SEX FOR CLINTON, POWER FOR FRANCE

James Srodes on how Paris has taken advantage of White House scandal to see off Washington in Africa

Washington, DC THE world's rulers at last week's United Nations meeting were led by Nelson Man- dela to cheer on their friend Bill Clinton even as his sex and lies were appearing on videotape. A snicker, however, can be heard from the Elysee!

Paris can chortle because Mr Clinton's personal problems have stymied Washing- ton's efforts to challenge French hegemo- ny in a 14-nation bloc of francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa. But this is not funny. The potential for terrible vio- lence is greater there. The global econom- ic stakes are higher than in Kosovo and could rival the Iran-Afghan face-off.

Beginning in 1994 Mr Clinton's policy `wonks' (as his advisers are called) began a series of adventures to insert American influence into what were seen as corrupt and brutal regimes throughout the region. That was the year that the CIA-backed English-speaking Tutsis who returned from exile in Uganda to overthrow the government in Rwanda.

The American campaign reached its apogee in 1997 when Washington support- ed Laurent Kabila's coup against Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Earlier this year Mr Clinton took a historic victory lap around the region to supplement his offer of billions of dollars of foreign aid and trade incen- tives to African nations which abandoned statist economic policies and embraced the free market.

That was then. This, sadly, is now. The sag and collapse of the American effort perhaps is more complete and visible on the African front than it has been in the other areas of Mr Clinton's virtual reality gestures to Russia, Northern Ireland or Japan. He may be able to fire a rocket or two at a Sudanese drug factory but he has left his client allies in Africa holding a very empty bag.

If there was a reasonable rationale for what the Americans were up to it could be found in the African Growth and Oppor- tunity Act which the White House pro- posed to Congress last summer with suitable fanfare. The legislation was the linchpin of a Clinton pledge to funnel bil- lions of dollars of American trade and aid to the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa with special focus on the western nations that had been colonies of France and Britain.

In exchange for solemn promises to open their economies to free market forces, the African trade bill would have funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars of government insurance and trade incen- tives to American companies that would set up factories in the participating coun- tries. Later the American firms would help develop markets for the final products.

But that bill is dead along with much of Clinton's Congressional proposals. The lawmakers are dithering over whether to impeach, when it might be best done, and how the voters in November's elections will react. While Mr Clinton squirms to defend his presidency the American presi- dency has ceased to function.

A good argument can be made that the Clinton plan never had much of a chance of working. The French, for many years the major power over a dozen or so of the leading countries in the region, have long sneered at the American effort to tie democratisation to economic progress. French authorities also have openly resented and often contested American strategems in the region.

The result has been a nasty four-year clandestine struggle between the security services of the two ostensibly friendly nations, with the African poor being caught in the crossfire. So it was that when the Americans backed the Tutsis in Rwan- da, the French backed the Hutus even though they began a genocide that killed more than half a million Tutsis. Paris also backed Mobutu Sese Seko and continues But Maureen, I thought we'd grow middle- aged together.' to support Ugandan and Rwandan efforts to topple Kabila in the face of support from Angola and Zimbabwe.

But there is more to this ominous chaos than American efforts to supplant French political hegemony in the name of democratisation. Nor are the French fight- ing back out of a sense of wounded amour propre. The most visible objective all along has been oil. American energy strategists have become increasingly worried as the country's dependency on Middle Eastern resources grows more vulnerable. Equally important, other nations too want even more and cheaper petroleum reserves at hand, and the convenient fields that beck- on from the coastline of western Africa are enticing if badly run. It was with this in mind that Tony Blair broke five years of international sanctions to be host to Nigeri- an strongman Abdulsalam Abubakar at Downing Street a fortnight ago.

The French know this as well as anyone, perhaps better. The stakes cannot be underestimated. Intelligence authorities estimate that a French company may have paid $150 million to the Congo president Pascal Lissouba's enemy to overthrow him last year.

Nelson Mandela knows the score as well. Personal friendship aside, the South African leader looks to America's — Clin- ton's really — promise of support and aid as vital to his struggle to increase the national pie so everyone can have a larger slice. In last spring's presidential visit and since then through promises by Vice-Presi- dent Al Gore to his friend, president-in- waiting Thaba Mbeki, the Americans were explicit about what riches awaited South Africa if it played along with US ambitions in the region to the north.

Provided the Mandela government remained visibly aloof from the statist and confiscatory policies of, say, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, then the United States would make South Africa the American entrepot for the economic democratisation of the region. This would mean aid, trade and economic development flowing through South Africa to other sub-Saharan nations. The implication was that Pretoria's new masters could divert as much of this flow as they could get their hands on.

But there will be no such flows. Not now. Not even very soon after Mr Gore succeeds to the White House, if that happens after all. Perhaps never.

America has virtually vanished from Africa. United States embassies throughout the region are either closed or operating with skeleton staffs out of fear of terrorist reprisals. Meanwhile Mr Kabila's war in the Democratic Republic of Congo threat- ens to involve other nations from Angola to Uganda. Tribal genocide on a level that would make a Slobodan Milosevic blush has sent refugee floods backwashing over the borders of all the countries involved.

Mr Clinton's cheap sex, it turns out, comes at great cost.