Uranium. Campaign checks. Oil. What’s really going on in Mali.
France is at war. At the time of writing, 4,000 French soldiers are deployed in Azawad, the northern half of Mali, fighting a combination of Islamist and separatist insurgents who took over the region in mid-2012. Codenamed Operation Serval, the intervention is the largest launched by a Western power in a Muslim-majority country since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although France’s official rhetoric stresses the importance of assisting Mali in the fight against radical Islam and protecting French expatriates, France’s history of colonial meddling in African affairs casts a shadow on the current intervention’s motives.
Operation Serval is a risky bet, yet French President François Hollande’s socialist government is willing to take its chance in order to preserve French influence abroad, safeguard strategic interests in the region and advance its domestic agenda. Two distinct narratives—one ideological and consistent with modern times, the other rational and rooted in history—pervade the official discourse about the intervention.
For one, the story of Operation Serval reads like the newest page in the tiresome history of the War on Terror—or “Overseas Contingency Operations,” the Orwellian rebranding of the term. President Hollande’s vow to “destroy terrorists” and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s description of Mali’s insurgence as an “existential threat” to “our way of life” are telling tributes to the enduring legacy of post-9/11 neurosis.
The operation is linked to NATO’s recent intervention in Libya, as Mali’s instability is in great measure an offshoot of the latter’s: the influx of former Muammar Qaddafi loyalists and mercenaries from Tripoli to Azawad, following the dictator’s murder in late 2011, lit the fuse of the ongoing conflict. In addition, Operation Serval follows a pattern of increasing foreign policy activism on the part of the French government. Its unilateral recognition of the Syrian National Council as the country’s sole representative last November raises the question of whether Operation Serval will mobilize support for a similar initiative in Syria, or contribute to the consolidation of the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine in international relations.
On the other hand, there is much that the War on Terror clichés and R2P rhetoric conceal, starting with the viability of the operation itself and the greater stakes for France. Operation Serval’s stated goal is to stop the Islamists’ advance, reverse it, and cripple them in the process. The French and Malian militaries have successfully retaken the town of Konna—the insurgency’s former springboard to southern Mali—followed by Gao and Timbuktu in central Azawad, and finally Kidal and Tessalit near the Algerian border. But ousting the rebels from Mali’s northern mountain ranges, where they are presently regrouping, will prove elusive. French forces are unprepared for a counterinsurgency campaign, and porous national borders across the Western Sahara allow the insurgency to move in and out of the country at its convenience, as the Taliban do in Afghanistan. For this reason, it is not clear whether Operation Serval will achieve much in the long term. In the short term, however, it wards off an insurgency that could spread to neighboring Niger, where nuclear giant company Areva gathers much of the uranium that fuels France’s power plants. This economic consideration is rarely invoked in the defense of France’s decision to intervene, but is essential to understanding it.
At first glance, it seems as though the stars aligned to make Operation Serval a textbook case of legitimate humanitarian intervention. The Hollande government complied with all legal niceties required to intervene: it received a clear UN mandate and waited for Mali’s official request for help. It also garnered support from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Chad, which have committed 3,300 and 1,800 forces, respectively, to the intervention.
The rhetoric Hollande employs when addressing his African counterparts attempts to bolster support for France’s activism throughout the continent. In a recent speech in Dakar, Senegal, the president stressed the need for a “sincere” relationship between France and Africa and an end to their conflictive interaction. His tone was in stark contrast to that of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 speech, also in Dakar, in which the former French president used the opportunity to muse upon the ills of the “the African man”—specifically, on his “failure to enter history” while “living in a world of fancy.” Needless to say, the speech was not well received.
More importantly, this particular intervention is an easy one to sell. The Islamist insurgency in Mali, composed by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) and the terrorist organization Ansar Dine has galvanized French public opinion. The rebels’ tactics of systematic amputation of limbs and stoning of adulterers, coupled with the imposition of strict Shariah law throughout Azawad, are all too reminiscent of outrageous conditions in Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan. Even concern for Timbuktu, with its historical landmarks and Tatooinesque architecture, is a motivation for backing the intervention: the Malian town’s possible destruction recalls the 2001 dynamiting of Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban, which drew international condemnation. Accounts of Malians cheering French troops, waving French flags, and even naming their children “Hollande” add further legitimacy to Operation Serval. After all, it has saved the southern part of the country from an Islamist takeover.
