Apologists for French Neocolonialism in Africa

France: NPA Social Democrats Support Military Coup in Niger

We print below an article translated from Le Bolchévik No. 191 (March 2010), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

On February 18 a military coup d’état took place in Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries. This landlocked country in the Sahel region contains major uranium mines, operated for 40 years by the French Areva nuclear power conglomerate (and its predecessors), which gets almost half its annual uranium supply from Niger. Uranium is a strategically important metal especially for French imperialism with its nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. The country of Niger, whose independence French premier Charles De Gaulle engineered in 1960, remains solidly in the French neocolonial African backyard—commonly referred to as Françafrique—which was officially declared to be a thing of the past by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Gabon’s president Ali Bongo, whose father Omar ruled Gabon for 42 years.

As it happens, the president of the capitalist state of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, had had the nerve to want to renegotiate prices with Areva and tried to get the support of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state as a counterweight to French imperialism. In the eyes of French imperialism, that’s a crime far more serious than physically liquidating a few opponents or dissolving parliament: Tandja was reportedly locked up in a military camp somewhere.

What has changed regarding Françafrique is not so much that Tandja didn’t find himself immediately riddled with bullets. It is that, above all, there is now a French social-democratic organization (which used to call itself “far left” and even “Trotskyist”) that supported the military coup that deposed Tandja. Indeed, the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of Olivier Besancenot has just published an article in Tout Est à Nous (25 February) that, starting with the title (“Niger—A Counter-Coup d’Etat”), blames the villain Tandja for what happened to him after he anti-democratically dissolved parliament and extended his own mandate by a phony plebiscite. The article goes on: “The president’s dealings had been condemned by the International Community...and called by many a constitutional coup d’état.” The “International Community” complete with capital letters is apparently the name the NPA now gives French imperialism, its government led by Sarkozy and [Foreign Minister Bernard] Kouchner, and France’s allies. Despite the orders of the “International Community,” an unrepentant Tandja “wanted to maintain the Sixth Republic (that was autocratically installed)” according to the NPA, which goes on to denounce “these maneuvers by Tandja to maintain himself in power and his obvious commitment to blocking negotiations with the opposition.”

The NPA hails the military intervention, giving advice to the Quai d’Orsay [France’s Foreign Office] and to the new dictator of Niger, Salou Djibo, who claims that he wants to organize elections and draw up a new Constitution: “Some observers see this putsch as an opportunity to put an end to the drift toward autocracy.... If the purpose of the coup was to rid the country of the dictatorship, they should go all the way and not let themselves be overtaken by the vertigo of power as happened in Guinea, Chad and Togo....” And they continue: “Confronted with a looming famine, the abandonment of [dispossessed] local populations, particularly the Tuaregs, and the curse represented by its mineral wealth, Niger must take advantage of this turnaround in the situation. To that end, a hands-off policy is necessary and the Manichean discourse of silence or intervention must be rejected.”

According to the NPA, Niger’s “curse” isn’t the yoke of French imperialism but the country’s mineral riches! No matter how obscenely pro-imperialist these declarations are, don’t expect them to stir up any indignation in the NPA’s ranks. The NPA is a deeply social-democratic organization and as such is based on the union bureaucracy and the aristocracy of labor (and also, markedly for the NPA, the bohemian petty-bourgeoisie) who are bought off by the imperialists. For that the imperialists draw in particular upon the superprofits they have reaped from their colonies and neocolonies, such as the plunder of Niger for more than a century. As Lenin explained in 1915 in “Socialism and War”:

“Opportunism and social-chauvinism stand on a common economic basis—the interests of a thin crust of privileged workers and of the petty-bourgeoisie, who are defending their privileged position, their ‘right’ to some modicum of the profits that their ‘own’ national bourgeoisie obtain from robbing other nations, from the advantages of their Great-Power status, etc.”

The NPA’s crowning argument for lining up behind its own bourgeoisie is the question of “democracy.” It was in the name of the struggle for “democracy” that the NPA’s predecessor, Alain Krivine’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, supported the pro-capitalist counterrevolutionaries of Solidarność in Poland in the early 1980s and then supported the right-wing bourgeois politician Jacques Chirac in the 2002 [French] presidential elections. From that to supporting a military junta in Françafrique is but a short step which the NPA took very blithely.

Democracy is nothing but a convenient guise for the bourgeoisie to hide its own bloody dictatorship against the classes and social layers that it exploits and oppresses. In disappearing the principal question—democracy for which class?—the NPA comes out unconditionally for the rule of the bourgeoisie—democratic if possible, but not necessarily—and always opposes the dictatorship of the proletariat (which after all is only democratic for the workers and the oppressed). Lenin wrote in his polemic against the renegade Kautsky:

“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in the case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”

The NPA reaches the height of the grotesque by supporting a military junta in Niger, which it presents as a step toward the restoration of “democracy.” If the NPA sees democracy in pink and green colors in France [i.e., the social democracy and the Greens], apparently according to them khaki is just as good a color for Africa! After a hundred years of French imperialist atrocities in Niger and the whole region, these countries endure horrendous and growing poverty. There is almost no working class in that whole part of Africa, which means that these countries lack the only social force that can lead all the oppressed in smashing the imperialist yoke once and for all and fight for an international socialist revolution. In fact, the West African immigrant workers in France can play a strategic role and serve as a living bridge between the struggle for revolution in France and in these countries. This makes it all the more vital to fight in France itself against the depredations of French imperialism overseas, and to overthrow capitalism here and throughout the whole world. Only then can we begin to remedy the ravages of imperialist oppression and lay the bases for a society of plenty based on a collectivized and internationally planned economy. French imperialism out of Africa!