LA BAULE, France -- President Francois Mitterrand made an impassioned plea Wednesday for the industrialized world to come to the aid of Africa and urged the continent's leaders to move toward democracy but at their own pace.
Mitterrand, speaking before the leaders of 35 African countries, including 22 heads of state or government, strongly defended French policy toward its former colonies and said Paris would continue to play a leading, if altered, role in Africa.
'France is determined to pursue its policy and therefore its aid to Africa,' he told the assembled leaders, including King Hassan II of Morocco and President Omar Bongo of Gabon.
Mitterrand called on rich countries 'to renounce certain of their rights and 'to feed a sort of guarantee fund' for developing nations.' He said the West must not 'give lessons' to people 'who have their own conscience and history.'
The three-day summit at the Brittany seaside resort of La Baule comes after three months of turbulent and at times violent change in several African countries, including the Ivory Cost, Gabon and Liberia.
Opposition movements, which Africa experts say are inspired by the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the increasing misery of many Africans, have sprung up and prompted sharp criticism of French policy in the region.
Mitterrand announced that Paris had decided to make only donations rather than loans to the most underdeveloped countries and to reduce the interest rate on the public debt to four 'intermediary' African countries by 50 percent.
The measure in favor of Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and the Congo will mean a reduction of about $44 million in debt service for the four countries this year, according to French government sources.
The four, which have outstanding loans of $19.6 million, 52 percent of them with France, will see interest rates on their public sector debts drop to 5 percent from the current 10 percent.
The four countries are considered to have revenues of about $500 per capita, higher than that of many other countries in the region. The idea, a French official spokesman said, is to help them before their economic situation deteriorates further.
Nigeria, which falls into the same per capita category as the four others, will not benefit from the interest rate reduction, French officials said.
Mitterrand, who considers himself the spokesman for the underdeveloped world, said he will urge the United States and the world's other major industrialized countries to follow the French example by reducing interest rates and to extend the deadlines for repayment of the debt.
Mitterrand, whose prior initiatives on the debt issue have been coolly received by other industrialized countries, repeated his call for the creation of a special international fund to help underdeveloped nations.
Speaking of the disastrous economic situation in Africa Mitterrand said:
'I am one of those who believe that the responsibility also belongs to the international community and particularly to the richest countries.'
He emphasized that France is the biggest donor to the underdeveloped world in terms of share of gross domestic product, far ahead of the United States and Japan.
The French leader sharply criticized speculators who he said were in large part responsible for the sharp decline in the price of raw materials, leading to significant drops in financial resources.
'Colonialism is not dead,' Mitterrand said. 'It is no longer the colonialism of states, it is the colonialism of business.'
The French president devoted a large portion of his speech to defending French policy in Africa, which critics charge has supported corrupt one-man regimes that frequently violate human rights.
France, he said, supports moves towards democracy, but he insisted his government would not dictate to sovereign countries how they should behave.
'It is in undertaking the road of development that you will undertake the road towards democracy,' Mitterrand said. 'It is up to you to determine what should be the stages and the speed.'
But Mitterrand made it clear that the days of French military intervention to support wobbly regimes were over, although he said Arican countries could count on French help to combat outside aggression, an evident reference to Paris' role in helping Chad repel incursions in recent years by Libyan Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Gabonese opposition leaders charged that the deployment of some 500 French soldiers to Gabon last month to protect French citizens and oil installations actually served to prop up the Bongo government.
