He is a shadowy character but no less essential. The sometimes fantasized job of ambassador is little known to the general public, often overshadowed by events in the country, or simply forgotten when there is no news concerning the region where he is on mission. Recent years have been the scene of numerous crises, such as the war in Ukraine in 2022, the civil war in Sudan in 2023 or even recently, the coup d’état in Niger.
All very different situations but which each time involve the French ambassador on site. Two of them, Etienne de Poncins, former ambassador of Ukraine, and Raja Rabia, ambassador of Sudan, agreed to shed some light on their daily lives and tell 20 minutes how they experienced the upheavals that shook their country of residence.
Unique crisis experiences
They both talk about “special cases”. One experienced the invasion of one state by another, the second the outbreak of a civil war. But the two saw, in a few days or a few hours, the city they lived in change its face, raining bombs and danger at their doorstep. “At one point, the Russians were 800 meters from the embassy,” recalls Etienne de Poncins. “Hearing the missiles falling a kilometer from you still comes as a shock…” he admits.
When you are an ambassador, you risk this kind of situation where life comes into play. We are armed with devices and procedures, but humanly, we are rarely really ready to face war despite experiences in difficult regions. In one night, daily life in Khartoum was turned upside down, shooting punctuated the days “in the middle of the street”, bombings echoed in the Sudanese capital, all the bridges were cut… Raja Rabia, “stuck in her residence on the other side of the Nile” feared for his life when an “assault was launched” against the building. And this, even if “we are always prepared for the worst, even if Sudan has been in chronic instability since 2018”. “The suddenness of the high-intensity war hit us,” she recalls.
A crisis situation is necessarily a situation with a high content of stress and emotions. You have to know how to keep calm, remain rational, “almost cold”, as Raja Rabia describes it. “We must try to sleep, even if it is complicated, as soon as there is a moment of respite, force ourselves to rest, and also to eat, even if we have no appetite because we are busy in the seriousness of the moment,” advises the Sudanese ambassador. You have to know how to stay composed in a whirlwind of events.
The urgency of repatriation
Keep your cool, to fulfill your duty. In times of peace, the ambassador’s primary mission is to “build bridges in the long term, contribute to peace, and make people understand what France is and what the country of residence is”, illustrates Raja Rabia. But when things get bad, the priority is to ensure the safety of compatriots, expatriate French nationals or tourists who are in the country when it breaks out. Sometimes a few days before.
The crisis in Ukraine “escalated gradually”, which made it possible “to begin preparation with exercises, experts, to activate procedures as tensions increased”, explains Etienne de Poncins , despite the realization of the “most extreme scenario envisaged, that of the global invasion of the country”. As early as February 19, five days before the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the French embassy had already strongly advised French citizens to leave the country in view of the looming danger. “But not everyone left so we had to find ways to exfiltrate those who did not follow the first recommendations, be imaginative, and fortunately, we had no injuries,” congratulates the diplomat now stationed in Poland. The organization is done in close and constant link with Paris and the crisis and support center from the Quai d’Orsay. An “efficient” tool that allows the ambassador and his team to be supported.
On April 15, when the precarious calm turned into explosive chaos in the Sudanese capital, it was necessary to organize the emergency expatriation of the French with a major difficulty: the airport had been stormed and partly destroyed in the first hours of the conflict. “We were trapped, Khartoum is practically in the center of the country,” explains Raja Rabia. Finally, the operation called “Sagittarius”, launched on April 24, made it possible to evacuate over three days 209 French people and 329 people of 70 different nationalities, through the city’s military airport, with the authorization of the Sudanese armed forces. , which Emmanuel Macron obtained. In a very large city, it was “very complicated to pick up everyone at the three meeting points that we had set,” adds Raja Rabia. The ambassador was one of the first to reach the military airport, being geographically closer to the destination point, accompanied by ten civilians, a Briton and the German ambassador and his family. “Because if we attack the ambassador, we attack France directly,” she summarizes.
A priority, its mission
With the departure of the ambassador, the embassy is in fact closed in Sudan, but diplomatic ties are not cut. Raja Rabia continues to fulfill his mission from Paris by, for example, organizing meetings with the Sudanese opposition. “I continue to have contacts with Sudanese who have remained there, I also carry out missions in the region such as in Ethiopia or Egypt to meet Sudanese who have taken refuge there, you have to know how to keep your contacts alive and then prepare after the conflict because every war has an end, recalls the ambassador. Even if it’s more complicated when you’re not in the field,” she concedes.
This is why Etienne de Poncins preferred to return. The ambassador remained in Ukraine until the last French evacuated, to accompany his compatriots out of the invaded country like the “captain of a ship”. After staying only around twenty hours in Moldova, he left with a small team of volunteers to settle in Lviv. “My mission has a political aspect, France wanted to show its solidarity with frightened Ukraine,” he explains, specifying that it is indeed the President of the Republic who decides whether or not to maintain the embassy but always in listening. “If I had wanted to leave I would have been repatriated,” he assures.
In addition to the diplomatic aspect, it was easier for Etienne de Poncins to be directly on the ground to effectively help the Ukrainians, particularly to “identify their needs, streamline exchanges, face-to-face, is more direct,” he explains. This also allowed him last fall to travel the country accompanied by the GIGN “to get as close as possible to the population” but always in safety, he says. “These are strong moments on a personal level and at the same time an expression of French support,” he insists. Since August 20, he has been transferred to Warsaw at the end of four years of busy mandates in kyiv. A position he obtained at his request because “it makes sense to be appointed to Poland, a country which has close ties with Ukraine”.