France and the EU blew it in Africa and are trying to blame Russia
French influence in Africa has long been taken for granted to such an extent that the French media has a name for the relationship: “Françafrique”. The implication is that Paris still has historical and linguistic ties to its resource-rich former colonies on the continent, which should automatically translate to military, economic, and political privileges. But a new world is emerging in which France’s African sphere of influence is no longer a given.
During Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop’s visit to Moscow earlier this month, his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov said that France’s “dissatisfaction with the intent of Malian leadership to seek help from external security forces is nothing other than a recurrence of the colonial mentality.”
French troops have been in Mali since the launch of Operation Serval under former President François Hollande in 2013 in support of the Malian government against jihadists, and their presence was later expanded to the Sahel region, a vast belt that stretches across the African continent south of the Sahara desert. Toward the end of that year, the former president of Chad, Idriss Deby, pleaded for an expansion of the French-led Malian mission in which his country’s soldiers served, for fear of the area turning into a “terrorist sanctuary.” Shortly thereafter, a series of Islamic terrorist attacks on French soil subsequently made the seemingly endless operations in the region an easy sell to the French public as counterterrorism and intelligence missions.