Crisis in Zaire Exposes France’s Fading Influence

PARIS — Even a few years ago, it would have been much simpler: Send in a company of Foreign Legion paratroopers, or even more French military muscle, and patch up yet another African crisis to keep a friendly “Big Man” in power.

But that hasn’t happened in Zaire, and the swelling death rattle of Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year-old reign over Central Africa’s long-suffering heart has come as an enormous shock and humiliation for France.

More than a century after expeditions led by Pierre Brazza were slogging through the steamy jungles beside the Congo River, claiming territory in the name of the universal ideals of the French Revolution, France’s recent debacles in Zaire and neighboring countries of equatorial Africa prove decisively that the time when functionaries and officers in Paris could meddle with impunity in the continent that was their colonial playground is over.

“In effect, this is an important turning point,” said Jean Jolly, a French historian who has written a three-volume work on Africa. “It is the spectacular entrance of the United States into Africa, an undeniable European defeat.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration has been watching France’s problems in Africa with scarcely concealed glee.

The always prickly Washington-Paris relationship was strained last autumn when Jacques Godfrain, France’s minister for foreign cooperation, scoffed at a trip to Africa by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher as a preelection ploy by a U.S. government that had no real interest in Africa.

Christopher replied by challenging France to let go of its former colonies and stop treating Africa as its “private domain.”

In a policy decision that some French critics say defies logic, Paris continued to support the ailing 67-year-old Mobutu long after he had been abandoned by other Cold War allies such as Belgium, the former colonial power in Zaire, and the United States as a hopelessly corrupt leader of a country that had become an economic and social basket case.

Informed French sources say their country, increasingly desperate to help Mobutu, supplied the president with 60 to 80 Serbian mercenaries earlier this year to give backbone to his demoralized army and used helicopters to attack the gasoline convoys of rebel leader Laurent Kabila’s key ally, Rwandan Vice President Paul Kagame.

The misfortunes of the French really began when they failed to keep their Hutu allies in power in neighboring Rwanda, where Kagame’s Tutsi troops took power after a Hutu-engineered genocide in 1994. Even a unilateral deployment of French marines could not maintain a haven on Rwandan territory for the fleeing Hutu army and government, which escaped into Zaire.

Diplomatic efforts by Paris to prop up the tottering regime in Zaire proved no more effective, and the twin failures ended up baring the new and embarrassing limits of France’s power.

When Mobutu and Kabila met on a South African warship in the Congo port of Pointe-Noire last week, the French ambassador to Congo was allowed aboard but, according to one Paris daily, was asked to “stay at the bar.”

Leaders from the French-speaking countries of Togo, Cameroon, Gabon and Congo, which Paris has traditionally protected as a “big brother,” were reportedly kept away as well.

“Those who thought it was a good idea to put all their eggs in the same basket--the French one--should reflect,” the magazine Jeune Afrique advised its largely African readership in its latest edition.

Instead, it has been South African President Nelson Mandela and Bill Richardson, President Clinton’s special envoy to Zaire, who seem to have taken the leading roles in trying to broker what Richardson calls a “soft landing” for Mobutu that would permit a peaceful transition of power without a blood bath.

After 10 days of African diplomacy, Richardson stopped off in Paris for talks Thursday with high-ranking French officials on his way home.

He told reporters that he wanted Kabila and Mobutu to meet one more time next week to help smooth the way for “an inclusive transition government and elections within a year.”

Richardson lauded France’s “joint leadership with the United States,” but the bitter harvest for France in Zaire seems to belie that.

“In Africa, you must not lose face, and we now have lost face,” said Bernard Lugan, a professor of African history at the University of Lyons.

Formal independence for their former colonies notwithstanding, the French still keep more than 9,000 troops permanently stationed in Africa, and since the 1960s have acted in all but name as the “gendarme of French-speaking Africa”--including since the 1970s in former Belgian colonies such as Zaire and Rwanda.

In the past dozen years alone, French forces have gone into action in Chad, Togo, the Comoros, Gabon and Rwanda, as well as in U.N. humanitarian operations in Somalia.

In 1991, when the unpaid Zairian army rioted in Kinshasa, the French sent two parachute companies into the capital to protect Europeans.

Last May, French soldiers, warplanes and helicopters helped put down an army mutiny in the Central African Republic to the north of Zaire and even acted as a Praetorian Guard for President Ange-Felix Patasse.

“France has continued to believe that with two sections of paratroopers, you can make policy in Africa,” Lugan said.

Sub-Saharan African trade with the French accounts for 2.5% of France’s total, making Paris’ persistent attachment to Mobutu appear inexplicable in terms of self-interest. France has fewer holdings in Zaire than the U.S. or Belgium.

“It’s the complex of Fashoda,” explained Lugan, referring to a stretch of rain-swept marsh in present-day Sudan where rival British and French expeditions came face to face in 1898 to claim the headwaters of Africa’s most important river, the Nile. The French were forced to back down, and nearly a century later, some in France have not forgotten.

For them, Zaire has been Fashoda all over again, though the means given the French-speaking Mobutu to resist rebels aided by the English-speaking governments of Uganda and Rwanda--a few score mercenaries--show how far France has fallen since the days of empire.

“In people’s minds there is an equation: Mobutu equals France, and Kabila equals the Anglo-Saxons,” acknowledged an official at the French Foreign Ministry.

Ironically, the French did once decide to jettison Mobutu, when the late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand was slashing support for pro-French but dictatorial and corrupt “dinosaurs” in French-speaking Africa.

The Rwandan crisis, however, made Mobutu, though weakened, once again an indispensable ally for the French, who had few other friends in the region.

“The fact we demanded Mobutu conduct democratic politics, and cut our aid to him, was perhaps suicidal for France,” Jolly said.

The historian sees the Zairian crisis as an illustration of how old colonial masters such as France can do little about the fact that Africans are taking a greater role in their own affairs.

“There is a new generation of Africans in Rwanda and Uganda, for instance, who are pushing their pawns forward and trying to do things without the great powers,” Jolly said. “Africans are organizing and starting to take their own affairs in hand.”

Jules Ferry, the jingoistic 19th century prime minister who spurred France into the race for overseas colonies, once called Africa “that huge black continent so full of fierce mysteries and vague hopes.”

Checkmated in their ambition to keep a longtime client in power, the French now appear to be preparing for the post-Mobutu era.

A retired general, Jeannou Lacaze, France’s former military chief of staff, traveled to Lubumbashi this week for the first meetings between the French and Kabila’s rebel alliance on the latter’s home turf.

French officials said the visit is “private.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.