What Emmanuel Macron tries to pass off as 'civilisation'

Macron’s Libya stunt might smack of colonialism, but it will at least stop many looking at the source of the problem: the Elysee itself.

I’m told when alcoholics go to self-help meetings, they are told that admitting to their condition is half of the healing process. After watching two weeks of the French President Emmanuel Macron place himself at the centre of Africa’s woes – and then just recently make the news again with his controversial comments in Algeria - many might wonder how he will ever get to the halfway point.

And it’s pretty much the same with the EU which just held a summit in Abidjan, Ivory Coast where the subject of the migrant crisis in Libya once again came up. And once again the wholesale denial from EU chiefs chimed with Macron’s views about Libya.

The problem with the Libya migration crisis is that it’s really got less to do with Libya and can be sourced to other countries and how France and the EU deals with them. But that won't stop Macron confidently announcing just recently that the Libyan human traffickers need to be dealt with harshly through military force. 

This comment serves many purposes and was dutifully written up by a gaggle of journalists, many of whom have never even been to Africa - even on holiday. 

It brilliantly distracts the media – and to some extent other EU member states’ premieres – from blaming both France and the EU for the migrant crisis in the first place. It also squares with Macron’s verve as an EU leader who has taken on the job of EU foreign policy Tzar stealing Federica Mogherini’s thunder; the former Italian foreign minister who has been a great talker for four years in her Brussels office - Macron now positions himself as the doer.

Macron is a slave to the allusion of EU euphoria. He believes in the federal dream of the EU being a superstate and being much bolder when it takes decisions which don’t always align themselves with the US or Russia. 

The problem with this fantasy though, like many dreams, is that it requires a colossal amount of denial and bare-faced lying about the unpalatable facts.

Explosive message falls on deaf ears

It may well be that Macron has deceived us all with the award winning performance in Burkina Faso where he told university students not to look to him as the leader of their country, but to the President (who was present at the talk). The middle class kids from privileged backgrounds might have bought it. But the masses who are struggling to live on a dollar a day due to France’s post-colonial policies felt the need to throw a live hand grenade at Macron’s car and pelt it with rocks.

But he didn’t get the message. And neither did the EU who hosted a conference a few days later and espoused how Brussels would create jobs, support peace initiatives, focus on the youth, support culture, assist business; hell, even the environment got a mention.

But what was not on that long list of euro-garble was cracking down on human rights atrocities carried out by many African leaders who are recipients of billions of dollars of EU aid, both from the EU and even multilaterally from France.  

It’s here where Macron’s impressive swagger and the EU PR machine get caught out for pulling off a remarkable deception about the so-called migrant crisis in Libya.

In a previous conference in Paris, Macron, Merkel and the EU agreed more money needed to be given to African governments and this notion was pushed at the Abidjan conference once again, with a pledge to invest 44 billion. But how much of that money will actually reach the people it is meant to benefit?

Macron himself is delusional about both the EU’s power and its own responsibility in Africa. Even for France’s history, he wants to look at Africa in the same way that Germans under the age of 40 look at their Nazi history. Airbrush it out, in other words. 

This point was beautifully demonstrated just this week when he told a student in Algeria that he should forget about France’s 130 year colonial rule, as if it was something akin to unfriending someone on Facebook. But he couldn’t quite lead by example himself as he told the Algerians that they need to hand over those who fought against the French during their struggle for independence.

Before you even tackle the subject of those former colonies and how France is responsible for their demise (countries like Niger, Chad and the CAR are the poorest countries in the world), other EU governments who don’t swallow everything that Macron tells them should put both the EU and Paris under the microscope and ask themselves this: what’s the real deal?

Is there a link between the aid being pumped into these countries – unchecked with no link to human rights reform – and the hundreds of middle class Africans who don’t want to stick around and see themselvs become a victim of rape, false imprisonment, detention without trial, torture or merely having their personal assets seized by regimes which habitually carry out these techniques under the pretext of ‘governance’ – a word touched upon in the EU spiel handed out in the conference.

What Macron is trying to do by shifting the attention to the Libyan traffickers is to ensure that no one really makes the link between hundreds of millions of dollars given to African leaders each year, and the people fleeing the brutality of the regimes’ that receive this money. 

The problem of the Libyan immigration crisis is not at the end of the long road to Libya’s coastline. It is at the beginning in the capitals of the former French colonies.

But is there something more sinister that we should be watching out for?

It hardly takes an expert to ask, 'what does the EU and France get in return for giving these countries millions of no-strings-attached aid?’. 

The answer is that these African leaders keep both the French and EU dream alive: double barrelled hegemony whereby these countries accept the fantasy that France, along with the EU, is a super power, which has a foreign policy and is more or less running the world.

A couple of hundred million dollars in the top pocket of a dictator buys a lot of patronage. You accept the EU is the only real power in the world, you reprint our press releases verbatim in your newspapers, treat our people with superstar status and take your instructions from us on anything which goes beyond your frontiers. You accept our conditions without questions, of anything we give you and you never look to Russia as a partner in anything, let alone arms sales. Interestingly, it is countries in French Africa which don’t seem as receptive to China’s aid and trade as the former British colonies.

Libyan traffickers and extreme futility

But hegemony is at the heart of the migrant crisis. France, like the EU, doesn’t want these countries to stray away from the script which keeps the fantasy alive, which is why these former French colonies are not held to account on human rights – and why atrocities there are spiralling out of control and causing the exodus.

Attacking traffickers in Libya is an exercise in futility but it serves the PR purposes of both Macron and the EU which he serves. It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire and hoping that the flames will recede. But French leaders like Macron, or indeed EU apaches never admit their own mistakes.

The blinded dogma of arrogance and stupidity is too unbelievable and leaves some looking at the venal basis of the Libya stunt, in a country which is now doing a roaring trade in African slavery thanks to the belligerent post-colonial buffoonery which Macron is happy to keep alive. 

Macron will probably turn to the EU for ‘peace keeper’ regiments as there are a dozen or so scattered around the continent – European soldiers who rarely leave their compounds and are not allowed to fire live rounds back at the local militias, but who do a reasonable enough job at training local police forces in many African hot spots.

But it is still an idea straight out of the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel and bound to blow up in the faces of those who initiate it. The militias will simply become bigger and better armed and could start a new war, which then presumably the EU will blame on ‘poor governance’.

But Macron using brute force to deal with Africa’s woes makes him look just a tad out of date, not to mention out touch with reality. 

The French President recently telling journalists that it’s “not about declaring war” on Libya reminded me of Somalia in 1993 where the US was keen to stress that sending in troops was “only to protect the food shipments”. 

It’s just more gasoline on the fire and we all need to stand well back. Those small groups of traffickers are about to become a state within a state, thanks in large part to France and the EU.