bboc/20_African_independencies_and_communism_1960-1998_Francis_Arzalier.tex

\chapter[African independencies and \enquote{communism}]{African independencies and \enquote{communism} (1960-1998)}

\chapterauthor{Francis ARZALIER}

We are living at the end of this century, a time of strange repentance.
The failures, the dramas, the crimes of the three previous generations jump in our faces, like furious cats, all claws out.
Should we lose all common sense, all honesty of analysis, disguise our father's and owns' dreams of happiness, as matrix of murder?
Is it necessary to abandon all lucidity, all ideal of progress, and integrate the bleating cohort of penitents saying mea culpa at the horn's sound for the sins of others?

It is certainly time to know how movements born of ideals of social and political liberation were able to transform themselves into their opposite, into terrorist groups, massacring a people they claimed to liberate.
This work is initiated by historians and continues in the silence of the media. And this is fortunate, because our future depends on this lucid look at the 20th century.

This was not the purpose of the Black Book of Communism, to which its masters assigned an ideological, if not political, objective:
to criminalize communism, thereby “sacralize” the unsurpassable capitalist society in this perspective of the “end of history” that Mr. Fukuyama invented.

It would be too long to point out in the 900 pages of the Black Book the historical incongruities. 
Let us stick to the precise example of the passage devoted (twenty-five pages) to three of the regimes that claimed to be Marxists in Africa (Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique), under the title “Afrocommunism”.

Why these three, and only those? Who does not remember the fiery proclamations of “Marxism-Leninism” in Sekou Touré's Guinea, Sassou-Nguesso's Congo first way, Mathieu Kérékou's Benin before his ouster followed by a return through the ballot box?
In what way did these experiments of claimed socialism of the 70s fall less under “real communism” than the three restraints?
Could it be because the aforementioned revolutionary episodes, even if they have failed to achieve their proclaimed goals of democracy and social equality, do not present mass slaughters?
Thus works Mr. Santamaria's “analysis”: The only “communism with African mirrors”  is the one to which it is possible to impute mass graves.

Initially, five confusing pages want to demonstrate that Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia, although African, were indeed communists, therefore criminals, or criminals, because communists:
this by virtue of “the criminal dimension of communism”, African or not.

After this “demonstration”, dotted with some ethnicist errors (the “Rwandan Patriotic Front (Toutsi)” —sic— “Rwanda, with the genocide of the Hutu” —sic—), begins the history of the “Red Empire: Ethiopia”:
if the chronology is more or less accurate, the events are quoted outside any political and social context.
In 1974, Haile Selassie's Empire “collapsed without major upheavals,” and the head of the military government Mengistu “openly committed the country to the path of socialism.”
He was born a bastard, therefore revolutionary and criminal: the author does not hesitate to occasionally take up the old refrain of the counter-revolutionary historiography of the French 19th century...
From there, ten pages make an avalanche of imprecatory words spread into a litany: “liquidation”, “fate settled with machine gun”, “imperial remains endorsed”,
“survivors”, “physical destruction”, “extermination”, “red terror”, “blood bottles”, “execution”, “suffocators", “death squads”, “victims of terror”,
“political assassinations”, "mass graves”, "Bolshevik Saturn”, "carts of convicts”, "ready to liquidate ritual”, "mass graves”, "disappeared”,
“put to death”, “exhibition of tortured victims”, “murdered children”, “abuses”, “gas poisoning”, “wave of barbarism”, “Oradour-sur-Glane”,
“massacres of civilian populations gathered in churches”, “butchers”, “mass graves”, “concentration camp”, “total war”,
“massive reprisals and air terror raids”, “systematic rapes”, “famine”, “food weapon”, “diversion of aid”, “forced transfer”, “mass deportations”... 
Words are not innocent, linguists and psychoanalysts know this well. 
They take the place here of evidence and compensate for the lightness of the assertions, the death figures which are only a matter of possibility (“for the period February 1977-June 1978, the figure of 10,000 political assassinations has been put forward”, p. 751). 
Invective is elevated to the rank of historical analysis, structured by the negative aspects of the period 1974-1991 alone. 
Seventeen years of the history of the peoples of Ethiopia is thus demonized, amputated from everything that was progress or popular struggle for a generation.
For finally, let us return to the historical reality: the revolution of 1974, under the leadership of the military and progressive intellectuals of the DERG, overthrew the Ethiopian Empire, one of the most anachronistic feudal regimes in the world.
In the following years, it tried to force Ethiopian society into a modernity tinged with socialism:
agrarian reform and cooperative development, secularization of a hitherto clerical state, literacy, pensions for wages, national unity, etc.
From 1974 to 1980, the number of primary school pupils increased from 850,000 to 1,400,000 and the adult literacy campaign was cited as an example by UNICEF.
All the analyses of Specialists in Africa say it, Ethiopia from the years 1975 to 1980 experienced “an almost unique case of an African agrarian revolution. . . .
a remarkable amalgam between a desire for socialist collectivization and the reference to African communal customs” (C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Afrique noire permanence et ruptures(Black Africa, permanency and rupture), L'Harmattan, 1992). 
And all of them recorded initial peasant support, especially in the south, before hostility to bureaucratic collectivization from 1984 onwards. 
Certainly, the “red terror” from 1975 to 1980 was very real, certainly beyond the necessary constraints of a state power eager for reform. 
The mistakes were numerous, and the final failure followed when the government found itself isolated in the face of the flowering of armed regional uprisings, largely supported by the United States. 
The observation of this failure, however, does not allow us to forget the initial progress.

After Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique are entitled to ten pages of the same growth: 
accusatory logorrhea as evidence, conditional to convey any rumor, according to the process dear to our television journalists, afflicting count of all the victims of the war and its corollary hunger, all of course attributed to the “Soviet model” and “the deeply Leninist nature of African states”!
It would hardly deserve to dwell on it, if this description of the former Portuguese colonies for twenty-five years did not push the instrumentalization of history to the point of ignoring the role of apartheid South Africa.
 Yet it was very present, and in what way, in subsidies, in weapons, in men, until the victory of the ANC in 1994. 
The author does not hesitate to invert the most proven facts: 
the Union of South Africa reportedly intervened in Angola alongside Jonas Savimbi's Unita in response to the presence in Luanda of Cuban and Soviet forces. 
It is therefore necessary to recall what even the Western press did not deny; the racists in power in Pretoria have also throughout these years proudly claimed their intervention “to stop communism”.

In Angola, the colonial repression carried out by the Portuguese fascist regime from 1961 to 1974 against the armed liberation movements (MPLA of Marxist inspiration, UNITA and FNLA more ethnicist and anti-communist) led to independence, thanks to the Portuguese democratic revolution of the “carnations”. 
The Angolan people did not long enjoy their new freedom: in 1975, the FNLA and especially UNITA installed their separatist power, particularly in the diamond-producing regions, with the financial, material and human support of the two pro-Western governments of Zaire and South Africa, and the CIA.
Defeated on the ground by the forces of the MPLA government, helped by a Cuban contingent, UNITA mercenaries, supervised by the South African special services, officially supported by the United States of Presidents Reagan and Bush, continue to manage various parts of the country, to multiply terror raids against villages that do not accept their law. 
According to UN publications, the toll of a decade of war, from 1978 to 1988, is more than 300,000 dead, hundreds of thousands maimed, and as many refugees. 
The gradual collapse of apartheid in the GDR finally forced UNITA and its US protectors to accept an end to the fighting: the 1992 peace agreements explicitly provided for the departure of foreign contingents, and elections.
They took place in 1992, under the control of observers from all over the world and gave a large majority to the MPLA. And Savimbi's UNITA, refusing the popular verdict, restarted the civil war: in 1994, the UN estimated that this new conflict killed a thousand Angolans a day! 
It was not until the defeat of Mobutu's Zaire in 1997 and its UNITA protégés that hope was reborn in Angola destroyed by 30 years of wars. Where the hell are the crimes of communism?

