Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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 Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 5:09 pm Post subject: France's Secret War in Africa |
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http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1189
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For forty years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in the dead-centre of Africa, hidden not only from the French people and parliament, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator - and even to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so vicious that thousands are even fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur - seeking sanctuary on the world's most notorious killing fields. I first heard whispers of this war in March, when a few scattered newspapers across the world reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far North of the Central African Republic. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers out here - so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France's forgotten war.
I am standing now on its latest battlefield, looking out over abandoned mud-streets streaked with ash. The city of Birao is empty and echoing, for the first time in 200 years. There are miles of burned and abandoned homes, with the odd starved child scampering through the wreckage. What were all these buildings? On one faded green sign, it says 'Ministry of Justice', on a structure reduced to a charcoal husk. In the market square, the dazed people who have returned are selling a few scarce supplies - rice and magnioc, the local yeasty staple food - and talking quietly. At the edges of the town, there are African soldiers armed and trained by the French, lolling behind sandbags, with machine guns jutting nervously at passers-by. They are singing weary nationalist anthems and dreaming of home. |
Read the rest. It is well worth your time. |
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