Chirac,
friend of AfricaMARCH 1976
First official African visitMAY 1979
Francophone mayor successAPRIL 1981
Chirac and BongoAPRIL 1986
Foccart’s come-backFEBRUARY 1990
Long live one-party statesJULY 1995
In de Gaulle’s footstepsAUGUST 1997
Chirac and SassouJULY 1999
Chirac and the “iron men”DECEMBER 1999
Chirac thwarted by Jospin and HollandeSEPTEMBER 2002
Chirac’s revenge at Gbagbo’s expenseJUNE 2003
Africa at the G8APRIL 2004
Friends firstJUNE 2006
White WizardJUNE 2009
Final journeySEPTEMBER 2011
Confession
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Relations between Jacques Chirac and Africa have always been passionate. This future president of France has woven since the seventies his network in the African continent. Chirac who considered himself to be the heir of De Gaulle’s political ideology, sought advice from the very controversial head of the General’s Africa think-tank Jacques Foccart and established close and almost brotherly relationships with many of Africa’s strongmen such as Gnassingbé Eyadema of Togo, Omar Bongo of Gabon, and Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville. While sharing power with his political adversaries such as President Giscard d’Estaing, President Mitterrand and Prime minister Lionel Jospin, he made it clear to them that Africa was his preserve and that they should keep their “hands off Africa”. The controversial Franco-Lebanese lawyer Robert Bourgi served as Chirac’s man Friday in his dealings with Africa. Read below the saga of a political adventurer in Africa, covering the years 1976 to 2011.
President Chirac (on the right) welcomes his counterpart from Togo General Gnassingbe Eyadema. Photo taken in Paris, on 2 March 2004. © Patrick Kovarik/AFP
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MARCH 1976
First official African visitOn his first official trip to Africa, Jacques Chirac, 43, went to Chad. As Prime Minister to President Giscard d’Estaing, a post he had held since May 1974, Chirac met President Félix Malloum and struck an agreement to increase military cooperation between Paris and N’Djamena.
Prime minister Jacques Chirac (left) talking to the Head of State of Chad General Felix Malloum. Photo taken on 6 March 1976. © Gabriel Duval/AFP
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MAY 1979
Francophone mayor successIn Quebec, alongside the Canadian city’s mayor, Jean Pelletier, Jacques Chirac announced the creation of the International Association of Francophone Mayors (AIMF). In August 1976, Chirac dramatically resigned as Prime Minister. He founded the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), a Gaullist, anti-Giscard political party, in December 1976. In March 1977, he was elected Mayor of Paris, beating the Giscard candidate. In May 1979, with AIMF, he wove an international network that brought him close to numerous African decision-makers.
Fingers separated signaling the V for victory. Chirac at a public meeting during the municipal election campaign in Paris. A month later, he became the first mayor of Paris. Two years later, he launched the International Association of French Speaking Mayors. Photo taken on 22 February 1977. © Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
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APRIL 1981
Chirac and BongoIn the first round of the 1981 presidential elections, Jacques Chirac garnered 18% of the vote, coming third behind Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Socialist Party candidate François Mitterand, who was elected in the run-off two weeks later. Rumours circulated that the RPR leader had received financial support from some of his African friends. Twenty-eight years later, in June 2009, Giscard revealed on French radio that the President of Gabon, Omar Bongo, had financed Chirac’s campaign at the time. “I telephoned Bongo to ask for an explanation,” said Giscard. Chirac immediately refuted the accusation, calling it a “low-grade controversy”.
French President Jacques Chirac (R) hugs his Gabonese counterpart and friend Omar Bongo 30 August 2000 in Elysee palace in Paris. © Georges Gobet/AFP
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APRIL 1986
Foccart’s come-backFollowing victory for the right in the legislative elections of March 1986, Jacques Chirac became Prime Minister once again, forced into political cohabitation with the left-wing President François Mitterrand. He soon afterwards appointed Jacques Foccart as head of a newly set-up Africa unit. Foccart had been General de Gaulle’s chief advisor on African affairs. He soon afterwards appointed Jacques Foccart as head of a newly set-up Africa unit. Foccart had been General de Gaulle’s chief advisor on African affairs. In September 1987, Chirac “double crossed” Mitterrand on two sensitive issues. In South Africa, he secretly negotiated the liberation of the anti-apartheid figure Pierre-André Albertini. In Congo Brazzaville, he dispatched several intelligence officers and a Transall military aircraft to President Sassou Nguesso to help him crush a rebellion in the north of the country.
