Diversify your partnerships. This is how the Central African authorities, who until now called on Moscow and Wagner’s Russian mercenaries for the military component, justified, on December 24, the conclusion of a new security agreement signed with the Americans. “The Central African Republic is in the process of diversifying its relations,” declared Saturday the spokesperson for the Central African presidency, Albert Yaloke Mokpeme. The United States of America thus proposed to the presidency to “train its soldiers”, “both on Central African soil and on American soil”, an offer that Head of State Faustin Archange Touadéra said he accepted.
This statement from Bangui confirms the rumors launched a few days earlier by an RFI article. The French channel revealed that employees of the American private security company Bancroft are currently in the Central African capital, to prepare the group’s long-term installation. “We are within the framework of the reconstruction of the national army. As part of this reconstruction, we called on partners, including the Russian Federation, Angola, Morocco, Guinea, etc.,” explained the presidential spokesperson. “Anything that can help us rebuild our future and get our armed and security men back to full strength, anything that can help us do that, we are working with them,” he said.
The project of a rapprochement between Washington and Bangui had actually been unofficial since the beginning of 2023. Last February, Le Monde revealed that the Central African President, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, had received a proposal from the American administration in margin of the United States-Africa summit in mid-December 2022. According to information from the daily, the United States then gave Bangui a period of twelve months to separate from Russian mercenaries, in exchange for new terms of partnership in the area. safe.
This formalization is no less a reversal in this former French colony, which, after the departure of the French operation Sangaris in 2016, had turned resolutely towards Russia for the military component. An agreement signed with Moscow in 2018 provided for the supply of weapons and training of Central African officers in Russian military schools. President Touadéra also called on the Wagner group in 2017. In five years, the Russian paramilitary company went from military aid to political interference and economic plunder, getting its hands on diamond and gold mines , without forgetting logging and the alcohol trade.
However, after the death of Wagner’s founder and boss Evgeni Prigojine, several media outlets reported a departure in Wagner’s workforce – around 400 mercenaries left the country in July, according to several sources. “There is departure in the air. They are reducing the sail,” a source confided to AFP in July.
Would the Americans wish to supplant France, after the successive departure of the latter to its former pre-squares? In 2016, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian decided to withdraw troops from the Central African Republic, believing that efforts should focus on Mali. Four years later, Operation Barkhane in the Sahel ended in turn, judged as a failure by local public opinion as insecurity continued to increase.
Alongside the rise in anti-French discourse, the Biden administration has shown renewed interest in the continent. After a tour by American Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Africa in the summer of 2022, Washington organized a United States-Africa summit in December of the same year. In the pages of Le Figaro, Michael Shurkin, director of programs at a consulting firm specializing in African affairs, however assured that the United States “does not want to drive France out of Africa”, but above all seeks to counter Russian influence on the continent, avoiding “anything that could fuel (the) frustration” of African countries who, disappointed by France, therefore turn to Moscow.
“We should not see in it a desire to supplant the Europeans, who are few in the Central African Republic, but rather a manifestation of the Russian-American struggle for influence,” agrees Frédéric Lejeal, author of an essay on The Franco-African Decline . According to him, the partnership with the Americans further shows “the limits of Wagner’s presence in the country, which costs the Bangui authorities several million dollars every month”, and the weakening of its strategy in Africa “after the death of Prigogine.
Especially since the United States has “no interest in the CAR”, underlines Therry Vircoulon, researcher associated with Ifri. “Washington took note of the extremely weak situation of Paris in Africa, of our successive departures and the arrival of Wagner. So they arrive,” explains the Africa specialist.
In Niger, on the other hand, the Americans, who have been present in the country for a long time, where they have a large drone base and nearly 1,000 soldiers, are being supplanted by the Russians. After the departure of the last soldiers from Barkhane following the coup d’état of July 2023, the authorities in Niamey are turning to Moscow. In Niger as in the Central African Republic, the situation promises to be “doubly unprecedented” with the cohabitation of Russian and American soldiers in the same country. “Never seen since the Cold War,” underlines Thierry Vircoulon, seeing it as an illustration of the new geopolitical situation, where the role of France is considerably reduced. “For our part, we are no longer just spectators.”