Moreover, domestic politics have provided an equally strong, if not stronger, impetus for the French government to intervene. 75 percent of people questioned in France in January supported the intervention in Mali, buying into its legitimacy. Launching Operation Serval offered Hollande an opportunity to boost his approval ratings, which have plummeted for several reasons since he was elected to office in May 2012. He made the decision to send troops to Mali not simply because it was good politics, but because that added benefit clearly made the choice ever more appealing.
One factor contributing to Hollande’s decline in popularity is his internal management of France’s economy. Recent wavering on fiscal policy has inspired Hollande’s pejorative nickname “Flanby,” after a trademark French caramel custard that is soft and wobbly. During the 2012 elections, he ran on a pro-growth platform representing the Parti Socialiste (France’s Socialist Party), promising to reverse austerity policies that had been implemented in France following the German-led trend of belt tightening in the eurozone. Instead, after his victory Hollande ended up kowtowing to Berlin and drafting the toughest budget in the last three decades of French economic history.
Yet his government’s adoption of rigueur—austerity with a human face, based on increasing fiscal pressure rather than slashing welfare spending—has failed to revitalize France’s stagnant economy. To make matters worse, Hollande’s flagship economic proposal, a 75 percent income tax applied to earnings above €1,000,000, was shot down in December 2012 by the French Constitutional Court.
What is more, the ongoing euro crisis has, at France’s expense, consolidated Berlin’s dominance as leader of the eurozone. As Brussels sees it, today’s Franco–German axis functions to hide Germany’s strength as much as it does to hide France’s weakness, a fact made painfully clear to Hollande during the latest negotiation of the EU’s 2014–2020 budget. When his country’s interests were outmaneuvered by Germany and Britain, Hollande was forced to settle for a less than wholly satisfactory deal that hurt his domestic popularity. Add a botched January attempt by French special forces to rescue a hostage in Somalia, reminiscent of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Desert One debacle in Iran, and it is evident why Hollande’s position was untenable.
The opportunity to intervene in Mali thus seemed too good to pass up. Operation Serval is backed by the French citizenry, and it allows the French government to pitch itself as a relevant global actor and draws attention away from the troubled domestic and European political economy. It has even generated an increase in Hollande’s approval ratings, as Monsieur Flanby revealed his solid resolve in deploying hard power in his foreign policy. On the whole, it appears as if moral and pragmatic considerations justified the intervention.
Despite such a rosy presentation of the intervention, Malians should remain skeptical of its desirability. France’s traditional reliance upon its former African colonial for strategic resources, Mali included, has led Paris to numerous feats of realpolitik in the past, including support for the corrupt likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, former president of Zaire, and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, former president of Tunisia. France’s notorious history of military interventionism in Africa has rarely captured the attention of international mainstream media, yet this background context is critical to understanding the logic behind Operation Serval.
The connection between French and African elites—from those in Tunisia to those in Madagascar—is a complex one, a relationship associated with opaque backroom dealings at the Élysée Palace involving only the executive branch of government. One leading critic of French policies in Africa likened the liaison to an iceberg: its visible tip displays France’s well-wishing rhetoric, but its hidden body contains the exploitative collusion of elites pursuing narrow interests at the expense of the African public. The coziness of this liaison— termed Françafrique as a parody of the positive spin on France–Africa relations during post–World War II decolonization—has also turned out to be a great boon for the French political class, especially the Gaullist right, which to this day receives generous campaign contributions from elites in its African client states.
It was Jacques Foccart, chief of staff for African matters for both former French presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, who established and perpetuated France’s neocolonial grip on the continent. Under the stewardship of “Monsieur Afrique,” which lasted from 1960 to 1974, France’s reactions to the independence movements of its former colonies took a distinctively Lampedusian turn, changing everything to keep everything the same. During this period, Paris consistently propped up dictators and supported military coups; it also encouraged the Biafran secession that lead to a civil war in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. In the context of the Cold War, these policies served the purpose of keeping large swaths of Africa from falling under the influence of the Soviet bloc.
