Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic ADVERTISEMENT\u201cVladimir Putin came to fight in Africa in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,\u201d Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi tells his hundreds of thousands of followers in a video shared across multiple platforms.\u201cHe participated in the fight against Western imperialism. I hope you know that.\u201dThere is no evidence that the Russian president visited Africa in that period, let alone fought colonial powers. Born in 1950, Putin was also a child for most of that time.Yet these facts have not stopped disinformation from spreading like wildfire, especially in former French colonies around the Sahel, where the Kremlin has been using increasingly insidious methods to play on anti-colonial sentiments in order to pursue its interests.The director of Research at the US Defence Department\u2019s Africa Centre, Dr Joseph Siegle, argues Moscow\u2019s approach is multi-pronged, and media play an essential part.Speaking to Euronews from Washington, Siegle explained that \u201cin environments where there isn’t an established set of trusted media outlets you get an explosion of unregulated, unfiltered social media,\u201d which he says is especially prevalent in the Sahel.According to the UN, the region of the Sahel comprises 10 central and west African nations, with 400 million people who call it home. Of these 10, eight were colonised by France, and almost all only gained independence in the 1960s.French is widely spoken across all of them, meaning francophone commentators and influencers\u2019 reach and messaging often easily crosses the borders between the region’s countries that France imposed in previous centuries.However, colonialism is no longer a hot topic, and Siegle contends that colonial legacies have largely faded from political life. \u201cI’d like to remind people that colonialism ended 60 years ago \u2026 It wasn’t part of recent election discourse,\u201d he said.If anything, for many of the countries’ regimes, Europe remained the preferred partner as they progressed on their sovereign paths, according to Seigle.”When you had democratically leaning governments, albeit weak governments \u2026 there were good relations with Europe,” he explained.These relations were strong, especially with France itself, which maintained deep political and disproportionate trade ties with its former colonies in Africa, under a somewhat hazy policy known as \u201cFran\u00e7afrique\u201d.It also stationed thousands of troops across multiple bases in the Sahel. This number multiplied in 2013 when France and other European countries sent reinforcements to combat a series of extremist insurgencies in the region.Seigle holds that it was a largely positive relationship, which was only recently upended by a series of coups that installed pro-Moscow juntas across the region.Things fall apartHowever, it isn\u2019t that simple in the eyes of prominent Chadian human rights lawyer and activist Delphine Djiraibe, who believes the rise of Russia is inherently linked to deep-rooted anger felt towards France in the region and Paris’ historical support for governments she believes were anything but democratic.ADVERTISEMENTOver a patchy phone call with Euronews from the capital N’Djamena \u2014 where Djiraibe said power and mobile network cuts were increasingly common \u2014 the advocate explained that \u201ccolonisation may have changed form, but we have remained under the yoke of France until practically today.\u201d\u201cWe\u2019ve felt it in a very bitter way.\u201dDjiraibe pointed out that Chad maintains a French legal code, as do most of the other francophone countries in the region \u2014at least in some form \u2014 but these codes aren\u2019t respected within the region or by Paris.\u201cFrance is always presented as the country of human rights,\u201d she lamented, \u201cbut when extrajudicial executions are commonplace, when populations are subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment \u2026 France does not stand up.”ADVERTISEMENT”Not only does it not stand up, but it supports the dictatorial powers that suppress the populations.\u201dAs an example, she cites French President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s speech at the funeral of former Chadian President Idris D\u00e9by in 2021, in which he referred to the late authoritarian leader as a \u201cbrave friend\u201d before praising D\u00e9by\u2019s son and political heir, Mahamat, for bringing \u201cstability\u201d.Yet, within a year, relations with Chad and across the region frosted over. France withdrew its 1,000-strong force from Mali in August 2022, and by the end of 2023 both Burkina Faso and Niger also forced out the French military presence.Then, in a dramatic diplomatic spat that broke out in late 2024, Macron claimed that the region had never \u201cthanked\u201d France for deploying troops there. The younger D\u00e9by demanded that France withdraw from Chad as well \u2014 and Fran\u00e7afrique had the rug wholly pulled underneath it.ADVERTISEMENTAt the same time, the Kremlin quickly emerged from the shadows of social media campaigns and was ushered through the gates of various presidential palaces as the new global power best friend in town.From Russia with love?In a video published last month, Swiss-Cameroonian internet personality Nathalie Yamb shared a clip of former French Ambassador to Mali Nicolas Normand claiming the region \u201cabsolutely needs partnerships,\u201d while warning that \u201cRussia isn’t providing it with any help, except military aid to … form a praetorian guard for the juntas.