France Tales

Imagine a man on trial for his life. The jury brings in a verdict of not guilty, so the judge immediately invites counsel for the prosecution to complete his closing speech, and then the accused is found guilty and sentenced to death. The Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty on 12 June by a large majority. The treaty cannot come into force unless it is adopted by all 27 member states of the European Union, but most European leaders immediately announced that the ratification process would (…)

The Carter Doctrine, established 28 years ago, put the US military in service of assuring the nation’s regular supplies of imported oil. This has near-bankrupted the US and corrupted the military, yet left the US insecure in energy sources and globally loathed. The time has come to demote petroleum and stand down the troops.
American policymakers have long viewed the protection of overseas oil supplies as an essential matter of “national security”, requiring the threat of – and sometimes the (…)

Since his election as president in May last year, Nicolas Sarkozy has kept tight control of foreign policy while swinging it round towards alignments and alliances quite opposite to those of Jacques Chirac. It is now pro-Israel, pro-US and pro-Nato, where before it had been defiantly dismissive of all three.
It used to be routine. France elected a president and, a year later, the journalist given the job of assessing his foreign policy reached the inevitable conclusion, summarised in a (…)

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France still has bases and troops in its former African colonies, but their departure or downscaling has now been planned, while the level of French economic aid to the continent is at an all-time low. Just what are Sarkozy’s intentions towards the continent?
Jean-Marie Bockel was France’s secretary for international development for just eight months, until he said he wanted to “sign the death certificate of Françafrique”. (The term describes the secret private and public ties between most (…)

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There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless.
Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, the southernmost state of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Day and night, huge trucks roar through (…)

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The world’s desperate need for nuclear power plant energy means a sound future for uranium mined in Niger. But the international corporations that have won concessions to remove it are careless of the land and its people, who are fighting back.
The Nigerien Movement for Justice (NMJ) , which is mostly a Tuareg organisation, warned in a recent press release: “If armed struggle is the only way to make ourselves heard, then that is the way forward.” Twelve years after the 24 April 1995 peace (…)

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