In an interview with the weekly Le Point, published on 23 August, French President Emmanuel Macron, when asked about the supposed anti-French sentiment in the Sahel region, tried his hand at euchronia, the technique of narrating fictional events from a real historical starting point.
The starting point, in this case, is the request for military aid from France made by Mali’s interim president Dioncounda Traoré just over a decade ago.
By assuming that France has ignored this call, President Macron pointed his story towards a rather radical outcome: “If we had not been involved, with operations Serval and then Barkhane, there would probably no longer be any Mali, no longer any Burkina Faso. I’m not even sure there would still be Niger.”
Speculative fiction
Without denying the real threat, 10 years ago, of Bamako being taken over by jihadists, and without minimising the sacrifice of the 58 French soldiers who died in the Sahel, many African observers describe this Gallic assertion – a mythical binary of “me or chaos” – as arrogant. In a more skin-deep analysis, specialists in geopolitical issues see it as speculative fiction.
While Macron refers to the possibility of “the creation of caliphates a few thousand kilometres away” from his country, he is well aware that neither the Taliban takeover nor the establishment of the Islamic State proto-state has removed Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq from the map.
Did the interviewee’s words go beyond his thoughts, as is sometimes forgivable in a long interview without a formal structure? It would appear not. The following Monday, at the opening of the conference of French ambassadors, Macron drove the point home.
After a 40-minute speech, he mocked a “baroque alliance between so-called pan-Africanists and neo-imperialists” and repeated his analysis: “If our soldiers had not fallen on the field of honour in Africa, if Serval and then Barkhane had not been deployed, we would not be talking about Mali, Burkina Faso or Niger today.”
No sooner had he formulated what might seem like a nuance – “these states would no longer exist within their territorial limits” – than he repeated how convinced he was of being right: “I can tell you with certainty.”
While the diplomats in today’s Areopagus are learning to paint a picture of glasses half-empty and half-full, Macron is drawing up a presumptuous balance sheet in which the glass is full to the brim.
As excess begets excess, the spokesman for the government of Burkina Faso, Jean-Emmanuel Ouédraogo, believes he is too entitled to describe an empty glass, or rather one filled with hemlock: “France is part of the security problem in Burkina Faso.” Don’t the people of the Sahel deserve better than fiction and a diagnosis for the archives?
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