The front page of Malian newspaper 26 Mars yesterday said it all. It simply read "Vive La France!" It would have been an utterly unimaginable headline when Nicolas Sarkozy – who once provoked an entire continent when he said that "
the tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history"– was at the helm. But this week, in Mali and elsewhere in west Africa, France adulation is standard fare.
It all began last Friday, when
Operation Serval was launched. French fighter jets entered Malian airspace and started pounding al-Qaida-linked rebels, who control the north of the country. Contrary to what the sudden flood of misinformed tweets tried to suggest, this was not another Afghanistan: the Malian government had been pleading for foreign assistance to regain control of its territory for months. Plans for an African-led military intervention – approved by the UN security council last month – were going nowhere.
As
Jeune Afrique reported in depth, the sudden decision by France to intervene was met with one gigantic
bienvenue!. Although a few sensible Malians pointed out that it was western powers who created this mess in the first place by failing to prevent thousands of Gaddafi-armed Tuaregs crossing into the desert from Libya, most were just happy to see something happen. One newspaper editor I spoke to in Bamako was furious at the French, but not because they are bombing his country – only because it took them so long to begin with.
The Malian press was almost unanimously singing from the same hymnsheet. For
Le Republicain, the French president had become "Hollande le Malien". Online paper
Journal du Mali celebrated "the outstretched hand of France in our country." Even Burkinabe Le Pays, despite stating in an editorial that it found the inability of Mali to defend its own territory "humiliating", grudgingly accepted that without French intervention, the crisis
could not be contained.
Here on the ground, French flags are flying in small provincial towns – something I have never seen before. In the capital, people are organising a collection for the French helicopter pilot who was killed in action (there are, it has to be said, similar feelings of affection for wounded Malian soldiers).
One blogger in Bamako pointed out that last weekend, over 1,000 people showed up at a health centre to donate blood to the armed forces, despite the fact that the national blood bank apparently could accommodate just 113 donors per day.
There are however some major exceptions to this wave of support. Algeria – which many in Mali blame for facilitating, fuelling and funding the rebels in the first place – is not a huge fan of the French military action. Conspiracy theories about Algeria's interests in the Sahara are circulating, some of which seem a little far-fetched, until a remarkable op-ed in today's New York Times by a former US ambassador to Mali suggested – no doubt unintentionally – that
there is a hidden agenda involving American and French support for some kind of Algerian occupation of the desert.
Grumbles about Algeria are common in Mali these days. But how can we explain this almost unchallenged adoration of France?
For one thing, there is a credible theory that the French defence ministry has imposed a
media blackout on reporting Operation Serval, preventing less savoury details from being reported. Since I've been in Mali, many humanitarian workers active in the north have told me that they are concerned about civilian casualties, which they believe far outnumber both official estimates, and would put a dampener on things, to put it mildly, if released.
There is another, equally depressing side to the joyous greeting Malians have offered the French. When I have asked people here about the impending arrival of west African troops, facial expressions have switched from welcoming smiles to snarls and pouts. "Comedians," one Malian told me. "They are just coming into the country to rob and vandalise us, then they will leave us again no better off."
It's as if I went to bed one night in a place where pan-African regional pride still existed, and woke up in another where the former colonial master is king. And that is much, much less welcome.
