Daniel Cohn-Bendit bitterly criticised the head of European diplomacy, Catherine Ashton, in the European Parliament: “You say this war is everyone’s business. Everyone says the same thing. But there are only French soldiers there. And the French are told: ‘We will send you some nurses, but they will kill you.’ In France, most people would sign those words.

Across Europe, the mainstream media basically say the same thing, that someone had to drive away the fanatical Islamists from a country like Mali. Then the cost calculations begin: If the centre of Africa is geopolitically dominated by France, if the same currency is established from Paris, profits for French companies, then war will be done by France.

Something similar has happened to the Algerians, who the day after the outbreak of the Battle of Mali in the area of Ain Amenas, in Algeria, after the guerrillas attacked a gas field, kidnapped the workers and organized a disaster. "We have suddenly forgotten repression, abuse, coups d'état, generals and their children. (...) While the world has mentioned the bloodshed, we Algerians said that a wall has been erected against the wicked.”

But it's not that simple. Despite the fact that at any given time they have forgotten the harshness of the events or the propagands that the great powers readily sell, leaving aside the geopolitics, the economic interests and the history of recent years, it is not possible to understand what happens or what happens in the following years.

North American expert Glenn Greenwald has published in the journal The Guardian the title of the race: The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention, that is, the bombs of Mali show all the lessons of the interventions of the West. After Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, SOMALIA and the Philippines, Malica is the eighth country in which Westerners bombard Muslims.

For starters, Greenwald says, Mali's intervention is the result of another earlier intervention. Those who believed that the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya was a clean and effective attack are now going to learn that Western strategists do short-term calculations. As in Afghanistan, the Libyan war has exported new fighters fighting in Libya.

On the other hand, many of the elite warriors now facing the Bamako Government and the French have been trained by the United States or France, who have passed by the enemy. In this, the same model as in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the West has to wage war on those he fed and built before.

Third, Greenwald says, “it’s foolish to believe that the United States or its allies can continue to bomb and kill innocent Muslims without them simultaneously suffering ‘terrorist’ attacks around the world.”

This nearby Francophone Africa

A Greenwald which, in any case, is liberal, but which should not be regarded as very left-wing, says at last: “The French briefcases, perhaps with the help of the United States, clearly demonstrate what the West’s intervention is like. The ‘war on terrorism’ guarantees that it is perpetuated precisely because it creates its enemies ceaselessly and because it carries fuel for the fire to continue in flames for life.”

From a geopolitical point of view, France is facing the resolution of the emergency in Mali because it has always claimed that the control of this African region belongs to it. Since the beginning of the war on Al Qaeda, the United States has increasingly put its nose into the Sahel, but Paris has resolutely resisted the hegemony of Francophone Africa.

14 western and central African states use the CFA pound or franc, including Mali and Niger, whose equivalence with the former French pound, is now linked to the euro via France.

The economic relations that come full of coins, emigration, the language established by the Francophone ... have almost everything that unites them to France. The capsules and the military also abound. In Paris diplomacy these ancient African colonies have always been of particular importance, where there are hardly any political movements that have escaped control of the Hexagon.

In recent years, Niger, an almost twin brother who shares the life of Mali and the desert, has experienced many similar problems and events.

On the one hand, the riots of the people of Amazigh or Tuareg. By granting French colonies independence in the form of a State, as in many other regions of the world, borders were imposed without the slightest care of their local peculiarities. Since 2008 Argia published on these same pages "the Tuaregs of Mali and Niger shooting in the desert," things haven't gotten much better there.

In that chronicle, it was said that the conflict was heated by a new subterfuge: uranium. Paris, which aspires to be the world champion of the nuclear industry, is playing a great deal at Niger and Mali, where the public multinational Areva has its main suppliers of uranium. Guerre au Mali: sécuriser notre approvisionnement en un uranium de Stéphane Lhomm can be read on the next page of this chronicle.

Niger and Mali suffer in almost the same way over and over again their famines. The Sahrawi countries, although formerly the nest of major civilizations, today the fact that they are keeled states is linked both to the time of the colony and to the economic policies of the former metropolis, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

If the most fundamentalist versions of the old religions have taken hold in the Sahel, it is because the development model imposed by the colonial powers, in this case France with the whole of the European Union, has failed. Hunger, poverty, desertification of vast areas and emigration are the consequences of all dismantling.

In France, this African song that has touched more than one context is very popular: “Mamadou m’a dit / Mamadou m’a dit / on a pressé le citron / on peut jetter la peau”, (Mamaduk told me / Mamaduk told me / we have squeezed the lemon /strip quiet cover). Europe must now taste the bitterness of citrus fruits.