Opinion: The Ivorian crisis or the prelude to war with China
By Jean-Paul Pougala – Since the beginning of the Ivorian crisis, everything and its opposite or almost have been called. Westerners support almost all Ouattara they call “elected President” while Africans support almost all outgoing President Gbagbo they mean by “re-elected President.” Beyond the partisan choices for either elected or reelected president, it is interesting to note that there is another battle that is remote that is being played out between China and the West in Cote d’Ivoire. Through direct or indirect military support.
The West stands an old idea of ?? Africa in which he controls everything through his henchmen and accommodate themselves readily to mass misery. China is the one who wants to change that and make Africa a showcase for its economic and military power outside Asia. What offends a strong European Union and the USA. But recently they have strength and energy for long resist the juggernaut Chinese who unfortunately decided to make Africa one of the pillars of its superpower in the making? Just as the U.S. had made Europe 66 years ago.
Laurent Gbagbo, the best symbol of the frustrations of Europeans and Africans
For Africans, the two characters in our series represent two opposing views of African politics. Mr. Ouattara, is defined as “Houphouet”, that is to say someone who was openly against the United States of Africa. In 1963, Houphouet Boigny was his mentor with the former Senegalese president Leopold Sedar Senghor, the 2 main gravediggers of the dream of Kwame Nkrumah to establish immediately the United States of Africa. For Senghor and Houphouet relationship with France was more important than any need for African autonomy. The latter was then pronounced the famous phrase: “They say they will unite Africa Cape to Cairo. They will do without us, without my Cote d’Ivoire “. Following it is known as the OAU was born as a nullity with one program dear to Boigny and Senghor, “inviolability of borders inherited from European colonization” and farewell the old dream of Kwame Nkrumah contained in his book published in 1961 premonitory Title: Africa must unite (Africa must unite if it does not know hunger, poverty and wars).
Ending sad interlude of the OAU was a priority for Gbagbo on his arrival to power in 2000 to move to the new African Union (in 2002) as an intermediate step towards the creation of the United States of Africa. Today, Mr. Ouattara continues in the same way that Houphouet: it ignores the institutions of Côte d’Ivoire (Constitutional Council) and prefers to wait for its legitimacy from Paris or Washington. He asked some of the world to come to war to kill some of the Ivorian people.
He asked to starve the Ivorian officials, depriving them of their wages. He asks France to organize commandos under cover of ECOWAS, and as Houphouet, he never explained what he intends to offer to France in return. Sorcerer’s apprentice of the theory of blitzkrieg, I want to say: no elections, no person deserves that there is a single life lost. Men pass, empires disappear. But the scars of war never end. Iraq can serve as a lesson?
Three examples out of Africa to clarify my comments:
• The December 19, 2010, we voted in Belarus, the outgoing president has proclaimed that he won with 72% and immediately jailed leaders of the opposition. Is there a single European country that has threatened the country to use force to dislodge Alexander Lukashenko in power for 16 years? The European Union has no plan to go to dislodge the military dictator. The reason is simple: the 27 European Union countries have at heart the value of the lives of their brothers and sisters of Belarus. Is to treat each of its interests and the Europeans consider human life more important than Belarus dictator who will go away sooner or later.
• The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and UN Representative in Côte d’Ivoire Mr. Choi Y are both citizens of a country divided in two, Korea. It is one of two presidents Kim Jong-Il crazy and they say a permanent danger to his own people and its neighbors. But for Kim, Y Choi and Mr. Ban Ki-Moon has always rightly advocated deference. To those who want to wage war in Côte d’Ivoire, I have two questions: How is the life of a Korean would it be more valuable to keep than an Ivorian? How is the death of civilians in Côte d’Ivoire would be less severe than in Korea? What Gbagbo is it more dangerous to his neighbors that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in power inherited from her father for 17 years and who himself had served for 46 years until his death and was preparing to go to his son?
· In Burma (Myanmar) in 2000 won the presidential elections has been deprived of his victory, worse, deprived of freedom for 10 years. Aung San Suu Kyi was confined to silence a Nobel Peace without ever requiring any outside intervention to get unseat the usurpers of power. The victory of Aung San Suu Kyi validated by the Constitutional Court Burma is less important than the defeat of Mr. Ouattara declared loser by the Constitutional Council of his country?
