Areva, Sarkozy, and the Niger crisis: “No coincidence”

Sophie Team Observers — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:10:51 +0200

Niger President Mamdou Tandja dissolved the country's constitutional court on Tuesday, removing yet another obstacle to his plans to stand once more for the presidency, in defiance of a constitutional ban.

Mamadou Tandja's second presidential term runs out in December of this year, and the constitution prevents him from standing for re-election. With this deadline in sight, the country's leader has prepared a referendum to allow him to stand for a third term. In order to give his project a good start, Tandja granted himself emergency powers to rule by decree last week, and then went on to scrap the constitutional court, which had been attempting to block his referendum plans.

Two months earlier, Niger's government granted French state-owned nuclear giant Areva a crucial uranium contract. Coincidental timing? Although France has condemned Tandja's actions, a specialist on the subject tells us that there's still cause for concern.

UPDATE (3 July 09 - 11am Paris time): Areva has responded to Daniel. Read the statement below his comment.

Daniel Dubreuil is an activist for Survie, an association working on Franco-African relations, and a specialist of Areva's policies in Niger.

This was no coincidence. Areva and Niger signed a [€1.2 million] contract in January to develop the Imouraren uranium mine [in central Niger]. Negotiations took two years, during which the Niger government eventually gave up on most of its demands. Then in March, Nicolas Sarkozy passed through Niger and made a speech in which he quite clearly stated his support for Mamadou Tandja. On May 4, the mine's first stone was laid, and just a few weeks later, as though by chance, president Tandja launched his constitutional reform plans and dissolved the constitutional court.

How I see this timing of events, is that Areva got the contract in part by promising that France wouldn't take too much of a harsh stance against the president's intended actions.

Areva has ruled out any political pressure. But it's obvious that in the case of Niger, the position of Areva and the French state, which owns 90% of its shares, are inseparable. That's been the case since uranium was discovered in 1959 and up until today. Niger's uranium is a key factor in French diplomacy. Once the Imouraren mine opens, Niger will be supplying a third of Areva's uranium, making it an evermore important player in France's independent energy supplies.

Nicolas Sarkozy made a speech announcing the end of Françafrique [France's ambiguous relationship with former African colonies], but what's actually followed is quite the opposite. Although the French government said on June 5 that it would look into reform projects in Tandja, the half-hearted statement didn't even put forward any sanctions against Niger or president Tandja. It would have been possible, as proved by other countries (notably the US), to take coercive measures - threatening to freeze assets, reconsider certain agreements, etc.

I repeat that in my opinion, Areva has an obvious interest in Niger's internal politics. Recently, one of the company's managers made a revealing statement about the company's behaviour in Niger. According to [French analytical publication] Le Canard enchainé, he said that France should help the Niger government ‘sort out' the Tuaregs [the government has been faced with a rebellion by the local nomadic Saharan people since 2007]. It appears that the Areva manager in question didn't use the phrase ‘sort out', but that was basically what he meant. There's nothing surprising about that. As soon as the accord between Areva and Niger had gone through, the directors of the company felt that they could exploit whatever resources in the region they deemed fit: water, land, air... They didn't seem to think that the effects of their actions on the local Tuareg population held any importance. Just to take a recent example, in order to open the mine in Imouraren, Areva will have to drill a hole eight kilometres long, two km wide and 150 km deep. Can we really believe that such a creation won't have any impact on the local Tuareg people, who live solely from farming?"