For his last official posting, Jacques Foccart (R) served as advisor to Chirac, during the first period of cohabitation (1986-1988) between a socialist president (Mitterrand) and a liberal right-wing prime minister (Chirac). © AFP
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FEBRUARY 1990
Long live one-party statesThree months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacques Chirac, who had lost the presidential race against François Mitterrand in May 1988, attended an AIMF meeting in Abidjan, hosted by his friend Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. When questioned by RFI about the national conference taking place in Benin at the same time, the leader of the French opposition declared, “The multiparty system has nothing to do with democracy, and there are some perfectly democratic African countries, like Côte d’Ivoire, that have one party and where that party acts democratically.” The leader of RPR added, “Multiparty systems are a kind of luxury that these developing countries can’t afford.” Four months later, in a speech he made in the French resort of La Baule, President Mitterrand announced that henceforth, “France will link its entire contribution effort to efforts made to move in the direction of greater freedom.”
Four years before the speech of La Baule, during the Lomé summit in 1986, François Mitterand and his Prime Minister Jacques Chirac seemed almost like pals. At their side are Gnassingbe Eyadema from Togo and the Ivorian Felix Houphouët-Boigny. However their views on the Ivorian and Togolese governments would change in 1990. © Daniel Janin/AFP
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JULY 1995
In de Gaulle’s footstepsThree months after being elected President of the Republic against Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin, 62-year-old Jacques Chirac set off on his first tour of Africa. Visiting King Hassan II in Morocco, then Henri Konan Bédié in Côte d’Ivoire – Houphouët-Boigny had died twenty months earlier – then Omar Bongo in Gabon, he made a final stopover in Senegal, welcomed by his friend Abdou Diouf. He asked the presidents of neighbouring countries to join him there. Alpha Oumar Konaré refused to respond to what many Malians perceived as a “summons”. During his tour, Chirac was accompanied by the ageing Foccart, 81, and his two “heirs”, Fernand Wibaux and Michel Dupuch.
Senegalese president Abdou Diouf (R) and French president Jacques Chirac (L) wave to the crowd, on 23 July 1995 on the Independence plazza in Dakar during Jacques Chirac’s five-day tour of Africa. © Georges Bendrihem/AFP
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AUGUST 1997
Chirac and SassouIn Brazzaville, a fierce battle had been raging for two months between the militias of President Pascal Lissouba and political opponent Denis Sassou Nguesso. Officially, France was neutral. That was the position put forward by both the President’s Office whose incumbent was still Chirac, and Matignon, the seat of the recently appointed Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. However, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné revealed that heavy weapons had been delivered to political opponent Sassou Nguesso’s troops via Gabon, Angola and Senegal with the tacit agreement of the Elysée. It was the first serious upset in the Chirac-Jospin cohabitation. Ten months later, Chirac declared, “Congo was destroying itself and it was a good idea to re-establish order. Someone was capable of re-establishing it, and that was Denis Sassou Nguesso”.
French President Jacques Chirac, (R), talks with Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso during a meeting Saturday, 15 November, at the 7th Francophone Summit in Hanoi. © Laurent Rebours/AFP
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JULY 1999
Chirac and the “iron men”For two years, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and the First Secretary of the Socialist Party, François Hollande, had been openly supporting young African democracies (Mali, Senegal, etc.). Jacques Chirac chose a different path and set off on a new tour that took him, along with Nigeria, to three francophone countries ruled with an iron fist: Guinea run by General Lansana Conté – while his opponent Alpha Condé languished in prison, Togo led by General Gnassingbé Eyadema, and Paul Biya’s Cameroon. In February 2005, upon Eyadema’s death, Chirac paid him a glowing tribute, calling him a “personal friend”.
French President Jacques Chirac (C) holds the hand of Chantal Biya, wife of his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya (R), upon his arrival at Yaounde airport, 24 July 1999. © Georges Gobet/AFP
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DECEMBER 1999
Chirac thwarted by Jospin and HollandeOn Christmas Eve, Ivorian President Henri Konan Bédié (HKB), was overthrown by the army. To get him back in the saddle, Chirac wanted to send French soldiers to Abidjan. Jospin did not agree. Chirac backed down and bit the dust. A second defeat for the French president: in October 2000, Laurent Gbagbo, Jospin and Hollande’s fellow socialist, was elected president of Côte d’Ivoire in the absence of his two main rivals, HKB and Alassane Ouattara.
In July 2001, a few months after his election, Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo met French PM Lionel Jospin in Paris. Smiles all round among Socialist comrades. Jacques Chirac is chomping at the bit. © Patrick Kovarik/AFP
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SEPTEMBER 2002
Chirac’s revenge at Gbagbo’s expenseA few months after Jospin’s electoral rout and Chirac’s re-election, Laurent Gbagbo was confronted with an armed insurrection by supporters of Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo asked Chirac to help him defeat the uprising. The French leader responded with a half measure. Seizing the opportunity to undermine the socialist president of Côte d’Ivoire, whom he considered an “illegitimate child of cohabitation” (Antoine Glaser), Chirac limited his response to a peacekeeping force between the north and the south of the country: Operation Unicorn. In November 2004, following the death of nine French soldiers when their barracks was bombed in Bouaké, in the centre of the country, Chirac ordered the destruction of Gbagbo’s airforce and declared: “We can’t allow a system to develop that could lead to anarchy or a fascist-style regime.”
