There were probably quite a few places Nicolas Sarkozy would have rather been than at
Omar Bongo's funeral today. Not only did the late Gabonese dictator have an astonishing
40-year record of human right abuses and corruption, but at the time of his death, a French court was
investigating him for embezzlement, which always makes things awkward, not to mention the fact that the French government had been accused for years of protecting Bongo from prosecution.
But then, he had to listen to the crowd cheer his predecessor Jacques Chirac (who allegedly received illegal campaign contributions from Bongo) receive cheers from the crowd while he got booed:
"Go home we don't want you, leave," chanted the protesters. "Timber,
petrol, manganese, we've given you everything. If France is what it is,
it's thanks to Gabon. We don't want this anymore. We want the Americans
and Chinese," said one.
Chirac was a close friend of Bongo (and, if you believe Valérie Giscard d'Estaing, received money from him to fund his 1981 presidential campaign);
Sarkozy paid him lip service but Bongo was outraged that the French
leader had failed to crush a legal complaint about where his family got
the money to pay for 39 luxury properties in France and various flash
racing cars. A court order to block some of his France-based bank
accounts further irked him.
All of this raises the question of why Sarkozy allowed himself to be humiliated like this. Chirac got a lot of flack for not attending the funeral of former Senegalese President Leopold Senghor in 2001, but Senghor was a genuine democrat, anticolonialist icon, and major Francaphone literary figure to boot. Bongo: not so much.
I know France has economic interests to protect in Gabon, but given that the French president Bongo actually liked was going anyway, I'm sure Sarkozy could have gotten away with a sympathy card.
AFP/Getty Images
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