From 30 November to 1 December 2005 at the Youth House of Bamako (Mali), the Alternative Africa-France Citizen Summit was held as a response to the 23rd Africa-France Summit, showroom of French neo-colonialism.
Reunited in this unprecedented event were more than 200 participants from twelve African countries and from the rest of the world, representatives of more than 100 organisations of civil society.
During its encounters, the summit had dedicated itself to the themes regarding the principle evils that assail Africa: dictatorship, the terrible debt, corruption, unfair trade, enormous violations of human rights, impunity and plundering. 45 years of cooperation and 22 Franco-African summits have not brought any remedies to these evils. The Alternative Africa-France Citizen Summit had noted on the contrary that the Franceafrican cooperation has served exclusively the interests of the French and African leaders, in contempt of the people that they are expected to represent.
In the year 2005, France has validated the electoral coup d¹état of Faure Gnassingbé Eyedéma in Togo, it has continued with its dirty game in the Ivory Coast. It sustains the agonising regime of Idriss Deby in Chad and the dictatorial powers of Paul Biya in Cameroon, Denis Sassou N¹Guesso in Congo and many others, who are today gathered in Bamako with a profusion of means that offends the misery of their people.
And it will certainly not be the new European and multilateral attire with which France tries to make believe that it will change the nature of the system whose logic leads to poverty, to the desperation and therefore to exile, to forced emigration of young men and womenŠ
The participants of the alternative civic summit have expressed their indignation before the politics of repression and of stigmatisation of the immigrant populations or people of immigrant origins, reflections of a colonial past that has been badly assumed and of a hidden neo-colonial present.
Noting the failure of such politics and the refusal of dialogue with the participants on behalf of the official summit, the Alternative Citizen Summit has decided to make itself the spokesman and voice of the aspirations of the masses of citizens, to organise international associative networks that mobilise to permit their resistance movements to build themselves, to conduct actions to express their revolt and obtain radical transformations with the people for the people.
This requires us on our part:
– to create an ample program of education of citizenship awareness;
– to favour the capillarity of the interventions and solidarity to
the national, regional and international struggles;
– to create a network of information and international mobilization;
– to work together for the creation of mechanisms of battle against
the impunity of political crimes (international penal justice, universal
competence) and economic ones (debt audits, new rules for international
commerce, transparency in the extraction industries, etc.);
– to demand the free circulation of people.
So as to avoid responding to empty discourse with other useless discourse having no effect, the participants of the alternative summit commit themselves to establishing in the coming months a cohesive plan of actions and propositions.
The hour has come to build a true cooperation between Africa and France based on truth, justice, equality, liberty and mutual respect.
The reign of Franceafrica and the impunity of its leaders must end!
Made at Bamako, 1 December 2005
Translator’s note: with Franceafrica ("Françafrique") it is meant the nexus of political, economic, financial, military-policing and mafia interests that tie the French leaders to the French-speaking African ones, that is, the neo-colonial pact, 45 years from the "independences".
Translated by Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity (transtlaxcala@yahoo.com). This translation is on Copyleft.