Mozambique has a parallel history. It too, barely freed from Portuguese domination, suffered the ravages of the war waged by the separatist forces of RENAMO, financed and armed for sixteen years by racist South Africa, and, hypocritically, by some major Western powers, including, unfortunately, France.
Here too, the peace process, laboriously installed after 1994 (Mandela's ANC was then in power in South Africa) gave a large majority to the FRELIMO party (very little Marxist, no offense to Mr. Courtois). 
It has yet to rebuild a ravaged country that has lost hundreds of thousands of citizens, most of its industrial equipment, and whose arable land is dotted with anti-personnel mines uprooting lives and limbs for decades to come. Crimes of communism? 
Mr. Courtois' authors should study some of the history of black Africa elsewhere than in the works in use in Pretoria 10 years ago!

Angola, Mozambique, have been left exhausted at the end of conflicts born mainly from the appetites of the great powers and multinational corporations, eyeing the riches of the subsoil, diamonds, oil. 
What do the few abuses, human rights violations and executions, attributed by our authors to “communist” Frelimo and MPLA weigh in this dramatic assessment?

Angola, Mozambique: crimes of communism or criminal consequences of African and international capitalism?

\section{Capitalism and Africa since the 60s}

Because finally, this is what it is all about: the “black continent” is not an isolation, it is inhabited by the same ideological controversies, the same economic and social structures as the rest of the universe.

Let us not repeat the manipulations of the Black Book in reverse: ideologies are not responsible for the criminal excesses of those who claim to be so.

In Rwanda, in 1994, nearly a million human beings, because they were Tutsi or democrats, were exterminated in a few weeks by the Interhahwe militias of the fascists and racists of the “Hutu Power”. 
These assassins were for years, and even in their defeat, armed, financed, protected by the secular arms of President Mitterrand. 
This in no way makes it possible to affirm the responsibility of the social-democratic ideology in the crime.

It is also unfortunately real that some priests in Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa, have approved or even participated in the racist massacres: 
it does not allow anyone to speak of a crime of Catholicism on occasion.

It is common knowledge that the fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship that has imposed its law on Sudan for ten years has maintained very cordial relations with the French networks of Charles Pasqua and Marchiani: 
this cannot allow Gaullism to be blamed for the fierce war waged by the fundamentalist power against the peoples of South Sudan, which has left millions of people dead and refugees in twelve years.

On the other hand, there is an undeniable reality: contemporary Africas, from north to south and from east to west, are inserted into the global mechanisms of capitalism. 
The masters of the major Western powers, notably through the international organizations they control (IMF, World Bank, UN Security Council, etc.), exercise daily surveillance over African states. 
The price of commodities, which make up the bulk of African exports, is the sole responsibility of Western financial markets, and has fallen steadily over the long term; the industrial or food products that undeveloped Africa has to buy are, on the contrary, becoming more and more expensive.

The World Bank's recent diagnoses are clear with regard to Africa: 
even more than before, African economies and African states are crushed by debt to the point of being able to dream of an independent practice.

Despite sluggish growth in commodity exports and debt reduction agreements, the situation in sub-Saharan African countries continued to deteriorate. 
Their debt represents on average 170\% of their exports (1,000\% in Mozambique, 600\% in Côte d'Ivoire).

According to the “debt tables” published by the World Bank, out of 40 heavily indebted countries, 33 are in sub-Saharan Africa. The Maghreb is not much better off: 
in Algeria, the debt-to-export revenue ratio is 308\%, in Morocco 247\%, in Egypt 214\%.
Many experts from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, can even afford the luxury of recognizing that many of these debts can never be repaid: 
the African continent and its peoples must remain crushed by the straitjacket of debt. 
Debt is for the great financial and political powers more political weapon than source of profit: 
sub-Saharan Africa's total debt (\$223 billion) barely exceeds 10\% of the global total. 
But it makes it possible to impose on African governments the “structural adjustment plans”, that is to say to control their political, economic and social orientations (austerity for public services and privatization of wealthes). 
Better: this grip of world capitalism is stronger in Africa in 1998 than in the colonial era. 
Most of the villages of the AOF in 1930 lived in quasi-communal autarky, and felt the weight of colonial authority only through forced labor and taxation. 
At the end of the 20th century, the Ivorian or Senegalese farmer knew that the price of his cocoa or groundnut harvest depended on Western stock exchanges!

