is almost a social class in countries decomposed by misery, by tribal and fanatical wars, by the immobility of thievery. We must begin to read the faults, to distinguish the groups: generals and middle officers, presidential guard linked to the Palace, more trained and modern elite units (often those who initiate coups), infantry devoted only to plunder and survival. Until now, a phone call from Paris was enough for illiterate sergeants to eliminate some president who was not very obedient or who chattered about true independence or revolution. They were an essential factor in colonial underdevelopment. Now they dare to ask that the French and their Western allies engaged in the interminable war on terrorism leave.
For example, let’s decipher the most recent coup, the one in Burkina Faso. In 2015, another coup attempt led by a former president, Blaise Campaoré, was thwarted by the mobilization of young people in the cry of “we want democracy”. Six years later, when the military came out of the barracks and arrested President Kaboré, an incapable who left the country in the hands of the jihadists, the same young people returned to the streets, but this time to praise the coup leaders with the cry of “long live the army “.
In addition to the signs against the French presence in the Sahel (there is a special forces base near the capital), photos of the young coup colonel Paul Henri Damiba, legend of the war on jihadists, and of Sankara, the revolutionary hero killed in 1987 by a palace conspiracy.
Another bloody scandal unleashed the rebellion, the massacre of Inata, in the North; fifty gendarmes killed by jihadists in their barracks. They were helpless: for weeks they had not received supplies, ammunition, food. To feed themselves they hunted animals in the brousse. The necessary money had been drained, as always, by the Camarilla in power. Shame shook the military and the country. Marx was right: shame is revolutionary. In six years here, the jihadist offensive has killed two thousand people and one million refugees.
The same popular support in Bamako, Mali, in August hailed the fall of President Keita and his adrift regime, and in Conakry in Guinea where a colonel fired President Alpha Condè, a specialist in the fraudulent third term. that is, of power for life. Now in West Africa there is a bet whether it will be the first to Niger or Guinea Bissau.
The war on the jihadists is lost. The shameful and alarming contours of an African Afghanistan are emerging. The populations are abandoned to themselves, to their misery, to the fury of the fanatics who mount caliphates of sand. In eastern Burkina Faso, in the Arly natural park where tourists once admired wild animals, towns and villages are besieged by jihadists who give ultimatums to the population and organize checkpoints to prevent the passage of food and medicines, it is forbidden. working in the fields and those who do not obey are whipped and killed, 50,000 students can no longer go to school, some communities such as Naougou are now Islamic cities where militiamen run shops and apply Sharia law. The populations flee on foot for days across the savannah, without food, piled up in refugee slums without anyone helping them.
This is Sahelistan. If you do not cross it you cannot understand what happens to you, nature shapes history and men, torturers and victims. Africa here becomes tragic and depopulated, even beauty is inhuman. The rock and the earth take on exalted colors, blackish red ocher yellow. It is the kingdom of the mineral, the fossil, the prehistoric. And of the rusty desert of bushes, swirled by ghost-like dust swirls in daylight. And in the end the expanses of the cities, chaotic, perishable, temporary, broken, polypai of misery, at night become black sponges soaked in lights.
Nature is absolute, of a weary splendor like the struggle to survive. Here is a life of labyrinths, pockets, astronomical geographical, ethnic and moral distances. The jihadist preaching is powerful there, resistant to every attack, it welds the most disparate men together. It becomes a kind of redemption. Let’s recognize it: we have not been able to probe the abysses of this fluctuating mass of men and loneliness, foretelling landslides. We have listened to the leafy rhetoric of French propaganda (the fight against terrorism, fraternal support …), to its minute colonial politics.
The Sahel is changing under the jihadist impact with a pressing cadence, finally modifying old balances. New concepts of life, some so dangerous and fanatical, new interests, new desperations and new human characters increasingly enter the game of this exalted and teeming space. New actors break in, Russia with its mercenaries who promise security, China, Turkey, takes on the great game of the cold war era in Africa in a new guise. And the temptation to play against each other is reborn and widens. France is old, anachronistic, guilty.
Only the French continue to delude themselves that the Elysée will decide the fate of these countries. But they remain alone. The Danes leave, the Swedes are preparing to imitate them, the Germans reduce the contingent. Nine years after the start of the war on terrorism, the areas controlled by the jihadists have expanded, the states have decomposed and anger is growing against the Western presence, the white, the boss. A contingent of Italian soldiers is in Niger: trainers explain themselves. Because? –
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