France is burning and the balance sheet after six days of rioting is nothing short of hallucinating, as well evidenced by the nearly 800 public buildings burned or damaged, including 26 city halls and 24 educational institutions, 2,560 bonfires set on public streets, 4,500 cars set on fire, the expropriations of supermarkets and luxury stores, the more than 3.300 people arrested (among whom a third were under the age of 18), the hundreds of injured police and gendarmes, the 40,000/45,000 police and gendarmes -including 5,000 in Paris alone- deployed between Raid, BRI and GIGN, all characterized -according to the Ministry of the Interior- by a level of violence higher than the 2005 riots.
Newspapers somewhat simplistically headline pointing out, some more and some less, how with the uprising of the desperate people of the banlieus the France of “fraternité” goes up in ashes and highlighting how the peoples of the global South look astonished at the nation of human rights, equality and the welfare state unable to avoid noting how Paris has been transformed from a destination for redemption, to a murky, divided place that disdains and isolates the last: certainly all true and often amply documented, but is that really all there is to it?
The question is not deliberately reductive, as if these reasons in themselves cannot be enough to trigger righteous anger -even if it is badly channeled-, but rather an awareness of the fact that I read too many comments from the ‘gut’ and not from the ‘head’ to the point that I feel it is my duty to invite reflection since that social unease exists and is spreading (not only in France) is a fact, but it is also a fact that usually the mass prey of unease is only the mass of maneuvering artfully used by those pursuing quite other objectives.
This, like it or not, despite the rhetoric of schools and all too many universities, is the sad history of all so-called ‘revolutions,’ none excluded beginning with the very French Revolution, a bourgeois revolution still passed off as popular: as to the factual dynamics I recommend rereading the eulogy of Mark Antony in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
France certainly has its own faults, but it is also a fact that there are too many coincidences: Macron talks about a European army (Nov. 6, 2018) and the need for greater political integration of EU countries, and the Gilets Jaunes revolt erupts (whose first phase in violent form, after a broad peaceful start, covered the period Nov. 17, 2018-March 14, 2020); Macron (who probably understood who and for what reason piloted the sudden violent drift of the protest , and Angela Merkel hastily sign the Treaty of Aachen (a clear signal of refusal to submit to EU norms, inspired by the U.S., in global geoeconomic competition: a true farewell to the Washington consensus complete with an opening to China) on January 22, 2019, a full five years ahead of schedule, and here comes JFK’s grandson (Robert F. Kennedy Junior, nephew of President J.F Kennedy and son of his brother Robert) who on August 29, 2020, riding on the populism of our own pandemic deniers, takes to stirring up the European squares to call for their choral action against all European Chancelleries as enemies of citizens’ freedom; Macron returns from Beijing urging other European countries not to fall in line with Washington’s logic and demands; and the … ‘spontaneous’ (?) revolt that we have before our eyes erupts: …shall I go on?
A further reflection that reinforces legitimate suspicions about a 2023 heteroguided uprising is the following at the time of the Gilets Jaunes uprising there was a lively exchange of accusations between Russia and the United States who accused each other of somehow fanning the flames.
The extremes to lend credence to these mutual accusations are provided to us by the terms of the Treaty of Aachen with Germany : a treaty that aims at the greater political and military integration of France with Germany also from a military point of view. It should be noted that both countries have not purchased the F-35 which is an aircraft for strategic superiority but only in the NATO context since the U.S. has not sold to the “allies” the F-24 , i.e. the only aircraft that in the framework of strategic superiority represents the armed arm of which the F-35 assumes the role of coordinator of possible joint actions.
It is no coincidence that Germany at the time had already started with the project of two antagonistic aircraft of F-24 and F-35 to be used in the European chessboard in joint autonomy and it is obvious that this can only be displeased to Washington but also to Moscow, a Moscow that has always looked favorably on an uncoupling of the EU from the States but not as a cohesive geopolitical structure since a united EU would have been configured as a full-fledged power both economically, militarily (France is a nuclear power) and politically, since thanks to Paris the integrated EU would have been able to enjoy a permanent seat with veto power in the UN Security Council.