In this universe regulated by the laws of the world market, where one invests only according to the expected profit (in “useful Africa” according to the terminology of the financiers), the network of capitalist interests has its local relays, impregnated with the “liberal” creed, able to propagate it and to make it respected by the populations who suffer from it, emanating from the profits that derive from the system:  
it was for a long time (from 1960 to 1990) fierce military thugs, such as Bokassa in the Central African Republic, or Amin Dada in Uganda, corrupt tyrants like Mobutu in Zaire, and many others: 
all owed the wealth they have accumulated and their political longevity only to the multifaceted support of the powerful of the West, in the name of anti-communism. 
Some of them still survive, such as Eyadema in Togo, maintained by French support after ruthless repression.

But a new generation of African leaders dedicated to global and local capitalism is taking place, which is no better:
they are the fine talking technocrats trained by the IMF and the World Bank, who never cease to extol the virtues of multi-party politics confused by them with democracy and the laws of the sacrosanct world market. 
Soglo was one of them, whom the people of Benin have just thanked after seeing that he had only aggravated their poverty.

The new masters of world capitalism, feeling the African soil moving under them, are also ready to make an arrow of any wood, to support in relay leaders displaying very varied ideologies, provided that they ensure the essential, political stability, obedience to the “laws of the market”... and “structural adjustment plans”. Here
a former Converted Marxist, there a former supporter of the maquis of the 60s, elsewhere an avowed fundamentalist: : the IMF is very “plural”, it expects from them only the ability to make their peoples accept the need for capitalist profit.

Since the dawn of African independence, capitalism has been the context of some of the worst mass slaughters of the 20th century.

1. — In 1966, the Biafran war began in Nigeria. This former British colony, the most populous in sub-Saharan Africa, had managed to federate into a single country various peoples: 
its unity, as much as its oil, could give it hope for an exit from underdevelopment. 
It was counting without the appetites of the great capitalist societies of western states and their ability to play with separatism. 
The ethnicism opposing the Ibos of the east to the majority Yoruba in Lagos, led to the proclamation by the former of a republic of Biafra, eager to keep for itself the profits of the oil fields. 
If the British oil companies (BP, Shell) support the federal state, the Biafra of Ojukwu is helped, and even aroused in its military stubbornness, by their competitors who see it as an opportunity to expand their area of influence. 
De Gaulle's France and Foccart, its African affiliates, Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire and Bongo of Gabon, take up the cause of the separatists, organize the supply of weapons and mercenaries: the SDECE and Bob Denard are part of the adventure.

French opinion was then outrageously manipulated in its good feelings by a campaign in which some of the tenors of the “humanitarian” used any means:
 the images of children starving, mutilated, as a result of the war, “demonstrate the just cause of Biafra”. 
To the end, the Biafran secession is nourished by the sordid ulterior motives of financiers and politicians ready to fight to the last living Biafran. 
After three years of fighting and famine, the toll is eloquent, recognized by all analysts: nearly 2 million dead!

2. — In this list of crimes against African peoples, let us recall for the record what was mentioned above of Sudan and Rwanda.

Sudan, a vast pivotal country between Arabized Muslim Africa and animist or Christian black Africa, has been suffering for 30 years from ethnicist hatreds, military authoritarianism and fundamentalism: 
it must also be seen that these evils have been aroused, fuelled by anti-communism.

In 1971, a clumsy (?) uprising of far-left military led to the eradication of the trade union movement and the Sudanese Communist Party, the most powerful on the continent. 
Fundamentalism then began to develop, especially within the Muslim bourgeoisie and the army, with two essential ideological components: 
hatred of communism and democracy, religious fanaticism and racist contempt for black Christians in South Sudan. 
This was until 1989, when the army installed a military dictatorship, whose master thinker was the fundamentalist Turabi. 
Make no mistake: the fundamentalist masters in Khartoum are no more “anti-Western” than the Nazis were “anti-capitalist.” 
Their opposition to the US and Saudi Arabia is geopolitical, non-ideological, based primarily on their unachievable desire to play the leading roles in the northeast of the continent. 
Their economic management is inspired by the purest criteria of “liberalism”

The fundamentalist regime that the official France has helped for so long (by virtue of which it delivered carlos, this retired terrorist), waded blood in the south of the country since his birth: 
the figures put forward by the United Nations and NGOs such as Amnesty International are staggering: 1,300,000 dead in 10 years, 3 million displaced, millions undernourished, etc.