The end of the Cold War, however, did not bring an end to France’s meddling in Africa. Although Foccart was replaced in 1974, both the D’Estaing and the Mitterrand governments followed his African policy schema. The latter, in fact, brought Foccart back as an adviser during Jacques Chirac’s tenure as prime minister, and François Mitterrand’s presidency witnessed a shameful episode of complicity with Hutu authorities during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
The continuity of France’s imperial foreign policy became even more blatant under Jacques Chirac’s presidency. African donors allegedly made frequent cash contributions for the campaigns of the president and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Cote d’Ivoire became France’s “little Iraq” in 2004 when French soldiers destroyed the Ivorian air force and killed dozens of unarmed civilian street protestors in muddled circumstances—a reckless, violent rampage of retaliation after Ivorian nationalist Young Patriots attacked French homes and businesses in the African country. In 2007 Sarkozy pledged to put an end to Françafrique—only to welcome Qaddafi in his visit of honor to France and endorse Gabon President Ali Ben Bongo’s victory in a disputed election.
Talk about Europeans being from Venus. The way France has thrown its weight around in Africa is all the more shocking because coverage of the issue has rarely made it into Western headlines.
It is against this realpolitik backdrop, however, that Africa primarily views the Mali intervention—and for good reason. Françafrique also means France à fric, fric being a French slang word for “cash.” The French business establishment has benefited from gaining preferential access to African resources and strategic assets, namely oil and uranium in the Niger basin. This in turn has supported the development of France’s independent energy policy, which relies on nuclear plants to satisfy 80 percent of the country’s electricity needs.
Safeguarding uranium production in Niger constitutes a key objective of French foreign policy, and the risk of the insurgency spreading from Mali is too great. Tuaregs compose a substantial part of these forces, nomads spread throughout the Western Sahara that lack a state of their own. This means that Mali’s Tuareg insurgency could easily spread to neighboring Niger, where French nuclear giant Areva collects around a third of its uranium supply. Areva’s two mines extract 4,000 tons of uranium every year; a third one will add a further 5,000 from 2014 onward.
It’s impossible to extricate the motivations behind the Mali intervention from France’s desire to maintain its grip on regional economic and strategic assets. Even the operation’s code name betrays this goal: the serval, an African wild cat, has the notable tendency of urinating up to 30 times per hour in order to mark its territory.
Colonial legacies aside, Operation Serval might not be feasible in the long term. The ambivalence of most NATO members, the unreliability of Hollande’s African allies and Mali’s history of recurring civil strife generate doubt regarding the viability of the operation.
The United States’ lack of support is unwelcome news in Paris. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice described the French plan to intervene as “crap.” The Obama administration has found only slightly more encouraging words and is airlifting French soldiers to Mali, but it will not engage beyond that point. This noncommittal stance falls in line with the ongoing pivot of U.S. forces to East Asia, but it displeases French policymakers, who claim that U.S. leaders have failed to establish a middle ground between the excesses of the Bush years and today’s isolationism—alas, if only they would follow each and every one of Paris’s guidelines. The problem here is a recurring one: European nations lack the capacity to conduct effective large-scale interventions without the United States, and Americans have lost the stomach for such involvement after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Support from the European Union (EU) is also insufficient. Most European countries are limiting their contribution to logistical support and the training of Mali’s military, which does not amount to much. Once again, French officials have not taken this very well, complaining about the absence of a common foreign policy in the EU—a sad absence indeed, but a European foreign policy, if it is ever to exist, cannot simply tag along with France’s, despite the obsessive wishes of the old and venerable Gaullist tradition. As a result, France must go it alone.
The dubious credibility of France’s African allies is just as disturbing. Nigeria’s military, currently a leading presence in the ECOWAS deployment, has a notorious track record of human rights abuses. It is also underfunded and possibly incapable of conducting frontline operations. The case of this regional hegemon is not isolated but indicative.
Algeria is another noteworthy French ally. France considers the country a key partner in the struggle against radical Islam. Though Algeria remains under dictatorship, it earned Western support after waging a ruthless war against its own Islamist insurgency in the 1990s. Officially defeated in 2002, part of the insurgency merely moved to neighboring Mali, where it founded AQIM. Algeria is not contributing troops to Operation Serval, but it has allowed French aircraft to fly over its airspace in order to intervene in Mali. In return, Hollande tacitly supports its brutal regime; it is, after all, the enemy of France’s enemy.
