French President Emmanuel Macron will travel to Djibouti on Friday, December 20, where he will share a Christmas meal with the French soldiers deployed on this strategic base, before going the next day to neighboring Ethiopia, we learned on Tuesday. of the Elysée.
For the traditional end-of-year New Year’s Eve, the Head of State this year chose Djibouti for “show the gratitude of the nation” to soldiers deployed abroad, said the presidency. He must meet on site with his Djiboutian counterpart, Ismaël Omar Guelleh, about the situation in the Red Sea and in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Somalia, prey to various conflicts and attacks by Chabab, Islamists radicals, as well as in Sudan, ravaged by more than a year and a half of civil war.
They will also discuss the defense partnership renewed in July between the two countries. The French base in Djibouti, which hosts 1,500 soldiers, is the largest French contingent abroad and the only one not to be affected by the historic reduction in force planned on the African continent after a series of disappointments in the Sahel in recent years. recent years. The renewed treaty reflects “the excellence of the relationship that prevails between our two countries as well as the convergence of our strategic interests”then underlined the Elysée.
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A prized island of stability in a troubled region, Djibouti is located opposite Yemen, at the exit of the Red Sea, in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, where a large part of world trade passes between Asia and the West. In addition to a rent which has been the subject of heated discussions, France provides air policing for this small East African country.
The president will fly to Addis Ababa on Saturday, where he is scheduled to meet Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. They will inaugurate the National Palace, a historic building which was the last residence of Emperor Haile Selassie Iisoverturned in 1974. The French Development Agency (AFD) contributed 25 million euros to its renovation and transformation into a museum. In addition to the bilateral relationship, the two leaders will once again address the volatile regional climate and the internal situation, two years after the agreement which sealed the end of the war in Tigray, which left several hundred thousand dead in the north of the country. .
This visit marks Emmanuel Macron’s stated desire to promote new African partnerships, freed from the colonial past which has poisoned – sometimes to the point of rupture – Paris’s relations with its former colonies in recent years.
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