While imposing its law on the increasingly reluctant people of Khartoum in the name of Islam, the military-fundamentalist power provides arms and ammunition to the guerrillas of Christian fundamentalists (Lord's Resistance Army) who are ravaging northern Uganda by terrorizing the villagers: 
implacable demonstration, if it were still necessary, that fundamentalisms are not religious movements, but political manipulations of the religious. 
But will it be necessary to wait for the foreseeable collapse of the current regime in Sudan for the disappearance of the hypocritical supporters who bring it certain French networks that still believe themselves to be in the era of Fachoda? 
The dossier produced on this subject by Pax-Christi France in June 1995 was damning and remains partially relevant.

There is no need to insist on the appalling massacre in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of which are known (the “tropical fascists” of the late Habyarimana) and the accomplices who armed their arm. 
On 4 February 1998, C. Josselin, Minister Delegate for Cooperation, regretted the weak presence of the France in Rwanda, “with which diplomatic relations are not the best”. 
Should we pretend to be surprised, when we know the past of the official France in this country to be rebuilt, when the memory is still fresh of the “Operation Turquoise” of the French army: 
Armed with great humanitarian pretexts, it saved above all the Interhamwe massacrers of Rwandan fascism, already defeated around Kigali, from being definitively put out of harm's way. 
En conséquence de quoi, ils ont pu continuer à combattre au Congo, au service de Mobutu et de Lissouba, et animer encore aujourd’hui une meurtrière guérilla au Rwanda. 
It remains to be hoped that the peoples of the region will not be able to revive the ethnicist embers that are still present, whether from States (USA or France), international organizations (World Bank) or private (capitalist multinational companies): 
external pressures can only hinder the healing of wounds left by recent history, as the past amply demonstrates.

3. — How can we finally forget the long martyrdom of the people of South Africa under the racist apartheid regime from the 1960s onwards?
In itself, apartheid is already a crime, because it is based on legalized racism, “genetic” inequality erected as law, and the rejection of democracy theorized in political principle. 
It should also be remembered that the apartheid South African republic was the perfect example of capitalism in Africa, led by a bourgeoisie whose standard of living exceeded that of its French counterparts, thanks to the overexploitation of black workers in the mines and fields. 
Local capitalism, therefore, regulating the economy of the only industrial power south of the Sahara, but supported throughout the Cold War by the US and other Western powers, in the name of the struggle against Soviet influence. 
Even after 1977, and the multiple embargo decisions of the UN General Assembly against apartheid, multinational corporations (Shell), Western states, including France, supplied the racist power in Pretoria with the weapons, nuclear technology, oil that it lacked.
Even better, if we can say so: on March 29, 1988, Dulcie September, representative of the South African ANC fighters in France, was assassinated in Paris. 
The French courts closed the case as unanswered in 1992. 
Six years later, in liberated South Africa, the “truth and reconciliation commission” wondered about the help that could have been given to the killers of members of the French secret services, while Dulcie was preparing to denounce the plans of the France to provide the government in Pretoria with Mistral surface-to-air missiles.

The daily management of apartheid from 1960 was a long police and judicial oppression, punctuated by collective murders in case of organized popular resistance:

{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{---}
\begin{itemize}
\item in March 1960, in Sharpeville, the police machine-gunned the crowd, killing 69 people and wounding hundreds;
\item in June and July 1976, demonstrations by students and high school students were fiercely repressed: 300 dead in Soweto, a thousand in total in the country...
\end{itemize}
}

This was until the surrender of the “white power” in 1990, asphyxiated after the popular uprising and the erosion of American support, and the electoral victory of the ANC in 1994. 
Nothing is definitively closed in South Africa, struggling with the heavy legacy of apartheid still inscribed in social inequalities;
 and the white or black “liberal” bourgeoisie dreams of serving as a relay for US capitalism in Africa rather than social progress. But the future of the continent is at stake.

Finally, beyond these periodic collective massacres, capitalism is responsible even more directly in Africa for dramatic consequences that are part of everyday crime: 
Massive poverty, the collapse of the most basic public services, growing illiteracy over the past ten years, majority unemployment in urban centres that are becoming homeless, are the common lot of the majority of States subject to the debt law and structural adjustment plans that prohibit them from any endogenous industrial development.

