France's 'Little Iraq'

Tom Fenton On France's Traditional Area Of Influence In West Africa

(CBS)  Tom Fenton, in his fourth decade with CBS News, has been the network's Senior European Correspondent since 1979. He comments on international events from his "Listening Post" in London, and other parts of the world as well.

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The president of a major Western power orders troops sent to a crisis-torn country on another continent. Officials close to the president talk of the need for “regime change” and “democracy” and ramp up a military response to the unrest under the cover of a United Nations resolution.

Mobs take to the streets of the crisis country as the Western troops seek to impose order. The military reports that European women have been raped, and local thugs have beheaded foreigners with machetes. The troops rescue frightened whites as the mobs bay for Western blood. Chaos reigns, and back in the Western capital, the public begins to demand what their soldiers are doing in that far-off country.

The troops are French, the country is the former French colony of the Ivory Coast and this is what some observers are now calling French President Jacque Chirac’s “little Iraq.”

Indeed, a letter from a resident of the Paris region to the editor of the French daily “Le Figaro” says, “France is doing in the Ivory Coast what we reproach the Americans for doing.” It is, the writer says “none other than the unilateralism which we denounce (in Iraq), but of course France loves to give lectures to others.”

All that’s missing would be for France to ask for American troops to help it overthrow the government of the Ivory Coast, and the irony would be complete. But President Chirac, of course, will not ask for help, even if the lives of thousands of French expatriates in the Ivory Coast are at risk. That part of West Africa is France’s traditional area of influence: former colonies that France maintained within its system of military and economic control after granting them independence.

If rebels threaten a leader of one of the former French colonies who is considered to be a “friend of France”, the Foreign Legion is there to help prop him up. Or if the leader of one of the former colonies appears to threaten French economic interests there, France can arrange to remove him.

That is what may happen in the Ivory Coast after President Laurent Gbagho’s air force targeted a French military camp in the north of his country and killed nine French soldiers. President Chirac did not waste time assembling a coalition of the willing. He promptly ordered the destruction of the entire Ivorian air force – two jet fighters and several helicopters. Bang, and they were toast.

To give you a little context, the Ivory Coast was once the jewel of West Africa – a country that grew rich from its cocoa plantations under the benign rule of a Francophile president with the sonorous name of Felix Houphouet-Boigny. But Houphouet-Boigny died, the price of cocoa has fallen in recent years, and the late president’s successors were guilty of economic mismanagement, if not worse.

Fifteen years ago, 50,000 French expatriates lived a comfortable life in their West African paradise. Today, the few thousand who are left have either been evacuated to France, or are cowering in their homes or the homes of African neighbors, hoping the men with the machetes won’t get them. It’s your turn, Jacques.