Mali itself presents other concerns. There is the immediate problem of the lack of a legitimate government. Previously a success story of democratization since 1992, Mali experienced a military coup d’état less than a year ago; current President Dioncounda Traoré came to power after brokering a deal with the army. The episode casts an embarrassing light upon the U.S. military, under whose oversight Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, the coup’s leader, was trained and instructed.
Far worse in the long term, the country suffers from problematic statehood deriving from the arbitrary drawing of its borders by colonial powers. The Berbers and Tuaregs of northern Mali have a history of rebellion against the south of the country, where the majority of the population is black. Since the 1960 formation of the independent Republic of Mali, Tuaregs in the country have risen against the central government in the southwest several times. Their revolts have been crushed by the Malian military at every instance, generating occasional refugee crises.
Furthermore, current rebel forces are fragmented into three Islamic factions and a nationalist secular one, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). To the extent that the nationalist and Islamist insurgents are already split and have occasionally fought each other, driving a lasting wedge between them should prove relatively easy. The MNLA in fact has already offered to collaborate with French forces. For this cooperation to last, however, southern Mali would have to share its sovereignty with Azawad and perhaps contemplate a partition of the country. Civil strife would otherwise be unlikely to diminish.
Unfortunately, destabilizing episodes of ethnic conflict have been common during previous uprisings and are already taking place now, as black Malians destroy the property of Arabs and Tuaregs while the national army refuses to take sides. All of this suggests that French authorities will have to work closely with their Malian counterparts and perhaps even actively interfere in the country’s political process to contain the tensions. That type of action could prove controversial, given the dark history and legacies of Western interference in Africa’s affairs.
What are the ultimate consequences of the French intervention in Mali? At the time of writing, the country’s urban areas are under the control of French and African forces. Still not decisively defeated, the Islamists have retreated to Azawad’s northeastern mountains, and France lacks the resources to conduct a full counterinsurgency campaign there, although the recent killing of AQIM leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar by Chad’s military leaves room for optimism. Nevertheless, French forces are in the process of declaring victory and going home. The appearance of suicide bombers in Gao is another reason for France to pull out as soon as possible, before escalation becomes unavoidable.
The decision to intervene is still a risky bet in retrospect. France’s presence is currently approved by both the French and Malian publics, but it will not remain in favor forever, especially if and when French soldiers begin to suffer more casualties— the latest body count is only three. It also remains unclear whether Mali will be able to stand by itself once French forces leave, considering there is no exit strategy in place to accommodate the country’s Tuareg minority. To the extent that Tuareg populations are also present in Niger, Nigeria, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, any granting of regional autonomy could have destabilizing consequences throughout the region by inspiring spillover rebellions. For this reason, prospects for an enduring resolution to separatist pressures are dim.
Should French forces end up bogged down in a sub-Saharan version of Afghanistan, Operation Serval would destroy Hollande’s presidency and further weaken Mali. If, however, they withdraw in time and Mali remains relatively secure, Operation Serval will be perceived as a success. Perhaps it will significantly boost Hollande’s popularity, paralleling former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s experience with the Falkland Islands.
Whether Operation Serval can push France’s foreign policy in a more responsible direction remains to be seen. Up to this point, the intervention has been executed with more skill and care than previous ones. But France remains deeply invested in Africa, and a drastic reformulation of its foreign policy is off the table.
Economic constraints will, however, set a limit to France’s interventionism sooner than later. The country is too weakened by the ongoing euro crisis to indefinitely exercise control over its former colonies. And France’s early withdrawal from Afghanistan and its 2010 defense agreements with the United Kingdom speak to the limits of its military spending, though the latter suggests that military cooperation within the EU might attenuate the ongoing shrinkage of European defense budgets.
In this regard, a proposed way forward is to “Europeanize” France’s military bases in Africa, opening them up to participation from other EU members. This could blunt the edge of French interventionism and work to stabilize the continent—but can it be presented as anything other than a modern-day Scramble for Africa? At a time when the EU remains internally divided and weakened, perhaps it would be wiser for France— and the rest of Europe—to cease pushing forward and begin pulling back.