Some of Africa's wounds, which often pass for its exclusive attributes in the simplistic images delivered by Western television, are the direct result of North-South relations within the framework of world and African capitalism.

First, corruption, which plagues the management of most African states and the mores of many political and administrative leaders. 
Western states and private companies vying for African markets are the corruptors: 
the distribution of barely hidden gifts, for them minimal according to the stakes, allows them to secure political clienteles and juicy business. 
Given the disparity of currencies, the discreet foreign currency rebate of 0.1 per cent of the amount of an arms contract represents for the African person concerned, minister or civil servant, the equivalent of years' salary.
What Western industrialist would therefore deprive itself of corrupting?

In this “market logic”, the time of the slave traders was succeeded by that of the poison merchants. 
Industrial firms in Western countries are all the more overwhelmed by their waste as sensitivities favorable to the protection of the environment have become the majority in public opinion. 
Therefore, to dump the most toxic waste at a lower cost along the African coasts, to pay so that he closes the eyes of some president, some minister, a tidy sum, what could be easier for the technocrats running large transnational corporations?
 In 1988, a contract signed by the British company Sesco-Gibraltar to four ministers from Benin provided for the delivery of 1 to 5 million tonnes of toxic waste for ten years for a ridiculous official fee of \$2.5 per tonne. 
Pierre Péan (L'Argent noir(Black money), Fayard, 1988) revealed some other visible elements of this problem: like an iceberg, the essential is hidden, but very real.

Another aspect of the African reality is hunger, which has become in our world mediatized to the point of excess, as a symbol of the black continent. 
Who does not remember these images of bloated children, crowds fighting over the bag of saving rice brought by generous patrons?
However, this image of Africa, even if it was born of good feelings, is false, it is enough to realize it by visiting cities and villages.

Certainly, hunger is a very real scourge, which has wiped out tens of thousands of Africans over the past ten years, and is still preparing to do so;
Admittedly, this endemic hunger sometimes originates from climatic causes (in the Sahel where the desert extends), and even more demographic (population and herds too numerous for fragile grazing areas). 
But famine in Africa is only contingent; it occurs, against a backdrop of difficulties, when society is disturbed by an armed conflict, which prohibits seeds and crops, transport and food storage. 
Overall agricultural production is increasing, albeit insufficiently, but promising: according to the F.A.O., cereal production in Africa grew by 1.95\% per year from 1961 to 1990, and cereal yield by 32 per cent between 1986 and 1990. 
All the major famines of recent years have been linked to military conflicts, external or internal, to the destruction of agricultural and industrial potential, and to the displacement of population that were the result: 
this was the case in Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Mozambique, etc.

However, these warlike conflicts are intrinsically linked to the arms sold throughout Africa to the various belligerents, governments or armed groups by traffickers of all kinds, at the forefront of which are States, such as the France or the Usa, major producers of death devices of all kinds. 
Because the production and sale of firearms, from the surface-to-air missile to the machine gun that its price makes it possible to buy from the poorest, is an exclusivity of the industrial firms of the West that derive billions of dollars in annual profit. 
In Africa, the only weapons produced are by South Africa, and Egypt: the latter often serves only as a commercial relay; 
and does Mandela's power pursue this murderous trade only with some modesty, torn as he is between his need for foreign exchange, and his objectives of international morality.

The observation, in any case, is clear: wars and therefore famines plague Africa only because of the arms trade, juicy traffic for the benefit of Western producers, a capitalist mechanism inherent in contemporary North-South relations.
 Has it been noticed enough that, curiously, the structural adjustment plans imposed on African states by the IMF still require a drastic reduction in health and education spending but not military equipment? 
Elf was able to finance in 1997 the militias that took power in Brazzaville, at the cost of some 10,000 deaths.

We cannot highlight everything about this “logic of the capitalist world market” in the current African trouble. 
Let us conclude this overview with an enlightening example, most recently highlighted by the report published on 26/11/97 of the W.H.O. and the United Nations on AIDS. 
In sub-Saharan Africa, 7.4\% of men and women between the ages of 15 and 49 are infected with the virus. There are 2.4 million of them in South Africa, 25 to 30\% of adults in Botswana. 
Everywhere, life expectancy, which had increased by nearly 15 years from 1960 to 1990, is falling again.

