Nicholas Shaxson
22 June 2009
(Page 2 of 3)
Others, informally labelled the "convivial opposition," pretend to oppose Bongo, but don't.
These politicians drive luxury four-wheel drives and wear the latest suits from Paris.
The late French author Francois-Xavier Verschave told me that when he was being sued jointly by Bongo and by the presidents of nearby Congo-Brazzaville and Chad, ordinary citizens from two of the countries lined up to defend him. But from Gabon, nobody came.
"Gabon," he said, "is where the fear runs deepest. If you can instil that kind of fear, you don't have to do much of the rough stuff."
Foccart also created a covert strong-arm brigade, the Service d'Action Civique (SAC).
This was first set up to check communist party troublemakers at political demonstrations organised by president de Gaulle, but it evolved to carry out messier operations against France's enemies and to give Foccart's networks a steel backbone as he coiled his influence deep into Africa.
The mercenary Bob Denard, the most famous of these men, operated out of Libreville.
With the help of French secret agents, Freemasons, oil, timber, uranium and manganese magnates, and the mercenaries and hard men, Bongo set up what has been called the Clan Gabonais, a group of operators loyal to French political parties, to France, and to Bongo.
His Garde Presidentielle was a praetorian guard under French commanders, with French and Gabonese soldiers.
Gabon's oil was central to the system.
The country became, according to the writer Pierre Pean, "an outgrowth of the French state; an extreme case of neocolonialism, verging on the caricature... The roles are split, under the guise of non-interference... Africans deal with tribal quarrels while the French look after serious things, namely exploiting the natural riches."
Gabon was ruled jointly, he said, by Foccart, the right-wing Gaullist party in France, and Elf.
Years later, French investigators in the Elf headquarters in Paris seized a plan, never executed, to assassinate the writer Pean, who had nosed too far into the secret Franco-Gabonese world.
The book had been published not long after the election in 1981 of François Mitterrand, France's first Socialist president in a quarter of a century, and tremendous underground political tussles were underway between left-wing and right-wing factions in France, with Bongo leading the charge on behalf of the right-wingers.
One incoming French foreign intelligence chief was astonished to discover that Elf's intelligence services were penetrating his own."Pean's book was interpreted by the Foccart people as a Socialist-inspired attempt to discredit them," said the Africa expert Stephen Ellis.
"[The rise of Mitterrand] provoked real trepidation among the Elf networks, which feared the Socialists would destroy them. There were some on the left of the Socialist Party who indeed intended just that.
A lengthy political struggle ensued that finished with an almost complete victory by the old Foccart networks, whose effective leader was Bongo."
As part of his strategy, Bongo even threatened Mitterrand with the nuclear option -- turning toward the Americans under the recently elected Ronald Reagan.
But he never did.
Instead, a compromise was reached, which left the Clan unscathed: French right-wingers kept their fingers firmly in the fabulous Gabonese pie, but it was expanded to let the French Socialists get a piece too.
It is remarkable to think how far this African president had influenced politics in a big Western democracy.
Libreville also became a rear base for Igbo secessionists in Nigeria's Biafra war, whose cause de Gaulle had foolishly backed, hoping to split Nigeria's oil zones off from the English-speaking parent. About a million people died in that conflict.
Over the years, the Gabonese Clan squeezed its tentacles into conflicts in Rhodesia, Angola, Benin, Yemen, the Comoros Islands, Zaire's Katanga province, and Congo-Brazzaville; Bongo even recognized apartheid South Africa's racially segregated Bantustans.
Occasionally, when it suited France, the United States used Bongo for its own international parallel diplomacy, such as paying off separatist rebels in the Angolan oil enclave of Cabinda where American oil companies operated.
Bongo turned up in the most unlikely places -- mediating in wars, calling African presidents, discreetly flying opposition figures or rebel leaders to Libreville for chats.
They sometimes left with suitcases of cash.
"The Gabonese miracle would give Gaullist France the means to achieve its ambitions, far from the concessions that it had to negotiate with the AngloSaxons in the reserved lands of the Middle East," wrote the French newspaper Le monde diplomatique.
"From its Gabonese platform, Elf and its clan played politics across the African continent."
Though Bongo was less repressive than many African leaders, his government was no soft touch. When a radical opposition leader was shot dead in his car in Libreville in 1971, his family saw muscular white men pulling his body into a Peugeot and driving off.
The murder was never solved. In 1990, the year that Mitterrand made his famous "La Baule" speech supposedly marking a break with a dirty Franco-African past, a leading Gabonese dissident, Joseph Rendjambe, was found dead in his hotel room with syringe marks in his stomach.
An inquest said he died of natural causes, but disbelieving mobs, in Gabon's worst riots ever, briefly occupied the French embassy and took French oil staff hostage.
French troops in armoured vehicles quelled the riots, killing five. Not long afterward, Gabon hosted a huge tender for oil licences. Dozens of firms from Europe and North America prepared their dossiers, and submitted their bids, Elf won every licence.
Not only did Elf get the best exploration territories and fabulous contract terms, but other French companies more or less kept up the monopolies they had enjoyed for over a century.
Beyond all this, France also wrested control of much of the money from Gabon's natural resources that had escaped Elf and flowed contractually to Gabon's treasury. After independence, the central bank had its headquarters in Paris, under a French chairman and a French-dominated board.
The French treasury guaranteed the CFA franc currency, which Gabon shared with its near neighbours and which bolstered French control over its former colonies like Gabon.
They had to deposit two-thirds of their reserves with the French treasury and to prepare annual programmes of imports from non-franc countries; France not only set limits on imports of some items from outside the franc zone, but also minimum quantities for imports from France.
Capital flight from Gabon financed French deficits.
France had also set its relationships with its former colonies in stone with the now-infamous Co-operation Accords, a kind of all-conquering version of foreign aid.
A French prime minister, just before the wave of independence in 1960, explained how the colonies were to kowtow to French will, even after decolonisation: "Independence is granted on condition that the State, once independent, will abide by the co-operation agreements... one does not go without the other."
These accords incorporated the secret defence accords, anchored the monetary and trading relationships, and secured strategic minerals for France. Some "aid" money flowed out of the French treasury, into the Gabonese offshore turntable, then back into France to secretly finance its political parties.
The Clan grew fat on a Franco-Gabonese bureaucracy of nested rules, tax breaks, and exemptions that were hard for outsiders to penetrate.
Ports were awkward for ships not owned by the French transport and constructions titans; imports without letters of credit from French banks faced unpredictable delays; and French weapons, railways, or airplanes could be serviced only by French engineers with French spare parts.
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These devils that claimed to be Angels are the root of problems that we are facing in Africa and the world at large. They are the greedy and egocentric big brothers that are stealing African resources for their own benefits while the owners are left surfering, still they will say we are surfering without reference to their contributions to it. They are interfering with other country's affairs to satisfy their selfish interests, causing killings and bloodshed. They have democracy but only showing DEMONSTRATION OF CRAZYSurely, the days of reckoning had started already for all these companies, our bad leaders and countries that join hands with these corrupt and egocentric leaders to steal our natural resources, destroy the environments and making life difficult for the people in Niger Delta, Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
Only Africans...mostly sub saharan Africans have themselves to blame for every misstreatment or injustice or exploitation meted on them by the west. That's exactly what you get when you put your trust, knowledge and intelligence, welfare and security in the hands of a devil. Africans should learn from Asians how to patriotic.