Sawt Falasteen - Madagascar's protests fan anger against colonial France

"France out", "Rajoelina and Macron out", said banners after French media reported that the president had fled on a French military plane as an army unit threw its weight behind protesters calling for his resignation.

"They are still colonising us even though we are supposed to be independent," said Koloina Andrianina Rakotomavonirina, a 26-year-old engineer.

"It's unfair that they intervene in such a matter," she told AFP at a demonstration in central Antananarivo.

With the whereabouts of the 51-year-old president unknown, the national assembly impeached him on Tuesday for desertion of duty, paving the way for a military unit called CAPSAT to seize power.

Negative perception about France was not surprising considering its history, Paris-based political scientist Christiane Rafidinarivo told AFP.

Its colonisation of the Indian Ocean island until independence in 1960 was marked by several atrocities, including the bloody repression by French forces of a 1947 uprising which claimed tens of thousands of lives.

"France represents colonialism," Rafidinarivo said. "This perception runs through public opinion and is triggered depending on current events."

While President Emmanuel Macron refused to confirm French involvement in Rajoelina's evacuation, a presidential pardon for two French nationals jailed in Madagascar on coup charges -- announced as the reports of his departure broke -- raised suspicions of a deal.

- Citizenship revelation -

Rajoelina's apparently chummy ties with Paris have long been criticised at home, but media reports in 2023 that he had obtained French nationality nine years before deepened the mistrust.

The revelation came just before the 2023 presidential race, and led to calls for him to be disqualified as the opposition claimed he should have lost his Madagascan nationality as a result, according to local law.

Rajoelina went on to win reelection but the polls were boycotted by most opposition parties and marked by a low turnout.

That sparked new criticism against France "because the opposition accused him of being a French agent," said Adrien Ratsimbaharison, author of a book on the 2009 coup that brought Rajoelina to power but denied him international recognition.

French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, was the first foreign head of state to recognise Rajoelina as president during a state visit to France in 2011.

"People did not forgive in France for that, because that gave Rajoelina some kind of legitimacy," Ratsimbaharison said.

There were also suspicions that Sarkozy sent financial aid to Rajoelina to engineer the 2009 protests and secure the support of military personnel to overthrow then-president Marc Ravalomanana, he said.

- Rumours, resentment -

In Madagascar's social media mix of disinformation and rumour, a widely shared but out-of-context image that claimed to show the deployment of French gendarmes to support the embattled Rajoelina outraged those who believed it.

The photo showed a Malagasy gendarme wearing French colours but this was only because he had undergone training in France, the gendarmerie told AFP.

Resentment towards the former colonial power is also fuelled by the awarding of major contracts to French companies and open French sex tourism on the impoverished island.

Some French businesses, such as call centres, meanwhile, use French-speaking Malagasy workers at a fraction of the wages they would earn in Europe.

At one demonstration, 27-year-old Mampionona Razafinjoelina said he quit his call-centre job because: "I was tired of being insulted by the French."

Amid the long-running animosity, Macron said on a visit to the island in April he wanted to create the conditions for "forgiveness" for France's colonisation, which has also left a bitter taste in its other former colonies such as Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon.

This included returning the remains of a Malagasy king killed by the French army in an 1897 massacre that were taken to France as trophies, which happened in September, as well as the establishment of a Franco-Malagasy commission to look into atrocities of the time.

T.Khatib--SF-PST