“Lomé, capital of peace, mediation, dialogue and tolerance. » The slogan chosen by the Togolese government on the occasion of the Peace and Security Forum held in Lomé from Friday October 20 to Sunday October 22 was programmatic. At the Hôtel du 2 Février, in the middle of an audience of diplomats, intellectuals and representatives of international bodies, some of the guests were scrutinized: the representatives of the three juntas in power in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger . Regimes ostracized by the international community since they committed a coup d’état, but whose relations with Togolese President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé are in good shape.
“Mediation and tolerance”, the head of Togolese diplomacy, Robert Dussey, liked to repeat on the forum stage. However, as soon as the marble of the hotel was cleared of its prestigious guests, the Lomé authorities showed a completely different face. In the lobby of the palace, security forces arrived on October 25 to serve Joseph Breham and Matilda Ferey, two French lawyers representing Abgéyomé Kodjo, who lost the 2020 presidential election in which Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé was re-elected for a fourth mandate, that they were no longer free to move. “They very firmly prevented us from leaving the hotel, telling us that they were there to ensure our safety. In reality, they wanted to prevent us from participating in the press conference that we had organized just before our return to Paris,” explains Me Breham. The lawyers of Agbéyomé Kodjo, who lives in exile, intended in particular to “communicate on the methods of inhuman and degrading treatment suffered” by some of his activists, imprisoned after the election. In vain. They were escorted back to the airport on the evening of October 25 by the police.
” Optical illusion “
The sequence illustrates the paradox that makes Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé’s policy: a diplomacy focused on mediation in regional conflicts, combined, internally, with authoritarianism. “Togo is a sham country,” says historian Professor Michel Goeh-Akue. For the former trade union leader close to the opposition, “Mr. Gnassingbé’s all-out diplomacy is a way for him to gain legitimacy. He polishes an image of a man of peace outside to make people forget what is happening in Togo, where he leads a military regime.”
This large gap has so far enabled the regime to ensure its longevity. Faure Gnassingbé is the man of all podiums. First son of an African president to come to power following the death of his father in 2005 – at the cost of a repression which left more than 400 dead according to the UN, before Ali Bongo Ondimba in Gabon, Uhurru Kenyata in Kenya or even Joseph Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he is also the last of them still in office. At 57, he is among the youngest heads of state on the continent while being the one with the most years of power (eighteen) in West Africa. To the point of being called by his peers the “young dean”. The shy but stubborn man does not like the expression: it reminds us that he owes his position to his father, Etienne Eyadema Gnassingbé. Mediator in Biafra, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Chad, Ivory Coast… the general taught his son the talent of mediation as he carried out the functions he entrusted to him : advisor to the president, minister and deputy, then dolphin. A cumbersome legacy but one which makes him a man less attentive to democratic principles than the international community.
Since the August 2020 coup in Mali, Mr. Gnassingbé has displayed his singularity. At the same time as he sat within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which imposed an economic and territorial embargo on the new junta, he received Colonel Assimi Goïta in Lomé in December, then vice-president, who became president in May 2021. Several times over the past three years, Mr. Gnassingbé has visited Bamako, the capital which has become inaccessible for many heads of state. In 2022, it is again he who is appointed mediator to free 49 Ivorian soldiers held prisoner in Bamako who accuses them of being mercenaries. In this matter, the visit of the Togolese president to the Malian capital on January 4, 2023 was decisive: three days later, the soldiers were released.
This “active, discreet and effective diplomacy”, in the words of the presidency, is favored by the long-standing personal relationship Robert Dussey with his counterpart Abdoulaye Diop – a friend from the time when the latter officiated within the African Union ( UA) when the first was already playing mediator within the Vatican community of Sant’Egidio. The head of Togolese diplomacy is also very close to President Goïta, who also elevated him to the rank of Commander of the National Order of Mali in May 2023. The model is reproduced after the coups in Burkina Faso (2022) and Niger (2023). “As the Malians trust Faure, they advised the other putschists to turn to him,” says a Togolese government advisor.
” At the same time “
Since then, ties have been strengthened between Lomé and the putschist trio, united since September within the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The Niamtougou air base, located in the north of Togo, about ten kilometers from Pya, the village of origin of the Gnassingbé, serves as a hub for discreet diplomacy implemented by the president. At the beginning of August, “Faure Gnassingbé met representatives of the three military regimes (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger),” says the same advisor. According to our information, the Togolese president also discreetly flew to Niamey at the beginning of October, before Nigerien Prime Minister Lamine Zeine came just as discreetly to Lomé. Asked by Le Monde about these stays and their objectives, Robert Dussey smiled but said nothing. And what does it matter if the Togolese “at the same time” annoys certain West African countries.
“Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé is aware that we will have to deal with the juntas for a certain time,” underlines one of his close friends, who calls for “realistic” diplomacy, in the interests of Togo’s “future”. The prosperity of the latter largely depends on the state of its economic cooperation with the countries of the Sahel. Isn’t the autonomous port of Lomé, the only deep-water port in West Africa, representing more than 60% of state revenues, nicknamed “terminal of the Sahel”, as it serves as a transport route? transit for goods?
Since it began operating in June 2022 and despite the embargoes on goods officially imposed by ECOWAS on the Malian and Burkinabé putschists, more than 15,000 20-foot containers from Bamako, Ouagadougou and Niamey have passed through it, according to the management of the dry port, and 30,000 tonnes of goods were exported there to the Sahel.
For Lomé, cooperation is also necessary on a security level, while northern Togo is now the target of terrorist groups established in the Sahel. Since 2021, more than 140 Togolese have already been killed in attacks there according to the authorities. “We cannot afford the luxury of fighting terrorism at home without the cooperation of neighboring states where the problem originates, whatever the nature of the regimes in place,” specifies the close friend of the president cited above. “When your neighbor’s hut burns and you do nothing, soon the flames will reach yours,” Gnassingbé father liked to teach his son, also recommending him to “never let go of power.”
“The main accomplice of the regime”
To do this, Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé locked down the regime and the army – the coup d’état in Gabon where Ali Bongo Ondimba was overthrown in August after fifty-five years of family power once again reminded him of the need -, n not hesitating to repress massive demonstrations like in 2017 and 2018. According to Aimé Adi, director of Amnesty International in Togo, “it has become almost impossible for both the opposition and civil society to demonstrate. Opponents are still in prison, without knowing their number.” Even the launch of a European Union project to promote freedom of association was banned in mid-October.
New regional and legislative elections are supposed to be held by the end of 2023 but no date has been given by the authorities. The adversaries of Mr. Gnassingbé, who is now in his fourth mandate, no longer have any illusions. “In any case, the real results of the polls are never announced,” denounces Master Paul Dodji Apevon, president of the Democratic Forces for the Republic (FDR). “Even when ballots are stolen, the international community says nothing publicly. She is the regime’s main accomplice,” storms Jean-Pierre Fabre, president of the National Alliance for Change (ANC). A silence which fuels the disappointment of Togolese youth with the West and which is skillfully used by the authorities.
Speaking at the UN at the end of September, Robert Dussey said he was speaking “for African youth”. “We are tired of your paternalism, tired of your contempt for our public opinions, populations and leaders,” denounced the head of Togolese diplomacy. Faced with Westerners, Togo is playing the African unity card. In May, Lomé launched the African Political Alliance (APA) bringing together Angola, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Guinea, Libya, Mali, Namibia, Tanzania. Lomé, where the constitutive act of the African Union (AU) was signed in 2000, seeks to recast continental unity in “a less formal framework, bringing together states that truly agree with each other, to carry more weight” on the international scene, the president’s entourage summarizes.
Pragmatism
At the end of 2024, Lomé should host the 9th Pan-African Congress, whose “high committee for the decade of African roots” brings together fifteen countries from the five regions of Africa. “The regime wants to show its youth, which represents more than 60% of its population, that it supports its ideals in order not to give rise to a reversal of power, as was the case in the Sahel. It’s opportunism,” says journalist and writer Zeus Aziadouvo, former member of the High Authority for Audiovisual and Communication (HAAC), which he left at the beginning of 2023, believing that “it had become an instrument of muzzling the media.”
Driven out by the Sahel juntas and faced with a rise in anti-French sentiment in West Africa, Paris is carefully following Togo’s unique choices. “What matters is the interest of the Togolese,” explained Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé in April, before specifying that he was ready to make “certain choices, even difficult ones” to defend them. “What we want, we go and get it where we find it. With France, the English (…), certain African countries. It is this philosophy that guides my action. And the concern to be independent, not to be perceived as being irremediably linked to someone,” he added then, a month before being received at the Elysée by Emmanuel Macron with whom he shares a taste for “ at the same time “. A balancing act which has so far proven itself, and which the Togolese president should maintain “until he feels the tide turning”, summarizes a politician in Lomé. A matter of pragmatism.
