[The following article is reprinted from the July 22-28 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Why is it that for more than 15 years different French governments have carried out military interventions in the Chadian conflict but have never given the impression of defending a consistent policy there?
Why has France successively aided rival factions, at one point supporting the southern leader Kamougué, then Goukouni Oueddei, and today Hissène Habré?
Obviously we should recall the French economic interests in Chad. In 1980, cotton constituted 89 percent of French purchases in Chad. French exports fell in 1980 to 48.3 million francs, mainly vehicles and capital goods. For several years the activities of French companies have been disrupted. The Brasseries du Logone breweries, the oil company Total Chad, Renault, Colas road builders, and the French West Africa Company have had to cease or sharply curtail their activities as chaos slowly replaced the former economic patterns.
But this alone is not enough to explain the contortions of French policy in that country. Chad never represented a decisive market for companies in France, nor was it a source of strategic raw materials.
So is it the "Libyan danger" that makes Paris act? The big press suggests this kind of interpretation. But this explanation is somewhat simplistic and skips over the fact that Libya is a far more interesting export market for the imperialist countries than Chad.
In all the Western countries there are quite a few industrial lobbies that want to take advantage of the Libyan market. In this regard we should recall the desire of the Elf-Erap oil company, and its director Albin Chalandon, to maintain its existing ties with Tripoli when then president Giscard called for breaking off all commerical relations. Qaddafi himself has taken care in recent weeks to make a distinction between France and the United States, accusing the latter of "dragging" the former into this war.
Of course imperialism has no desire to see the influence of the "Guide" [i.e., Qaddafi] spread in Africa. A certain type of Islamic fundamentalism could undoubtedly shake up many regimes in the region. And the French government feels it must respond to that problem, if only to protect and reassure its best allies in Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, and Niger.
But none of this suffices to explain the French twists and turns in Chad.
A Chadian nation?
There is a third, more fundamental, reason that we must add to the two already mentioned: France and imperialism want to defend the maintenance and stability of a centralized "national state" in Chad, whatever the cost. To that end they invoke the Charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which defends the maintenance of the borders inherited from the colonial period. This is obviously stupid. No imperialist country invokes the map with regard to Western Sahara or Eritrea. Nor did any seek a confrontation with Libya when that country in fact occupied a strip of desert in
The Chadian national state is a fiction. Even Pierre Mesmer, who was governor of French Equatorial Africa [of which Chad was a part| and a strong partisan of the interventions in Chad under de Gaulle, acknowledged that recently in Le Matin. There is no Chadian nation. That leads therefore to the following contradiction: each of the factions in the confrontation (there are, in fact, more than ten) seeks to gain control of the power of the "national" state, while none of them can claim to represent the interests of an established "Chadian national consciousness."
First there was the division between the south and the north. The Black populations of the south formed the base of the cotton economy of the colonial period. The government that was established at the time of independence was set up primarily from "the South." The inhabitants of the north were left to fend for themselves.
which arose in the middle of the
Frolinat' 1960s, was rooted in these northern populations. But Frolinat itself broke up into a multitude of rival factions.
The central government was never capable of centralizing the economic networks of the north, of the nomadic and seminomadic peoples of the Tibesti. These networks, which dated back several centuries, were mostly oriented toward Libya and the Sudan.
Incapable of building a national economy. the neocolonial regime could only respond with repression and coercion to the first stirrings of unrest in the north. The economic backwardness and isolation of the Tibesti allowed the continuation of traditional forms of organization of society around the clans. This is what explains the breakup of Frolinat into
TUNISIA Mediterranean Sea Tripoli
ALGERIA
EGYPT
LIBYA
NIGER CHAD
SUDAN
• N'Djamena
NIGERIA
CENTRAL
AFRICAN REP
CAMEROON
groups based only on the most limited community of interests.
Defense of the 'national state'
French goverment spokesman Max Gallo declared on July 5: "France supports the legitimate government of Chad. " But the poor man would have quite a time telling us what that legitimacy consists of. A year earlier France supported the "legitimacy" of Goukouni Oueddei against Habré himself. Falling into step, the press began writing of "rebels" and "regular troops." Tripoli, in turn, uses similar language to support its allies of the moment.
The truth is that the defense of the regime in place in Ndjamena is an absolute necessity to defend the very principle of the "national state." A change in imperialism's attitude would be tragic for all the dictatorships in the region.
The long-term disappearance of a centralizing state in Chad would challenge the very principle of all the neocolonial institutions in Africa. It would challenge their corrupt repressive powers, whose supposed legitimacy is anchored solely on their ability to centralize a state through force.
Imperialism doesn't give a damn about whether a Chadian nation exists. Its objective is to show all the protagonists in the conflict that it will not permit the state structures in Ndjamena to collapse. This is what underlies the references to Chadian "legitimacy" that permit it to support one or another clique that grabs power for a moment. It hardly matters to imperialism that the overwhelming majority of the peoples do not concede any "national" legitimacy to those who occupy the governmental palace.
2. Goukouni Oueddei was quite conscious of these paradoxes. If he should return to power he would again seek his "legitimacy" from France.
When he was "the legitimate government," he took great care not to denounce the military accord linking Chad to France. an accord signed by [the then Premier Jacques] Chirac in 1976, Adberrahman Moussa. a figure from Goukouni's camp, stated, not without humor, that there was "no problem with France" and that France is simply obliged to make symbolic gestures.
Notes
1. Chad National Liberation Front, whose aim was to overthrow the Tombalbaye regime [installed when the French left in 1960].