I advise anyone not in the know to look into France's historical control of uranium mining in Niger. France's nuclear industry has long been fueled by a highly unequal neocolonial relationship with their former colony.
Great job moving those goal posts when your original premise was called out.
What exactly do you want France to do in Niger to atone for their sins? Build infrastructure, fund businesses, make deals with their government? In other words, you want to solve colonialism with more colonialism?
Locals should have been better compensated, more taxes should have been paid to the local government, costs related to environmental cleanup should be paid for by Areva. The business that went on there was fundamentally extractive and unfair to Niger - a result of a drastic power imbalance.
I fail to see how my "original premise was called out" or how I "moved my goalposts", but great job defending neocolonialism online - you really owned me!
I do not think uranium is that expensive, compared to the price of a nuclear reactor itself or other energy sources. I advise to look at wars actually occurring for the control of oil and gas (see country like the US).
Cmd/ctrl+f "colonial penetration" for a brief overview of the subject.
Not sure why so many people here seem to think the historical source of much of France's uranium is irrelevant - people in Niger are still paying the cost of long-term uranium exposure.
True. But Niger is not an exception, it just happens they had some uranium. In the other ex-colonies, it's petroleum, natural gas, wood and exotic products of all sort.
In fact, this has been such a continuum that the prefix "neo" in the expression "neocolonialism" isn't really appropriate. It's rather business as usual without having to maintain order directly. Military agreements still link France and most of its ex-colonies: the French Army has many bases and has the duty to intervene in case of coups.
Or not, depending on which side will be the most beneficial to France. In general, France helps to maintain the powers already in place, very often authoritarian regimes. Quite a few truly democratically-elected African leaders have been either bought, jailed or assassinated with direct support of France.
Things have changed though after 1991 on the political part, with a French foreign policy pushing more often towards democracy. On the business side, very little. Each country is a specific situation.
In all cases, the African "elites" of those ex-colonies are as much responsible of this continuum. Let's not be naive nor Manichean: the people of these countries have been actively betrayed by their own elites and France has cynically profited of it.
To sum it up, France behaved and still behave with its African ex-colonies very much alike the USA have and still do in Central and South America.
NB: I have both the French and the American citizenships and vote in both.
So I get a double dose of shame.
But let's not look at these countries as passive victims from bad richer countries. They have been independent since 60 years. If the local elites had been focused on improving their people's life instead of amassing tens of billions $, French cynical influence would have receded.
So it's less "neocolonialism" than converging interests between the ethically and financially corrupted elites on both sides.
In our so-called "modern democracies", American and French citizens have little influence in the foreign policy of their own country. It's rarely a matter of debate since elections mostly focus on internal issues.
Well, some of us demonstrated and petitioned regularly on obvious wrong-doings ... with just no effect. I remember demonstrating in Boston against invasion of Irak ; a few thousands people, students mostly, just to watch many Democratic officials like... Hilary Clinton voting for it.
What can we do? I still had to vote for Hilary against Trump, knowing she knew that the intel for invading Irak had been bent. Because Trump was far worse.
The French political theater is totally different, but still: the French economic and political "elites" are on both aisles implicated in dubious relations with African elites, as well as Arabic elites from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, etc etc.
What can we do really, as citizens? Foreign policies are even further a reach that a true ecological transition. On which nothing is done despite polls showing that the matter is among the 3 priorities of French voters. Democracy as we know it is a just a show.
These are the permanent ones. In you include temporary bases in Africa the list is longer. For 2021 it was: Djibouti, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad.
I am an ignorant prick, and if the powers that be had chosen to exploit poor people mining uranium instead of poor people mining coal 40 years ago, we would have avoided billions of metric tons of CO2 and saved millions of poor peoples' lives.