Certainly the death of the 17-year-old young man was accidental, but “cop watching,” as we shall see, is a fact, just as the use of social media as engines and promoters of qualunquist and populist immovable has been before other times that are there before our eyes, testifying that there were those who were waiting for the misstep to unleash (or at least try to unleash) something very similar to that Arab Spring that saw the North African masses artfully used to move entire countries from the darkness of institutional night to the chaos of uncontrolled violence, inter-ethnic and inter-religious feuds that the usual knowns are still using to try to win (or win back) their geopolitical maneuvering spaces in the crucial African chessboard.
In other words, in my opinion, the objective pursued at this juncture in France has been and still is the delegitimization of the Macron presidency, that is -for better or for worse- of the last remaining proponent of the pro-European project after Germany’s exit from the scene: an outcome this could favor in no small measure, albeit with different timing, Russia, China and … the United States.
To date, the uprising in France, despite the fact that in the last few hours there has been more or less a decrease in incidents and arrests, cannot yet be called resolved for a whole series of reasons, among which should be mentioned the harsh stances taken by various nationalist right-wing groups that have stimulated the appearance of belligerent patrols that are helping to keep the attention of institutions high: all the more so after the protest in recent days has crossed national borders infecting Belgium, Switzerland and Francophone Europe in general, as witnessed by the violence reported even in Lausanne where several stores were reportedly vandalized leading to the deployment of security forces.
The greatest fear now in France is that such protests will spread like wildfire to Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa as well, that is, to the geographic area in which we find Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon: fourteen countries of which Paris has held the national reserves since 1961, where the feeling of being robbed is as strong as ever and where, precisely because of this, tensions could rise if properly surreptitiously stimulated by those here who have every interest in an effective takeover advocated in every possible way beginning with the support given in the West, but not only, to the thesis that identifies the CFA Franc as the primary cause of the backward condition of the entire region and in particular of the Sub-Saharan one (for that North Africa is decidedly something else).
As is well known, the CFA Franc (an acronym for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique or, in times closer to us, Franc Communautè Financière Africaine) is the single currency wanted by De Gaulle at the end of 1945, used mainly in the former French colonial countries with a few exceptions: this is the case of Guinea, the first country to have independence from Paris, which did not join the monetary union.
In truth, there are two CFA francs: the West African one (used in Senegal, Mali, Niger, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Guinea Bissau) and the Central African one, which is the official currency in Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea-and in both cases the objective officially pursued with their establishment was twofold:
- That of avoiding the financial instability and inflation that have often affected developing countries (see under Zimbabwe) and at the same time
- that of facilitating trade between neighboring countries,
two objectives that in fact trace the same as those of the Euro area and, as such, burdened by the same criticisms that for years have characterized the debate on the European currency insofar as one and the same currency, which is rather stable -also because it is fixedly linked first to the French Franc and later to the Euro- in fact favors only the rich countries adhering to the union while inevitably penalizing those with weaker economies to which the rigidity of the system makes it impossible for the latter to for example, devalue their currencies to gain competitiveness, cannot compensate for the collapse in the prices of the raw materials of which they are exporters, and are today at the mercy of the fluctuations of the Euro against other world currencies.
On all this at the moment has taken to weigh as well what is here ‘exported’, monetarily speaking, from the Euro because of the ongoing conflict that sees the Euro-related CFA Franc as a factor of further penalization in the trade of the countries in the area also as a result of the fact that they, in the meantime, have taken to orienting themselves mainly toward Asian markets or those of the Nigerian giant.
In other words, if on the one hand, the link with the euro allows for monetary stability that prevents the African countries involved from violent jolts, also in terms of inflation, it is also true that it is an objective tare which, by penalizing African exports and benefiting only imports, creates an imbalance in the balance of trade that undermines any possibility of economic growth and debt reduction, so that those who point to the CFA franc as an “instrument of dependence” are more than emphasizing the diplomatic implications of this monetary system which still today sees France play the role of reference power for African chancelleries not infrequently with a more than dubious democratic reputation.
What is more than a little surprising in this context is the fact that in the analysis made in the West, even these days, of this state of affairs, the heavy substantive, if not formal, similarities to the situation generated by the USD’s decades-long prevalence in the global currency landscape are hardly emphasized, that is, in that something constituted in 1944 with the Bretton Woods Accords and maintained as such until today despite its subsequent ‘modifications’ resulting from that 1971 declaration of non-convertibility of the USD that marked, among other things, also the beginning of the era of the fiduciary currency as well as that of the Euro in a context characterized by a banking, but not political, unity of the countries adhering to the system.