Mr Gbagbo says he will enter history as a poor leader, wicked, brave or enlightened? No one can tell. What we know from cons is that he is the man who best symbolized the frustrations of Europeans and Africans. The Ivorian crisis has quickly turned into a racial crisis between whites and blacks, between Africa and Europe. This time with a third robber, China in ambush.
Angola, the first African partner of China in the commercial and military unfailingly supports Laurent Gbagbo
The specific day (12/17/2010) As the European Union announced that it had unanimously chosen the camp Ouattara in the Ivorian crisis, against Laurent Gbagbo, China announced that we have become the largest trading partner of the African continent by publishing figures of 10 months of exchanges with African countries. This indicates an increase in business volume to 20 billion dollars with Angola making the country its first partner on the African trade but also military.
And just so happens that Angola is the country that supports militarily Defense Forces and Security Laurent Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire. And this is the same day as the general division of Chinese Jia Xiaoning, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Office of China’s Ministry of Defence was granted an audience with President Biya in Cameroon. Have they talked about the crisis in Ivory Coast? Can China help financially Europe to emerge from the economic crisis and accept that she uses the money to fight it in Africa?
What is certain is that this is a scenario that Europe had not expected. The announcement the same week of the entry into service a few years of the aircraft stealth bomber Chinese Chengdu J-20 is it a mere coincidence of timing or a military message released in the U.S. and Europe ? The message was well received in Washington as the new military aircraft stealth F-35 in preparation to replace the F-22 is already considered obsolete, and there is already talk of abandoning the project with thousands of jobs at risk because the new bar very high technology that China has just imposed the U.S. arms industry so far considered the most advanced in the world.
According to U.S. military experts, the Chinese J-20 with large-ship missile is specifically designed to destroy the new 10 U.S. aircraft carriers under construction until 2058. We can now understand why the French aircraft carrier Mistral currently en route to Abidjan to unseat Gbagbo before the end of January as we promised Ouattara, would be destroyed by the new Chinese J-20 in less than 5 minutes. For now, China will not fire a single shot in the Ivorian crisis, but it is likely that the next crisis will be very different because European hegemony lasting from the year 1454 in Africa, is living its final hours Abidjan.
The Ivorian crisis that was apparently started as a simple quarrel between Europeans and Africans has quickly emerged as the anticipation of military battle-West that China has just begun, on African soil. It is also the prelude to a tumultuous season long between Africa and Europe which is struggling to accept the inexorable effective autonomy of Africa, 50 years after the travesty of independence. The generals of the Chinese army are marching across Africa to forge partnership agreements military in Beijing, no longer hides the real aim is to neutralize all the rebellions that Europe will organize on the ground African hinder and delay for this autonomy.
The arrival of China on the political, economic and African military is being transformed into a nightmare for Europe that loses its clarity. Since 2007 the EU has mobilized all to offer China a sort of triangular to stop the huge Chinese investment in Africa. Former European Commissioner for Development Louis Michel made incessant trips to Beijing to make a thousand proposals without success. Europe does not budge so far, that each of the 27 tries the same solo.
The most wanted man in Peking and gives headaches to the Western name: Zhang Ming, “Mr Saharan Africa” ??of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They all hate him and all their court. Westerners want him? They ask nothing less than to pretend to help Africa without really taking action. He explains that this is playing for 5 centuries and there are very big win. What does he say? NIET.
China is interested in any triangle. Africa was said is given marginalized by China at the center of envy. The Chinese president has visited almost all African countries and some 3 or 4 times, when the U.S. Presidents in 8 years only visit 2 or 3 African countries. And the 27 countries of the European Union, 21 are headed by presidents who have never set foot in Africa.
Europe is falling into the most grotesque mediocrity trying to gentrify the Chinese in Africa and teach them their shabby old recipes that have grounded for 50 years off of Africa, with slogans equally and burlesques shabby: “The EU and China feel closer to Africa than any other continent.”
