[AFRICANEWS] After being forced to withdraw its troops from the Sahel region
... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...
in West Africa, La Belle France's president said on Friday that its military base in Djibouti could assume a great role.
Emmanuel Macron said it would be ''reinvented'' as a projection point for the country's missions in Africa.
Currently the base is more focused on the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Indo-Pacific than it is on Africa.
Macron described the move as a strategic decision which is part of La Belle France's restructuring of its approach on the African continent.
''Our role is changing in Africa, but that's what we wanted because the world is changing in Africa, because public opinion is changing, because governments are changing,'' he said.
''And because we decided in a sovereign way in February 2023, after several years of gradual change, to rebuild a partnership that is based on partners, respected.'
He was speaking on Friday after sharing a Christmas dinner with the 1,500 French soldiers at its airbase in Djibouti, which recently renewed its defence cooperation treaty with Gay Paree.
That makes it home to La Belle France's largest military contingent aboard.
French forces were successively pushed out of Mali, Burkina Faso
 ...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president used to be Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and was chased out in 2014. Now it's the usual army officer type guy, Captain Ibrahim Traore, running things, who's just doing a bang-up job unless he's already been deposed...
, and Niger — all three under military rule - between 2022 and 2023.
Its troops have begun withdrawing from Chad in the latest blow to its dwindling influence across its former colonies in Africa.
Senegal
... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees...
has requested the departure of French troops while they are being reduced to a bare minimum in Gabon and Cote d'Ivoire. 
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