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French visit angers Africans
15/05/2006 19:10 - (SA)
Gao - There'll likely be the traditional welcomes of drums and dancing.
But the real message many Africans want to send France's interior minister when he visits this week is the same one he's been sending some of them: go home.
Nicolas Sarkozy will arrive for a two-day tour - that takes him to Liberia and former French colonies Mali and Benin - on Wednesday.
But, for many ordinary poor Africans, Sarkozy is an intolerable figure.
They feel he has used Africans who enter France illegally as political props, and they have a name for the government planes on which he orders Africans deported: "Charters of Shame".
Malian Hamidou Aljoumagat has been refused a French visa twice and he wonders why an interior minister is making an oversees trip to Africa, anyway.
"If it's to speak to us about selective immigration and the closure of borders, he can stay at home," said the young market vendor.
Many impoverished Malians want to enter France and other European nations, where jobs pay better, or where there are jobs at all.
Many believe the authorities will relent
But, they're generally unable to obtain visas and many use migration routes to sneak in.
One main transit route runs through the eastern Mali crossroads town of Gao.
West Africans of many nationalities move through the town on their way to Mauritania, where they board open wooden fishing canoes for a perilous sea journey to Spain's Canary Islands.
Others try to cross into Morocco and gain entry into Spain from there.
Many believe that even if one is caught illegally in Europe, the authorities will relent and grant them long-term residence.
So, deportations that have been stepped up under Sarkozy do rankle.
So does his harsh language. He has referred to troublemakers and criminals in heavily immigrant suburbs of French cities as "scum".
Sarkozy, is himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant. He makes no secret of his desire to pry French voters away from the anti-immigration far-right with his tough rhetoric and efforts to tighten immigration rules.
He has championed a bill - now working its way through the French parliament - which will make it harder for people with little education and few skills to make a new life in France.
Scoring political points
The bill would also create a renewable, three-year work permit for skilled workers, and scrap a measure that allows foreigners, who have been in the country for 10 years - even illegally, to get citizenship.
Many Africans view Sarkozy's policies as attempts to score political points before the 2007 French presidential elections.
They feel he ignores the contributions of French citizens descended from Africa.
Hamadou Maiga, in his 80s, said Mali should make Sarkozy wait in line at the embassy for entry papers.
"The whites are hypocrites," he said. "When they come to colonise us, they don't ask for a visa to come."
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