Reactions To The Withdrawal
The French withdrawal badly strained Franco-Chadian relations, as Habré felt both insulted and abandoned by the French government. Rumors of "secret clauses" in the Franco-Libyan accord spread from N'Djamena throughout Africa. These rumors obligated the French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas to formally deny the existence of such clauses in the Franco-African summit held in Bujumbura in December. Mitterrand resisted pressure from African governments to return to Chad, with the Foreign Relations Secretary of Mitterrand's Socialist Party Jacques Hustinger proclaiming that "France can't be forever the gendarme of Francophone Africa".
After the return of the French troops in their country, Mitterrand found himself accused both at home and abroad of having been naive in trusting the word "of a man who has never maintained it". Gaddafi emerged with a major diplomatic victory that enhanced his status as a Third World leader who had duped the French government.
Read more about this topic: Operation Manta
Famous quotes containing the words reactions to, reactions and/or withdrawal:
“In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.”
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“We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)