\u201dAs he says this, a man appears in the bottom right corner of Yamb’s video, making a Pinocchio nose action. Yamb then comes on screen to criticise the comments and to say she would \u201cbury the urban myth\u201d about Russia.However, Siegle says this is precisely what Moscow does, having literally filled out the presidential guard corps of multiple Sahelian de facto leaders with its own muscle.ADVERTISEMENTUntil recently, these military deployments were largely made up of Kremlin-backed private military companies (PMCs), under the umbrella of the notorious Wagner Group of mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Former Georgian Ambassador to the EU Natalie Sabanadze told Euronews that this gave Russia \u201cplausible deniability,\u201d which was important when Moscow was still trying to court international diplomatic favour.However, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, much of this pretence dissipated. Then, when Prigozhin led Wagner mercenaries in revolt a year later in Ukraine \u2014 and was subsequently killed in a plane crash, which many international observers blame on the Kremlin \u2014 Sabanadze says Russia removed what little arms-length autonomy PMCs had in the Sahel.Although there was a public outpouring of grief in some Sahelian societies over Prigozhin\u2019s death, this never translated into a broader questioning of relations with Moscow.ADVERTISEMENTMoscow’s popularity unchallengedYamb has been largely discredited as a Kremlin stooge who acted as an “independent observer” for Russia during sham elections in occupied parts of Ukraine in 2022.Yet she and others, like Franklin Nyamsi \u2014 along with those backing them in the Kremlin \u2014 have effectively harnessed anti-European sentiments to push Moscow\u2019s agenda, which includes controlling lucrative natural resources in various mines worth billions.Also, Seigle explains it fits into a wider narrative of \u201cRussia having many partners and allies and Europe and the West losing influence,\u201d both of these factors have only been exacerbated by Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent fallout.Sabanadze told Euronews that, coming from a former USSR satellite state, \u201cOne of my main jobs was to somehow convince Europeans that we knew how to deal with Russia.\u201dADVERTISEMENTYet Sabanadze, who is now a senior fellow at Chatham House, a think tank focusing on Russia\u2019s global influence, recalls comments she received from some in Brussels, which she sees as emblematic of Europe\u2019s hubris regarding Russian threats.\u201cThey\u2019d say, \u2018You guys are paranoid. You have your historical baggage. You just can’t get over it.\u2019\u201d \u201cRussia’s anti-colonialist narrative towards the Global South in general, including Africa, has been pretty much unchallenged,\u201d Sabanadze explained, allowing Moscow to not only oust French and EU forces there but actually entrench itself too.\u201cRussians are genuinely popular in many of these places. They\u2019re not seen as horrible mercenaries that come to exploit the resources, kill people and who have been engaged in horrible massacres,\u201d Sabanadze said.ADVERTISEMENTSiegle and Djiraibe both doubt Moscow\u2019s loyalty in return. \u201cI think it’s more transactional,\u201d Seigle said. \u201cThe Russian forces are not there to fight the jihadists, they’re protecting the regime and various mining sites.\u201dSabanadze agreed. \u201cThey like their operations there to be cheap and to be particularly beneficial to them,\u201d she added.’We never address the root problem’Yet, signs of discontent with the Russians are already on the horizon. ADVERTISEMENTIn early April, anti-Russian protests broke out across the neighbouring Central African Republic, which Siegle labelled \u201cthe poster child\u201d of Moscow’s influence in Africa due to the thousands of Russian Wagner troops there.While Russian losses in its ongoing war in Ukraine and the downfall of its ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria have paradoxically pushed Moscow to try and extend its global reach, they also provided vulnerabilities which could allow Europe to re-enter the fray.However, both Siegle and Djiraibe warned against a short-term approach that would lead to simply courting the very regimes that turned to the Kremlin for help.\u201cCertainly, that has certain short-term appeal,\u201d Siegle admits. “It\u2019s better to have the juntas than to have jihadists in power, but it doesn’t address any of the underlying sources of instability in these countries.\u201d ADVERTISEMENTNamely, a lack of financial stability and support for civil society groups.\u201cWe never address the root problem,\u201d Djiraibe concurs, calling for less intervention on all sides.\u201cThere’s no need to come and dominate. If we were left to manage itself, we would be capable of electing leaders and sanctioning them when necessary. The mechanism is there.\u201dAs the interview drew to a close and the connection again faltered, Djiraibe reflected on her decades-long career and how her country and those around it had changed, or not.ADVERTISEMENT\u201cFor more than 50 years, weapons have spoken for us under the logic that \u2018if we have the weapons, we subdue the populations, we burst into the villages, we kill\u2019\u201d.Despite this, she remained hopeful. \u201cWe’re not going to continue to use the language of weapons indefinitely,\u201d she exclaimed.\u201cWe must take courage. We\u2019ll continue to fight, to support our populations and reach higher, because we cannot replace one coloniser with another.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic ADVERTISEMENT\u201cVladimir Putin came to fight in Africa in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,\u201d Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi tells his hundreds of thousands of followers in a video shared across multiple platforms.\u201cHe participated in the fight against Western imperialism. I hope you know that.\u201dThere is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-279553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279555,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279553\/revisions\/279555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}