On 25 January 2003 after a meeting in Marcoussis near Paris, Jacques Chirac and the UN secretary general Koffi Annan, tried to negotiate a cohabitation deal between Ivorian rebel Guillaume Soro and Laurent Gbagbo. Their faces seemed nervous... Luckily UN secretary general Koffi Annan stands between the two fighters! © Patrick Kovarik/AFP
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JUNE 2003
Africa at the G8Bush in Evian? Four months after France’s UN veto on armed intervention, Chirac’s France was not in the good books of George W. Bush’s United States. Finally, after much hesitation, the American president decided to attend the G8 in Evian, France. At the initiative of Chirac, who was pushing for a tax on airline tickets, African development was a priority theme at the G8, and several heads of state from the continent were invited: Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Morocco’s Mohamed VI, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo wearing his colourful boubou, Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki. It was the first time African leaders were invited to a summit of the world’s largest industrialised democracies. At the francophone countries’ summit held in Beirut in October 2002, Chirac succeeded in imposing Senegal’s former president Abdou Diouf, one of his closest friends, as the new head of the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF). Diouf was running against Henri Lopès, Congo-Brazzaville’s former prime minister and his country’s then ambassador to France.
G8 summit In Evian, France on 01 June 2003. © S005/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
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APRIL 2004
Friends firstOmar Bongo from Gabon, Gnassingbé Eyadema from Togo and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from Tunisia, whom he called a great “democrat” during his visit to Tunis in December 2003…. When it came to his friends in Africa, Jacques Chirac was generous in word and deed. In April 2004, while on a trip to France, the head of the Congolese police force, Jean-François Ndengué, was arrested after a warrant was issued by a Parisian judge investigating the disappearance of 353 former opponents kidnapped in Brazzaville in May 1999 and never found. The French president reacted by ordering the Paris Public Prosecutor to meet at two in the morning to release Ndengué, a close ally of Denis Sassou Nguesso.
French President Jacques Chirac, President Of Gabon Omar Bongo, and Congolese President Denis Sassou N'Guesso on 5 February, 2005 in Brazzaville, Congo. © Gilles Bassignac/Getty Images
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JUNE 2006
White WizardFor a long time, Jacques Chirac had stressed how appalled he was by the slave trade. Starting in 2006, 10 May was established as a national commemoration day of the slave trade and its abolition. The French president also became a champion of “primitive art”. In June 2006, he opened a Museum of the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas on Quai Branly in Paris. On June 20, 2016, it was renamed Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.
French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony at Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, to pay tribute to the abolition of slavery, on 10 May 2006. © Gilles Bassignac/Getty Images
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JUNE 2009
Final journeyTwo years after leaving the Elysée, 76 year-old Jacques Chirac paid a last visit to sub-Saharan Africa. He travelled to Gabon with his successor Nicolas Sarkozy to pay tribute to his old friend Omar Bongo, who had died a few days earlier. In December 2001, he had not seen fit to attend the funeral of the poet and president Léopold Sédar Senghor in Dakar. His absence had been controversial in France and Africa. Did he still merit his nickname “Chirac the African”? This time round, in Libreville, he did not forget to pay tribute to another great friend of France.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy (3rdL) and former French President Jacques Chirac (2ndR) lay a floral tribute before the coffin of former President of Gabon Omar Bongo at the Presidential palace in Libreville on 16 June 2009. © Issouf Sanogo/AFP
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SEPTEMBER 2011
ConfessionIn a sensational interview in the Journal du Dimanche, the Franco-Lebanese lawyer Robert Bourgi revealed that during Chirac’s presidency he had ferried millions of dollars in cash, hidden in briefcases and drums, from several presidential palaces in Africa to Dominique Villepin’s office at the Elysée (1). Published seven months before the 2012 presidential elections, the article created a scandal in France. Villepin said he would press charges against Bourgi. Chirac made no comment. Too tired? Too weary? From that point on, the old lion roared no more. He was heard no more.
French President Jacques Chirac (R) and his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (L) on the Elysée, 27 April 2006. © Pascal Pavani/AFP
(1) In the run-up to the 2002 presidential campaign, according to Robert Bourgi, “Five African heads of state – Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal), Blaise Compaoré (Burkina Faso), Laurent Gbagbo (Côte d’Ivoire), Denis Sassou Nguesso (Congo Brazzaville) and of course, Omar Bongo (Gabon) – paid out around 10 million dollars”.