French tip-toe away from embarrassing colonial past

There will be no banquets, no fireworks, no teary-eyed speeches and no royal yacht sailing into the sunset when the French leave Bouar and Bangui.

Four decades after the first, wrenching loss of its colonies, France this week began a more discreet process of abandonment. It happened on the eve of the grand depart when the whole of France goes on vacation, as if the government didn't want anyone to notice.

After the humiliations of Rwanda in 1994 and Zaire this spring led to widespread denunciation of their African policy, the French are tiptoeing out of the Central African Republic.

On Thursday the French Defence Minister, Alain Richard, told the chagrined CAR President Felix Ange Patasse that France was withdrawing 1,400 troops and shutting down bases at Bouar and Bangui. The CAR had long been referred to as a "French aircraft carrier in the heart of Africa", and over the past 30 years it served as launching point for several dozen French military interventions. Because it shares borders with five important states - Sudan, Zaire, Chad, Congo and Cameroon - it was considered the linchpin of France's military presence in Africa.

Reductions in the defence budget provide a pretext for gradual disengagement elsewhere; a further 1,800 French soldiers are to be repatriated from bases in five other African countries, although Mr Richard isn't specifying where or setting deadlines. That will leave 5,200 men in French uniform on the black continent, just enough to rescue French people stranded in the midst of wars.

Couldn't they stay a little longer, Mr Patasse pleaded, knowing the French withdrawal will probably spell the end of his rule, which Paris has saved three times in the past 18 months. France, like Britain in Hong Kong, is washing its hands of further responsibility for its former colony.

But similarities end there. A cartoon in Friday's Le Monde mocked the contrast with the lavish British departure: two French paratroopers wave from the back of a jeep flying a tricolour. Back down the dirt track, a barefoot African couple, their three children and a chicken, stand outside a grass hut. The African man waves back to the paratroopers, saying, "It reminds me of the British withdrawal from Hong Kong."

When they compare their own colonialism with the British variety, the French tell you that the British wanted to be respected, whereas they, the French, made the mistake of wanting to be loved. France tried to transform its colonies into far-flung pieces of France; generations of African schoolchildren were taught about "our ancestors the Gauls". Relations were emotional, incestuous, often embarrassing. In retrospect, the exercise was doomed to failure.

France's new attitude of exasperation and abandonment is seen most clearly in the CAR, a nation larger than France, but with a population of only 3.2 million. It is the sordid story of the cosseting of dictators, of the west's inability to foster democracy in the developing world, and of political promise undone by ethnic rivalry.

Years before he proclaimed himself emperor of the CAR, the mad cannibal Jean Bedel Bokassa took to calling Gen Charles de Gaulle "papa". The same Bokassa nearly destroyed the career of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the late 1970s, when the Canard Enchaine revealed the French leader had accepted gifts of diamonds.

Bokassa's December 1977 coronation - financed from French development aid - cost a quarter of his impoverished country's annual budget. But it took a massacre of schoolchildren who protested against Bokassa to move Giscard to action. In 1979 the French paratroopers of Operation Barracuda landed in Bangui to dethrone him. They brought Bokassa's replacement, former President David Dacko, with them from France.

Eighteen years later, Paris has tired of the present CAR ruler, Mr Patasse, a former agronomist and communist militant who was elected under French supervision in 1993. French officials are appalled by the corruption and ethnic bias of his administration, but the days when France organised coups against unsatisfactory rulers seem to be over.

Instead, Paris is leaving Mr Patasse to his fate. He is from the northern Baya tribe and is opposed by the Yacoma river people from the south. Unfortunately for Mr Patasse, the Yacomas dominate the military. His predominantly Baya presidential guard made the mistake of trying to disarm a Yacoma army regiment in May 1996. Forty-three people were killed and 238 others - including five French soldiers - were wounded in the resulting mutiny, which was put down by French troops.

Last winter two French soldiers were killed defending Patasse against a second mutiny. Paris was getting fed up and asked its African allies to share the burden. Senegal, Chad, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Mali and Togo established the MISAB (Inter-African Mission of Observation of the Bangui Accords). Yet when a third mutiny occurred on June 21st, the MISAB appealed for help and it took 900 French troops to restore order - for the last time, Paris now says.

Mr Richard was accompanied on his African tour by Mr Charles Josselin, France's secretary of state for "co-operation", the ministry responsible for former colonies. Mr Josselin will be the last head of la coope, which Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government wants to merge with the foreign ministry, another sign of waning French interest in Africa.

The African rulers who benefited from Paris's largesse and protection may be loath to see the French go, but their people are not. Many Africans have resented French support for corrupt regimes and vent their anger on French expatriates, throwing stones at them in the CAR, boycotting French shops in Cameroon, attacking a French lycee in Togo.

In the past year, television images of French gendarmes roughing up African squatters in a Paris church and African immigrants sent home in handcuffs have heightened the bitterness of former colonies.