The question that also here has not been answered in time, as well as not surprisingly in Europe -duly distinguished-, has been for years and years the following: is it worth risking instability, fierce devaluations and galloping inflation, but being sovereign and flexible, or is it better to remain prudently in the situation adopted so far?
According to the theses that have been advocated and widely illustrated and debated on the subject so far (Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori’s is interesting in this regard), everything would be attributable to the CFA franc alone and to the nefarious local policies that a long-standing, well-orchestrated Francophobic rhetoric (in my opinion well heterodirected for decades by Washington) wants to see heavily influenced by Paris alone: a fact that even in these days has somehow been conveyed as incontrovertible, albeit heavily conditioned by the constant failure to take into account the real primary weight of the interference of other political-economic actors of international caliber, as well as the fact that a dictatorship that freezes a country for thirty years, as in Cameroon, or a civil war that breaks out here for the most disparate reasons (also heterodirected, but not necessarily always by Paris alone) have often had much more weight than the currency adopted.
This is especially so in a context, such as the present one, in which it becomes very useful for many local governments of the so-called Françafrique to endorse in some way the current narrative in order to offload on France alone the consequences of political managements all under the banner of the preservation -on the spot- of the privileges achieved by the members of the establishments currently in command who, it seems, very willingly go along with -underwriting- the identifications of the scapegoats pointed out to them by the global populisms and conspiracies that here, as in Europe, are increasingly in vogue.
In order to understand why my many distinctions and the scant reception given to the main stream sociological reading of even the most recent events, not least the one that has repeatedly taken up the criticism aimed at Paris, I find it surely useful to examine what was expressed in August 2018 by the usually excellent Professor Valori when he wrote verbatim: “in March 2015, Chad’s Minister of Communications, Sylla Ben Bakari, claimed that 40 percent of the weapons that had been seized by their apparatuses from Boko Haram were of French manufacture, while it is now known that it was precisely the Paris Services, in 2011, that organized the jihadists in Cyrenaica against Qaddafi, who wanted the redefinition of the old oil contracts, which were too “low” for the producers, as well as proposing, in a bombastic All-Africa rais speech, the Golden Dinar, as a payment vehicle for oil from all of Africa to Western countries. Two resounding punches in the face for the long-distance monetary and political hegemony that France intends to continue to manage in Françafrique and elsewhere on the Dark Continent as well. If we better read then the cui prodest of so much sword jihad, we would have clearer ideas on how to eradicate it.”
Facts that would be of considerable gravity, again if confirmed, recalling that Boko Haram is a jihadist terrorist organization widespread in northern Nigeria known as the “Sunna People’s Group for Religious Propaganda and Jihād” moreover affiliated with the Caliphate, but which cannot be presented as certain on the basis of alleged evidence that not only proves nothing, but on a little closer inspection turns out to be completely false opening the door to a series, this one, of disturbing questions.
Before getting to the heart of the examination, however, I would like to point out that the question of Paris’s support for the jihadists in Cyrenaica must be taken out of this context for the simple banal reason that, in fact, the Arab Spring took the entire West by surprise, which was faced with a context in which the protests that shook the Arab world drew their raison d’être, yes, from popular discontent generated by the repressive nature of local governments, as well as from concrete economic difficulties, but that ‘someone’ with a rather innovative mentality, in the absence of an expendable aggregating ideology, thought it useful to lean on Islamist movements as the only ones on the streets strong with a message pregnant with promises of renewal.
The protest managed via internet and social was a world novelty not foreseen in the West, but probably in the East (China?…maybe Russia?): it is not a matter of conspiracy, but of taking into account a fact, the one that shows us an East that uses markets and finance to conquer countries of interest instead of armies and monetary policy in the global sphere as a factor of destabilization of the geopolitical arrangements hitherto Dollar-centered.
Social media in the West up to that point had had quite a different intended use: that of vehicles for an ideal process of cultural homogenization in a globalist sense of the planet, as well as data acquisition tools for planning the political strategies most suitable for the desk construction of ideals that could be translated into electoral consensus. Dominating a country by imposing canons of government is far less than being able to get the masses to choose, by voting for them, the appropriate political figures to implement what someone else elsewhere has decided to implement by avoiding the use of force.
