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.
