Copyright AFP Luis TATO<\/p>\n
Cl\u00e9ment VARANGES<\/p>\n
Placards and slogans against France that surfaced in demonstrations against impeached President Andry Rajoelina this week exposed deep resentment against the former colonial power.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrance out\u201d, \u201cRajoelina and Macron out\u201d, said banners after French media reported that the president had fled on a French military plane as an army unit threw its weight behind protesters calling for his resignation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are still colonising us even though we are supposed to be independent,\u201d said Koloina Andrianina Rakotomavonirina, a 26-year-old engineer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s unfair that they intervene in such a matter,\u201d she told AFP at a demonstration in central Antananarivo.<\/p>\n
With the whereabouts of the 51-year-old president unknown, the national assembly impeached him on Tuesday for desertion of duty, paving the way for a military unit called CAPSAT to seize power.<\/p>\n
Negative perception about France was not surprising considering its history, Paris-based political scientist Christiane Rafidinarivo told AFP.<\/p>\n
Its colonisation of the Indian Ocean island until independence in 1960 was marked by several atrocities, including the bloody repression by French forces of a 1947 uprising which claimed tens of thousands of lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFrance represents colonialism,\u201d Rafidinarivo said. \u201cThis perception runs through public opinion and is triggered depending on current events.\u201d<\/p>\n
While President Emmanuel Macron refused to confirm French involvement in Rajoelina\u2019s evacuation, a presidential pardon for two French nationals jailed in Madagascar on coup charges \u2014 announced as the reports of his departure broke \u2014 raised suspicions of a deal.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Citizenship revelation \u2013<\/p>\n
Rajoelina\u2019s apparently chummy ties with Paris have long been criticised at home, but media reports in 2023 that he had obtained French nationality nine years before deepened the mistrust.<\/p>\n
The revelation came just before the 2023 presidential race, and led to calls for him to be disqualified as the opposition claimed he should have lost his Madagascan nationality as a result, according to local law.<\/p>\n
Rajoelina went on to win reelection but the polls were boycotted by most opposition parties and marked by a low turnout.<\/p>\n
That sparked new criticism against France \u201cbecause the opposition accused him of being a French agent,\u201d said Adrien Ratsimbaharison, author of a book on the 2009 coup that brought Rajoelina to power but denied him international recognition.<\/p>\n
French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, was the first foreign head of state to recognise Rajoelina as president during a state visit to France in 2011.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople did not forgive in France for that, because that gave Rajoelina some kind of legitimacy,\u201d Ratsimbaharison said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There were also suspicions that Sarkozy sent financial aid to Rajoelina to engineer the 2009 protests and secure the support of military personnel to overthrow then-president Marc Ravalomanana, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2013 Rumours, resentment \u2013<\/p>\n
In Madagascar\u2019s social media mix of disinformation and rumour, a widely shared but out-of-context image that claimed to show the deployment of French gendarmes to support the embattled Rajoelina outraged those who believed it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The photo showed a Malagasy gendarme wearing French colours but this was only because he had undergone training in France, the gendarmerie told AFP.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Resentment towards the former colonial power is also fuelled by the awarding of major contracts to French companies and open French sex tourism on the impoverished island.<\/p>\n
Some French businesses, such as call centres, meanwhile, use French-speaking Malagasy workers at a fraction of the wages they would earn in Europe.<\/p>\n
At one demonstration, 27-year-old Mampionona Razafinjoelina said he quit his call-centre job because: \u201cI was tired of being insulted by the French.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amid the long-running animosity, Macron said on a visit to the island in April he wanted to create the conditions for \u201cforgiveness\u201d for France\u2019s colonisation, which has also left a bitter taste in its other former colonies such as Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon.<\/p>\n
This included returning the remains of a Malagasy king killed by the French army in an 1897 massacre that were taken to France as trophies, which happened in September, as well as the establishment of a Franco-Malagasy commission to look into atrocities of the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Copyright AFP Luis TATO Cl\u00e9ment VARANGES Placards and slogans against France that surfaced in demonstrations against impeached President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[25186,2000,299,36,25802,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-503462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-demonstration","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-madagascar","13":"tag-politics"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115382425673017771","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}