In the light of these simple considerations, the West, and in particular Sarkozy’s France, found itself forced to do something-without really knowing what-beginning from the fact that, in the specifics of Libya, it certainly could not take sides in defense of Qaddafi. Hence Paris’ support for the insurgents in Cyrenaica, who only by incidens were jihadists and were not supported as such, but only pretextually in the name of protecting the civilian population dwelling in that Cyrenaica heavily threatened by Qaddafi.
In certain cases I think it is appropriate to make distinctions in order to avoid the risk of lumping together, as in this case, things, facts and circumstances that had little or nothing at the time to do with each other at least as far as that particular historical moment was concerned.
In this sense, the analysis made by Professor Valori is certainly sharable for all that concerns the socioeconomic examination of the genesis of the social malaise imported by the immigrants who came to France from Françafrique and experientially reaffirmed and reconfirmed by the failure of French integration policies-something that can certainly make us understand why the riots of 2005 and 2015 occurred.
Not so with all that has been borrowed from Professor Valori’s examination, as indeed from those of other distinguished scholars and commentators, in an attempt to understand and illustrate the reasons that led France to experience the terrible days of the recent uprising, which saw many other factors come into play that have been too simplistically overlooked, when not deliberately omitted.
Having made the necessary distinctions, it is at this point essential to consider that:
- the fact that 40 percent of the seized weapons were of French manufacture (which nothing tells us about the remaining 60 percent either in terms of the place of manufacture or even less of provenance) in the absence of confirmation based on objective data cannot be taken as evidence of a surreptitious involvement of Paris in dark plots. Confirmation to this reading comes from what happened in December 2019 in relation to a seizure of weapons that took place in 2017 passed off as French: a fact that turned out to be a gross hoax as amply demonstrated by what emerged thanks to a report published by AFP Fact Check on December 30, 2019, titled “No, these pictures do not show weapons from France going to Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria” signed by Segun Olakoyenikan. It all allegedly began with the interception by Nigerian customs officials on May 23, 2017 of a of a container from Turkey loaded with some 440 pump-action rifles, (one of several such shipments seized that year) destined for the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram. Photographic documentation of the seizure was offered in a Tweet by one Savn Daniel (later removed but promptly archived by AFP Fact Check) posted on December 22, 2019 and promptly retweeted more than 800 times, which read “France has been accused of supplying weapons to Boko Haram terrorists. A container full of weapons destined for the Bokoharam sect was intercepted by Nigerian customs men. Who are the Nigerian officials working with France, financing and arming Bokoharam?” Too bad this news turned out to be forcibly false not only because of the origin of the cargo but also because of the place of manufacture of the weapons, which turned out to be because they were Italian and U.S.-made according to Tin Can Island Zonal Commander Monday Abue, the author of the seizure. The only link to Paris in the end turned out to be contained in the statement of the importer who with reference to the cargo stored in the container in question (registration number PONU 210024/1) had asserted that it was plaster of Paris: decidedly little to bring rather serious charges. Everything reported here was published on December 24, 2019 by Premium Times picking up on a May 24, 2017 article by Akin Oyewobi and titled “PHOTO STORY: Pump action rifles intercepted at the Tin Can Island Port,” but the story does not end there-and in fact
- while it is a well-known fact that arms smuggling in Nigeria is a serious problem despite all government efforts to curb the illegal trade (a trade facilitated by the porous nature of the country’s borders, which, according to official estimates, is the transit point for 70 percent of all illegal small arms in the area), it is (intentionally?) less known that the leading supplier of illegal arms is Turkey (not France), which among other things has been accused by authoritative Nigerian government sources of supplying Boko Haram jihadists for the purpose of destabilizing Nigeria and its neighboring countries. And it is in this context that the seizure in 2017 of as many as 2,671 pump-action rifles (including the aforementioned 400) should be placed. False reports regarding the interception of weapons of alleged French provenance abound. Indeed, in the aforementioned AFP article we can find reference to the news of the seizure of another container of again alleged French provenance and stuffed with weapons, a news spread in 2019 through a Facebook post in which the alleged photographic documentation of the seizure was accompanied by a caption that this time tells us about firearms destined for Kidal, in northern Mali, but seized in Burkina Faso. Too bad the photos are of the same Turkish-sourced container intercepted in 2017 and containing the now infamous 400 Italian- and U.S.-made rifles mentioned above. To complete the disturbing picture here it is
- the last mendacious claim brings us to consider another hoax widely circulated on social media in 2018: the one concerning the alleged interception by the Cameroonian army of a French helicopter delivering weapons to Boko Haram. Too bad that, as documented in a report compiled by AFP, published on November 12, 2018 by Anne-Sophie Faivre Le Cadre and titled “No, a French helicopter did not deliver weapons to Boko Haram,” the 2018 story also turned out to be false having been constructed from a photo of a Cameroonian helicopter taken during a joint exercise between U.S. and Cameroonian troops on March 18, 2014.
