‘How France will support Nigeria’s anti-terror war’

Ex-colonial master to enlist Cameroun, others
FRANCE intends to help Nigeria to lay the ghost of terrorism and insurgency to rest by putting high-calibre intelligence reports on offer while leveraging on its special relationship with Nigeria’s French-speaking neighbours like Cameroun.
  Besides, the European power is maintaining that it sees terrorism largely as a regional problem, one that needs not just the collaboration of neighbours but also development partners.
  The French Ambassador to Nigeria, Jacques Champagne de Labriolle, stated this in an interview with The Guardian at the weekend.


   It is believed that the shared intelligence reports such that France is now offering, is largely responsible for the recent breakthrough by the Nigerian counter-terrorism team and the military joint task force in foiling bomb attack plans by members of the dreaded Boko Haram sect in parts of the North-East.
  France has defence pact with her former colonies which surround Nigeria. Cameroun and Niger have lately been fingered by intelligence reports of harbouring some terrorist cells apart from the provision of what appears to be safe havens for insurgents who have been striking at both soft and hard targets in North-East of  Nigeria.
  Last month, during a visit to Nigeria, French President Francois Hollande pledged his country’s support in the war against terrorism and insurgency by extremist group Boko Haram as France’s way of defending democracy.
  Hollande told delegates at a security summit in Abuja ahead of Nigeria’s unification centenary celebrations: “Your struggle is also our struggle.”
  But Nigerians have largely been in the dark as to how exactly France intends to help the Federal Government.
  Although Labriolle fought stridently against exposing the nitty-gritty of the French support for strategic reasons, he stressed that the role intelligence reports sharing in the fight against terrorism can never be underestimated.
  He said: “This is not a matter which is meant to be public. But it includes intelligence, intelligence sharing, strategic information and data. Things like these are not meant to be public as you can see; help is going on, you know in a very useful way which is also that we have good relations with the neighbouring countries and we can share views and bring assistance on what is going on.”
  As Nigeria takes the new status of being the biggest economy in Africa, the French envoy noted that development could be held back if the menace of terrorism is not tackled holistically.
  “I see development in this region (West Africa) is a worry in the sense that it is very difficult to say that only one country is concerned with terrorism, it is always more or less a regional issue. Very soon, the terrorist group will stray through the borders, will play hide and seek in the borders trying to take advantage of the rule of law which is basically that you cannot go in another country when you have a security force on ground (sovereignty provision). So, there is room for more co-operation and this has been developed for some time between Nigeria and neighbours already but this is a trend we are now ready to support”
  He added: “The regional dimension is what I believe is where we can help best. You were saying that the terrorists are coming from Cameroun. They are not coming from Cameroun, they are just coming and going very easily because the borders were not really secured. It is a matter of exchanges, legal and illegal that have gone on for decades that now have a consequence, that is very difficult to prevent people crossing the border which is the problem because security forces of one country cannot go after them in another country, this is not the state of international relations as we speak...”
  On the collaborative nature the French involvement in the days ahead, he said: “Our ideal which is drawn from the lessons we learnt in the Sahel is that for a long time, terrorists have been hiding in neighbouring countries, sometimes having deep-rooted shelters and things like that, it is part of the action against terrorism to address this so we came to think that instead of just speaking of borders and trying to see that the specific line between two countries be not crossed, a deep  analysis would now be put at the centre of the thinking that it’s a regional wide action that is needed, it’s a borderless region which is at stake with people from both side that may have problems that have to be addressed for terrorism to recede. I have said earlier that terrorism is also a consequence of a certain state of things in terms of economic, social and political development and this has to be addressed within the frame-work of inclusive strategies. That is something that we can help and as we have a good record working with the neighbouring countries, indeed we have been discussing with them and with Nigeria on how best is the way out of this crisis.”
  According to the envoy, France “certainly believes that Nigeria can use it (intelligence, information), in fact what we’ve been trying to do is to create a new frame-work for new kind of relations between countries, developed countries, developing countries in all the countries, we cannot believe that the traditional co-operation is enough, the needs are too big, the need for money, the need for technology transfer, the need for more relations, so the ideal was held at the summit that the French president organised early in December last year (Elysee summit), that was a summit which was centred on security issues. What we thought was that after what happened in Mali and how it went should be discussed and this is what we have done and further we discussed why some people turn to terrorism and we ended up discussing management of other issues also, including in the regions of Africa.”
  “President Hollande said we are close to Nigeria in the fight against terrorism, we for some time, the thinking for Nigeria was that the insurgency was a domestic affair and it has now become obvious in the last two years that even if there is a strong domestic dimension in all these, there is also in the insurgency, a regional dimension and in fact a global dimension, a certain way for some people to believe that terrorism may be a political choice that is legitimate or a genuine line of action, this is not what we think. We think that it is deemed to fail, that is, it deemed to go backwards and all the people involved, we believe that political progress is going in another direction, so indeed we have made it clear that we do our best to help Nigeria fight terrorism because Nigeria’s fight against terrorism is the same with the one we had to fight in the past”, he added.
  Lamenting last February’s spectre of violence by suspected Boko Haram terrorists, including the earlier massacre of at least 59 students in their sleep at a secondary school in the North-East, Hollande said: “We will always stand ready not only to provide our political support but our help every time Nigeria needs it because the struggle against terrorism is also the struggle for democracy.”