He has been praised as a war chief in Mali. Now, French President Francois Hollande has been awarded a UN-sponsored peace prize, barely a year into his presidency and just months after launching his first war against Islamic extremists.
The prize givers and African leaders attending today's awards ceremony, including Malian president Dioncounda Traore, say Hollande deserves UNESCO's Felix Houphouet-Boigny prize precisely because they say the Mali intervention is about long-term peace for a volatile region.
But continued violence in northern Mali, terrorist attacks in neighbouring Niger and the extremists' flight to troubled Libya underline the challenges of making that work.
"It may seem paradoxical to be awarded for peace after assuming responsibility for war," Hollande said in his speech at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris. "But the decision I made on behalf of France had no other purpose than to end an aggression."
Before the French military intervention in January, northern Mali was overrun by a trio of al-Qaeda-linked groups who threatened to move on the capital.
Paris has pledged to quickly pull out its troops from Mali, but the French military presence in the country will last for years, admitted the Malian Foreign Minister Tieman Coulibaly. "We cannot fear the French presence... On the contrary, the French army helped us out of tight spot," he told The Associated Press yesterday.
Hollande also won a cash prize worth USD 150,000 which he is donating to two organisations: the Network on Peace and Security for Women in the ECOWAS Region, and Solidarite Defense, which helps care for injured soldiers.
Hollande has promised to put an end to "Francafrique", a term used to describe the political, economic, and military relationship between France and its former African colonies, that Paris long used to insure its sphere of influence on the continent.
During his first trip in Africa as a president last October, he said in Dakar that he wanted "to write a new chapter" in the relationship. Hollande said he intended to break with the policies of his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who said in a controversial speech in Dakar in 2007 that African man "has not fully entered history (...) never really launched himself into the future.
