Waning of French influence underscored by the recent death of `Monsieur Afrique'

THE failure of France's Africa policy was writ large between the lines of the Foreign Minister's carefully worded statement. France welcomed the imminent meeting between President Mobutu and Mr Laurent Kabila, Mr Herve de Charette said. After all, it was France which alerted the international community to the Zairean catastrophe last autumn; it was France which tirelessly called for negotiations.

But now it was an American the UN envoy, Mr Richardson - who, trampling around France's African preserve, had finally engineered the fateful meeting on board a South African ship. The humiliation was complete. Mr Mobutti was about to fall, despite all of France's attempts to support him with an American ushering him to the table.

The world has judged Paris harshly for its close alliance with the late Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose followers committed the 1994 genocide of up to 800,000 Tutsis. Nor was France's 1994 "Operation Turquoise" a success: it left more than a million Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire in the grip of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and Interahamwe militiamen who perpetrated the genocide.

The death of "Papy" Jacques Foccart, for 35 years France's "Monsieur Afrique", at the age of 83 last March underscored the waning of French influence on the black continent. Although Mr Foccart was ailing, he and his proteges continued to direct France's African policy.

The networking, extra-diplomatic channels and confusion of political and business interests which have characterised French policy in Africa since the second World War came to be known as "Foccartism".

One of the African heads of state whom Mr Foccart brought to power - Mr Omar Bongo of Gabon is today embroiled in a corruption scandal involving the French oil company, Elf. But that won't prevent Mr Bongo attending the Mobutu-Kabila meeting.

It was Mr Foccart who decided to give Mr Mobutti the crucial role of chief policeman in the Great Lakes region after the 1994 genocide. And it was Mr Foccart who convinced Mr Chirac's administration to continue to support Mr Mobutti by now enfeebled by prostate cancer and losing territory to Mr Kabila's rebels last year.

Mr Jean-Francois Bayart, the director of the Paris Centre for International Studies and Research, told Le Monde this week: "It is because we claimed that Mobutti was the guarantor of the unity of Zaire, that he was the last bulwark against a chaos of which - we did not want to see - he was the principal organiser, that we supported him until the very end."

One of the tenets of Foccartism is that French-speaking leaders can be counted on to be loyal to Paris. France favoured the Hutus over the Tutsis largely because the former spoke French. With Mr Kabila enjoying the support of Anglophone regimes in Kigali and Kampala, his showdown with Mr Mobutu seemed to the French to be part of a giant battle for influence between Anglo-Saxons and Francophones in Africa.

In the interest of la francophonie, France turned a blind eye to the excesses of its African allies. With the possible departure of Mobutu Sese Seko, another pillar of Foccartism would collapse.