In the cartoon in The Independent: French fashion. Sarkozy: ... "It’s for you, President Ouattara..."

What’s happened to Laurent Gbagbo? The former President of Ivory Coast was last photographed in a vest in Abidjan, in the Hotel de Golf’s room number 470 after having been taken prisoner following an assault on the cellars of the Hotel where he had barricaded himself in. His supporters say that a Special French Unit, the "Force Licorne" {Unicorn Force}, attacked the bunker with helicopters, rockets and tanks. France has had a military presence in Ivory Coast since 2002(?) to “guarantee democracy”. Its troops intervened within 24 hours of the UN mandate to ensure the election result in favour of Ouattara was respected. A difficult result to evaluate given the lack of checks on the voting procedures and anyway it was an internal matter. In fact in Ivory Coast, the biggest producer and exporter of cocoa beans in the world, a civil war was happening, and it was unilaterally resolved by an armed foreign intervention. The first ones to rejoice at the French action were the international cocoa companies. Immediately after the fall of Gbagbo, the UN sanctions against Ivory Coast were lifted. These sanctions had taken the world price of cocoa to 3,775 dollars a tonne (the highest price in the last 34 years). Gbagbo had asked for the payment of a tax for the export of cocoa that many companies were anyway prepared to pay even to avoid the loss of quantities about to be destroyed, quantities with a value of 1.3 billion dollars. The acceptance, that was very near, of the cocoa taxes would have strengthened Gbagbo. Sarkozy intervened just in time in the former French colony.
Colonialism has been reborn from its own ashes, it bombs Libya, where a civil war is going on, in Egypt as an interlocutor, it has the armed forces, as ever close to the United States, it occupies both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is present with air and sea bases in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia. It declares war to export democracy where democracy has never been, as though democracy were a load of bananas. Conflicts are no longer declared. First you do the bombing and then you ask Parliament for permission. As Napolitano would say, it’s the “natural development of the choice taken by Italy in March.” But in March, the UN decided to set up a "No Fly Zone", an area where flying was prohibited, not to bomb Tripoli in order to kill Gaddafi.
The old reference points for the West, from Gbagbo to Mubarak, from Ben Alì to Gaddafi, are no longer useful. The new colonials want to conduct business in the first person under the fig leaf of the UN, but the wars for raw materials (because they are nothing but that) will lead to other conflicts. Roland Marchal, an expert on African conflict at the CNRS said: "This will go down very badly in Africa. Many Africans will think that once again France is looking after its own interests, and doing so in a violent way, and that this will not resolve anything." (source: "The Independent")

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