At this point, it comes natural to wonder where the doubt-free narrative of French arms supplies to the Boko Haram jihadis came from and why Niger has never retracted its claims in this regard despite explicit requests from Paris, especially in the face of what has now been highlighted and statements of no small importance such as those reported in an interesting article by Emergency Digest, dated Nov. 26, 2019, and significantly titled “FG INVESTIGATES ALLEGED TURKISH SUPPORT FOR BOKO HARAM, SAYS DHQ” in which it reads verbatim: “A report that Turkey is supplying sophisticated weapons to the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram is being given attention at a very high strategic level by the federal government, the Defense Headquarters told THISDAY yesterday (note: Nobembre 25, 2019). Egyptian television Ten.tv, quoted by CBN News channel, recently reported that Turkey is a major supplier of weapons to Boko Haram, while Turkish Airlines has been accused in the past of shipping weapons to Nigeria.”
Extremely important in this regard are the statements on this matter made by the Defense Headquarters Spokesperson, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, who with reference to the report of Turkey supplying weapons to Boko Haram called it a serious national security issue in the following verbatim words that give one no small amount of pause: “The veracity of the allegations in the video cannot be ascertained immediately. However, it is a serious national security issue and I believe it is receiving the necessary attention at the national strategic level,” words to which, despite Erdogan’s outraged rejection of the allegations, lend no small weight to the words (reported in a video posted on YouTube) spoken by an executive assistant of the Turkish airline, Mehmet Karatas, who reportedly told Mustafa Varank, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he felt guilty about the flag carrier’s arms shipment to Nigeria (verbatim “I don’t know if these weapons will kill Muslims or Christians. I feel guilty.”)
Specifically, Ten.tv anchor Nasha’t al-Deyhi reported on a leak that allegedly confirmed a phone call intercepted a few years earlier, which in turn confirmed arms trafficking: “Today’s leak confirms without a shadow of a doubt that Erdogan (president of Turkey), his state, his government and his party are transferring arms from Turkey to-this is a shocker, where you may wonder-to Nigeria; and to whom? – To the Boko Haram organization.”
A piece of news, this, that Raymond Ibrahim, Shillman Fellow in Journalism at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and expert on the Middle East and Islam, speaking during an interview with CBN’s Newswatch, commented on declaring himself not at all surprised by this as “(…) now that we have seen Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State of ISIS, recently killed and found only three kilometers from the Turkish border, who is, in fact, the last bastion of the so-called jihadist ‘freedom fighters’ attacking the Syrian government” the whole “It has brought back to the forefront the fact that he (Erdogan) supports ISIS.”
What emerges from this analysis, which is in no way meant to be an ex officio defense of Paris, by the way unsolicited, emphasizes the deliberate construction of evidence against France alone while omitting to call into question other parties whose involvement appears quite well documented: all in order to justify, while condemning it, a popular uprising speciously seen as the result of a reaction primarily of marginalized people charged with a righteous resentment (badly expressed) toward that Macron whose further loss of credibility was evidently welcome after the one already accrued at the time of the Gilets Jaunes revolt.
Interesting to note-and at this point beyond comprehension-how while the transalpine media in the past few days appeared, however things went, more concerned (at least on the surface) about security in Moscow, the international press for the most part seemed to have split between those who ascribed everything that was happening to the death of Nahel (the 17-year-old boy killed in cold blood by a police officer in Nanterre for failing to comply with a traffic stop) -and those who merely pointed out that the whole thing was ‘only’ the regrettable fruit of the tension characterizing for months a France exasperated by that Macron policy that on several occasions has given rise to demonstrations and strikes marked by violence encapsulating multiple issues among which we find as well, to a certain extent, the criticism that several top military leaders, mindful of De Gaulle’s teachings, have levelled at the Elysée with reference to the handling of the Ukrainian crisis.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2
