Former French lawyer and politician Roland Dumas passed away on Wednesday, July 3, at the age of 101. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs under François Mitterrand, of whom he was a close friend, was also President of the Constitutional Council in France. Over the course of a life full of twists and turns, he had also forged strong ties with Africa, until his downfall, with his conviction in the Elf affair, an emblematic scandal of “Françafrique”.
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It was first as a lawyer with an anti-colonialist streak that Roland Dumas established his first links with AfricaIn the 1960s, Roland Dumas was already a leading lawyer when he unsuccessfully defended French who finance the Algerian FLN, notably the head of a network of ” suitcase carriers » support of the Algerian FLN. Then, he pleaded alongside the civil parties after the kidnapping of Moroccan opponent Mehdi Ben Barka, abducted in the heart of Paris. This affair would have profound diplomatic repercussions.
At the very beginning of the 1980s, Roland Dumas also took on the defense of the newspaper the chained Duck in the case of ” Bokassa diamonds »facing the French president at the time, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
The rise of François Mitterrand, his close friend, then opened the doors of politics to him. He was sent to Muammar Gaddafi in 1983 to try to negotiate a Libyan withdrawal from Chad, in the conflict that opposed the two countries from 1978 to 1987. The mission failed, but he gained a future client with the Guide’s regime.
A subsequently controversial journey
The French head of state appointed Roland Dumas as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1988. He held this position until 1993. He summed up François Mitterrand’s speech at La Baule on the economic situation in Africa as follows: ” The wind of freedom that has blown in the East will inevitably one day have to blow in the direction of the South. […]. There is no development without democracy and there is no democracy without development. »
During these years, he became friends with Gabonese President Omar Bongo, one of the pillars of Françafrique.
The rest of his career would be very controversial. Appointed President of the Constitutional Council in 1995, Roland Dumas was caught up two years later by the sprawling Elf caseone of the biggest corruption cases that broke in 1994. Forced to resign in 2000, he returned to service in the courts, but his aura was definitely tarnished.
In 2010aged 88, he went to Abidjan in the middle of the post-election crisis. He had engaged virulently with Jacques Vergès as a defender of Laurent Gbagbo, who dismissed them six months later. The latter was also a friend of Muammar Gaddafi and a valued interlocutor of Yasser Arafat.
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