The most dramatic finding is the growing gap in care between industrialized and African countries. 
In Western Europe, the number of reported AIDS cases in 1997 was 30 per cent lower than in 1995: 
this is, for the most part, due to the effectiveness of current treatments, particularly triple therapy, which costs more than 100,000 francs per year in Europe. 
Under these conditions, the twelve African countries, which alone represent 50 per cent of the world's HIV-positive people, have no chance of offering their peoples this existing and effective treatment. 
At the international meeting in Abidjan in December 1997, the President and the Minister of Health of the France honoured each other by calling for the creation by the industrialized countries of an "international fund of therapeutic solidarity" for AIDS patients in the countries of the South. 
And the representatives at the World Bank conference immediately rejected this possibility, for it was contrary to healthy “liberal” logic.

Professor Gentilini, for his part, denounced to the delegates “a crime against humanity that future generations will tragically reproach us”.

Let's say it: this crime against man, in Africa, is called capitalist profit.  The century that will begin will surely answer what is for the moment only questions and uncertainties. 
We do not know in what sense, but one thing is clear, regardless of the ideologues of the “crimes of communism”: 
in this Africa, which is called French-speaking because it was a French colony half a century ago, dreams and hopes of well-being, equality and freedom are not embodied in technocrats and dictators manufactured by the French military academies or the IMF: 
this dream is called Thomas Sankara, mythical image of the incorruptible reformer, disorderly and generous fighter for the rights of the poorest and women, assassinated in 1987, who recognized himself inspired by the communist ideal.


\rauthor{Francis Arzalier}


Francis Arzalier is a historian, professor at the IUFM of Beauvais, responsible for the journal \emph{Aujourd'hui l'Afrique}(Today Africa).


\section{Rough Bibliography}

{
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{}
\begin{itemize}
\item C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, \emph{Afrique noire, permanence et ruptures}(Black Africa, permanency and ruptures), Harmattan, 1992.
\item \emph{Fin du Tiers Monde}, collective dossier, La Découverte, 1996.
\item P. Péan, \emph{Affaires africaines}(African businesses), Fayard, 1983.
\item P. Péan, \emph{L'Argent noir}(Black money), Fayard, 1988.
\item Faligot, Krop, \emph{La piscine}(The swimming pool), French Secret Service 1944-84.
\item M. Cahen, \emph{Mozambique, révolution implosée}(Mozambique, revolution imploded), l'Harmattan, 1987.
\item Mr. Cukierman, \emph{Cap sur la liberté. Afrique du Sud}(Heading toward freedom. South Africa), Messidor, 1987.
\item J. P. Chrétien, \emph{Le défi de l’ethnicisme. Rwanda, Burundi}(The Challenge of Ethnicism. Rwanda, Burundi), Karthala, 1997.
\item A. Gascon, \emph{La grande Ethiopie}(The great Ethiopia), Éd. CNRS, 1995.
\item Centre bordelais d'études de l'Afrique Noire: D. Bach, \emph{La politique africaine du général de Gaulle} (The African policy of General De Gaulle), Éditions Pedone, 1980.
\item \emph{Changement du climat et production agricole} (Climate change and agricultural production), PAO study by F. Bazzaz and W. Sombroek, Ed. FAO-polytechnica, 1997.
\item Collection of the journal \emph{Aujourd'hui l'Afrique}, from n° 53 (Nov. 94) to 65 (January 1998), articles by Y. Grenet, R. Borrelly, C. Grandrien, S. Cerqueira, F. Wurtz, M. Dos Santos, M. Macheve, H. Ibrahim Ali, B. Bouché, J. Kagabo, P. Kaldor, F. Arzalier, etc.
\item \emph{Journal de la paix, Pax Christi France}, special feature France Sudan, June 1995.
\item Powderkegs of the planet, published by \emph{Le Monde Diplomatique}, January-February 1998, articles by A. Conchiglia, P. Leymaire, C.Braekman, J. L. Pénina.
\end{itemize}
}