The few documents that we have in the hands of European secret proposals to China justify all this panic on board the concerns of Europeans towards a probable indebtedness of Africa if China continues on this path. This argument is completely absurd. It’s like a bank would not see his banker to explain that he does not sleep for weeks because her neighbor is likely to become over-indebted if the same bank continued to give him credit, and begs him not to treat directly with this neighbor, but to pass through it to filter and suggests that what is going well for her neighbor. Recently, the IMF refused a loan to the DRC on the grounds that the Congo receives Chinese investment. Edwards Bernays in his book “Propaganda or the art of manipulating public opinion in democracy teaches us that the conscious manipulation, intelligent, opinions and habits of organized masses plays an important role in a democratic society.
Those who manipulate this social mechanism imperceptible form an invisible government which really runs the world. The African Union must regain control in Côte d’Ivoire for the invisible government of Europe interferes with, and does not remove destabilizing for Africa a key piece of the puzzle (Ivory Coast) it will need to train and build the mosaic of the United States of Africa. If today the Ivory Coast is sacrificed to give Europe a consolation respite in the war, commercial and industrial losing with China (as Chinese diktat on REE), whose turn is tomorrow ?
The Ivorian crisis has at least the merit of giving us several lessons:
· The UN is an empty box that requires a complete overhaul. This organization is being transformed into an instrument of destabilization of nations and the initiator of civil wars rather than being an instrument of pacification of the peoples as it was originally designed.
· The finalization of the United States of Africa is an imperative that can no longer wait. The whole process of the African federation under way must be accelerated so as not to leave space to the old demons of Africa to start a new cycle of violence, wars and thus destabilize the continent as contributing over 50 years Previous to divert attention from real issues and goals of creating happiness for African populations.
· The drive for the first world war of the 21st century between the West (Europe / USA) and China will most likely be on African soil. The decline of the former does not deprive them of the instinct of usual arrogance to continue to humiliate the second and told him what to do in Africa, the devaluation of the yuan. Ridicule does not kill. These are countries that are the wrong policy and are responsible for a global financial crisis, which claim to give lessons to China that she was virtuous in its management. There is a red line that sooner or later the West will go through and that day, it will do: splat! And for this boom that Africa is now one and the other training ground.
Gbagbo, issue of control of the Eldorado oil from the Gulf of Guinea
I like to conclude with these two excerpts from comments on the Ivorian crisis:
1. “The colonialists have always a mask. They never say good things about you. They plunder your resources. They committed genocide against American Indians, destroyed civilizations like the Aztecs. On behalf of free trade, they have imposed on China three opium wars. On behalf of slavery, they came to impose forced labor in Africa. Today is the name of international justice that they intervene in Cote d’Ivoire. What is the International Justice? The International Criminal Court judges are affected by what is called a black color blindness. The Dalton does not see certain colors. They see only black. If you go to the International Court, all defendants are black, not because nothing happened in Gaza, not because nothing happened to the prison of Abu Ghraib. The question I ask myself now is: Why Africa does accept that? I’m not saying everyone is innocent, but if these people are guilty, it is up to Africans to judge them. Why Africa does accept that its leaders be tried by a band of cosmopolitans who despise it. ” Jacques Verges, a French lawyer
2. “Behind the continuation or not of Gbagbo in power plays control Gulf of Guinea, the Eldorado oil than French or Americans, losing ground in the Arab world, and united this time, do not wish to switch to other hands. In their eyes, Alassane Ouattara, a personal friend of Sarkozy, a former IMF director and manager Liberal, is a much more credible interlocutor that Gbagbo nationalist. ” Colette Braeckman, journalist with the Belgian daily Le Soir. Born in 1946, a reporter, she also works at the “Le Monde Diplomatique”
That’s why I think there has never been an election in Côte d’Ivoire, but a mock election. With 300 billion francs of Ivorians that the UN has thrown out the window for a sham election, we could have built 300 hospitals, 1,000 schools, 50 universities, 3,000 kindergartens, 5,000 dispensaries.
By Jean-Paul Pougala, professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland Diplomacy (co-author of “Africa, Europe and Democracy International (ed. Federop),
