TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP
Emmanuel Macron, here during the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters, in New York, on September 20, 2022.
INTERNATIONAL – “Let’s not resign ourselves to the fracture of the world”launched this Tuesday, September 20 Emmanuel Macron to the UN by urging world leaders to reject “the new order” of division which the Russia “imperialist” with the war Ukraine.
In a sometimes fiery plea that contrasted with the calm tone of speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, the French president called for the invention of “new cooperation” to meet the challenges facing the world, from conflicts to climate change and pandemics.
“The situation of our planet increases our demands”he said, wishing “a collective surge” for “build a new contract between north and south”.
This imperative is made all the more urgent by the war in Ukraine initiated by Russia and its President Vladimir Poutine. “We all have a role in ending it because we are all paying the price”he said.
“What we have been witnessing since February 24 is a return to the age of imperialism and colonies”, Hammered Emmanuel Macron. Gold “Who is hegemonic today if not Russia? ».
The Head of State is thus seeking to dismantle the idea that the war in Ukraine is a regional conflict resulting from the opposition between Westerners and Russia and, beyond that, the rest of the world. As a result, many capitals, in Africa, Asia or the Middle East, refuse to condemn Moscow.
“Contemporary imperialism is not European or Western and takes the form of territorial invasion backed by globalized hybrid warfare that uses the price of energy, food security, nuclear safety, access to information and population movements as weapons of division and destruction”denounced Emmanuel Macron.
“Cynicism”
Faced with this, the countries “who are silent today serve in spite of themselves, or secretly, with a certain complicity, the cause of a new imperialism, of a contemporary cynicism which disintegrates our international order without which peace is not possible”according to him.
In the longer term, Emmanuel Macron warns that this “attempt to partition the world (…) increases the tension between the United States and China”particularly in the Indo-Pacific zone, one of France’s strategic priorities.
In recent months, the French president has regularly scolded the countries that have remained neutral, in particular during a visit to Cameroon in July where he denounced the silence in the face of the “hybrid presence” of Russia in Africa, particularly in Mali.
He was to carry this message again during a dinner to which the Ivorian, Colombian and Argentine presidents and Indian, Indonesian and Egyptian ministers were invited this Tuesday in New York.
Speaking at the UN, Senegalese President Macky Sall affirmed that Africa had “enough suffered the burden of history” and didn’t want to be “the hotbed of a new Cold War” between Russia and Western countries.
Absent in New York, Vladimir Putin also again accused the EU on Tuesday of blocking, with its sanctions, the donation of 300,000 tonnes of Russian fertilizer to the countries that need it most. “The height of cynicism”he denounced while receiving diplomats in Moscow.
The EU has repeatedly asserted that its sanctions do not apply to Russian fertilizers or grain.
For his part, Emmanuel Macron once again defended the Farm program, “which makes it possible to supply vulnerable countries at low prices”and announced that France would finance “the evacuation of Ukrainian wheat to Somalia”where part of the population is suffering from famine, in support of the World Food Program (WFP).
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