On a recent visit to Chad, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner described the EU mission to that country (EUFOR), which includes some 400 Irish troops, as representing “the best face of Europe” (Irish Times, 24th November). But the media coverage (including in Ireland) has failed to address wider concerns about French involvement in that country.

French troops stationed in Chad have for many years been instrumental in keeping Idriss Déby in power. Kouchner describes Déby  as “an elected and legitimate president” – despite the fact that observers have never declared any of his elections remotely ‘free and fair’ and his most recent victory involved an opposition boycott (turn-out was estimated at only 10 per cent) and extensive vote-rigging.  Nonetheless, when Déby’s regime was attacked in January 2008, French troops helped defend the airport, directly fired on rebels, and ferried ammunition to government troops. French Green MEP Marie-Anne Isler-Béguin claims that “At the moment, we [France] are basically supporting a dictator”.  Her claim is backed up by the NGO ‘Survie France’ which accuses the French government of claiming to protest at Déby’s persecution and detention of  political opponents (under the cover of the rebel attacks) while consistently providing him with the wherewithal to make such repression possible. The Human Rights Watch World Report for 2008 states that “The Chadian government has been responsible for human rights abuses against both combatants and non-combatants”, and documents summary executions, torture, rapes, beatings, arbitrary arrests, extortion and property theft perpetrated by government troops.  

A recent report for the ‘Small Arms Survey’, written by Jérome Tubiana, provides the clearest documentation to date of the extent to which the EUFOR Mission was designed to further French foreign policy objectives by ‘multilateralising’ French support for the Chadian regime, and concludes that “If French support for the Chadian government persists, there is a real risk that EUFOR will become a party to this conflict”. 

Mary Fitzgerald’s recent reports from Chad in the Irish Times provide some indications that, to date, Irish and other EUFOR troops may have been able to establish their neutrality to some of the Chadian rebel groups. And those reports also indicate that the intervention may be doing at least some short-term good in terms of securing humanitarian work. Nonetheless, the fact remains that intelligence is shared between the EU force and longer-standing French contingents, while existing French assets (including aircraft and camp facilities) have been made available to the EU operation. More than half the EU force is French and Tubiana notes that “The neutrality of the force is more and more open to question given the pre-eminence of French troops in its ranks”.  

As Gerard Prunier, a leading expert on France’s Africa policy, has put it, “Idriss Déby is hanging to power by the skin of his teeth but he is likely to hang on only as long as Paris and Brussels continue to support him under some kind of a pseudo-humanitarian face-saving dispensation.”  Nobody can wish Irish soldiers serving in Chad anything other than the best in the difficult situation in which they find themselves, and it is to be hoped that their efforts do result in genuinely humanitarian outcomes.  But there is an alarming blindness about the wider context in which this intervention is occurring and the less than purely humanitarian motivations driving French and European intervention. Mainstream media seems largely ignoring of the frequent criticisms of French foreign policy towards Africa in particular, with French diplomatic or commercial interests typically overriding humanitarian or developmental considerations in countries such as Rwanda and the Central African Republic.  
 
These issues are becoming ever more urgent.  There have been recent calls for the deployment of EU peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and German naval ships are leading an EU anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia.  Unless we explore the wider context in which these interventions are occurring, and the motivations of the actors concerned, the consequences could be deeply damaging – for Africans and for ordinary Europeans alike.