French Fiddling

In an emperor's fall

It was to have been a quiet little coup, executed with characteristic French panache from behind the scenes. The successor had been picked, paratroops were at the ready, and when the despised dictator left the country, voil`a! "Operation Barracuda" would go into effect. So well, in fact, did the plot come off that when tyrannical Emperor Bokassa I was overthrown in the Central African Empire two weeks ago, it was hailed as a triumph of sanity over murderous despotism. By last week, however, the French connection in the affair was proving an embarrassment, and the all too Francophile new regime of President David Dacko was proving less than popular.

The plot first came to light when Dacko, a former President now reinstalled in Bokassa's place, revealed that the French had dreamed up the whole scheme and flown him and 500 French troops into the country to engineer the takeover. "Some countries call upon Cubans," declared Dacko disingenuously. "Why shouldn't we call upon French troops, since they are our friends?" French officials, mindful of criticism about previous interventions in Chad, Zaire and Mauritania, at first denied all, then admitted "helping out," and finally delivered a confession boasting that it was the only coup lately in which not a "single drop of blood had been shed."

However happy they were to see Bokassa go, French leftists and libertarians were not about to let French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's government get off so easily. After all, France had supported the Bokassa regime for 13 years and given it up to $100 million a year in aid. Giscard periodically flew off to hunt big game with the dictator and publicly hailed him as "my relative." Scoffed Socialist Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand: "What do they mean, no bloodshed? Blood was flowing for years, and it was known in Paris. This comic emperor owed his power only to the complacency of French officials."

Bokassa, unaware that it had been the French who had manipulated his ouster while he was away in Libya, flew to a military airport outside Paris, where he begged admittance to the country. He argued that since he had served in the French colonial army, even earning the Croix de guerre, he was a French citizen. Government officials said no, and he was flown back to Africa in a French-owned DC-8 to asylum in the Ivory Coast. That decision was deplored by a number of French jurists, who insisted that Bokassa should have been admitted and tried for his crimes under French law.

Meanwhile, trouble was also stirring back in the Central African Republic, as it had been promptly renamed. Although Dacko released political prisoners jailed during the Bokassa reign, there was resentment when he reappointed many members of Bokassa's Cabinet. At the same time, supporters of former Prime Minister Ange Patasse, a prominent opposition figure who had quit the Bokassa regime in 1978 in protest over its atrocities, staged anti-French demonstrations when his departure from Paris was held up by technicalities. At week's end Patasse castigated Dacko as an accomplice of Bokassa and demanded he resign. Part of it, no doubt, was pique that Dacko got there first; reportedly, Patasse had been plotting a coup of his own. -

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