In Djibouti, Independence Has Brought Little Change : Africa: After 17 years, nation still relies heavily on French aid. Its only exports are goats and camels.

It was a proud moment, one of the proudest this African outpost had known since being stillborn into nationhood 17 years ago. By 8 a.m., a veritable Who’s Who of Djibouti was on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony that would open the new little airport with a single departure gate.

There were French military officers in their summer whites, ambassadors and government officials, and Siad Coubeche, who owns Djibouti’s major commercial enterprise--a Coca-Cola bottling plant.

Finally, arriving 45 minutes late in his Cadillac limousine, flanked by outriders on motorcycles, was the Somali-born president himself, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, 78, Africa’s oldest leader.

“We won’t forget our friends who made this possible,” Gouled said last week in French, nodding toward three Arabs in the crowd of dignitaries.

Then he headed into the air-conditioned, marbled-floor terminal to marvel at a baggage conveyor belt and a digital message board that flashed his name. Clerks in the duty-free shop snapped to attention as he approached.

No matter that the one-jet national carrier, Air Djibouti, had gone belly up five years earlier or that only a dozen commercial flights a week--half of them Air France jumbo jets from Paris--would land here. This airport was a symbol of national identity and stood, along with a Sheraton Hotel, as one of the rare visible achievements of Djibouti’s post-colonial era.

Indeed, the former French Territory of Afars and Issas hasn’t had much to cheer about since it became the last European colony in Africa to gain independence, on a steamy June night in 1977.

Not a single head of state showed up that night to watch the French tricolor lowered for the last night over Africa; of the Djibouti males in attendance, most sat quiet and glassy-eyed, chewing qat, a narcotic weed imported from Ethiopia to which almost all men here are addicted.

A few weeks before independence, Gouled, a former camel herder with a sixth-grade education, was asked by a visiting journalist how a country that imported almost all of its food, produced nothing except Coca-Cola and ice and counted among its 320,000 citizens three university graduates and no doctors could hope to survive economically.

He replied, “We have many possibilities--salt, tourism, atomic energy, maybe a duty-free port like Hong Kong.” He took a puff on his French cigarette and paused for emphasis--”And French aid.”

No one would argue his last point. Probably no African nation today remains more dependent on its former colonial master. French aid and business account for 60% of Djibouti’s gross national product, and were it not for the presence of 10,000 French nationals and soldiers, diplomats say, this empty, Vermont-sized wasteland might simply disintegrate as a country and be left for Somalia or Ethiopia to swallow up.

Djibouti (meaning “my casserole” in the Afar language) has but three national assets: an excellent Red Sea port, which served as a backup staging area during the Persian Gulf War; a broken-down railway to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, operating at 5% capacity, and now, the airport.

Its only exports are goats and camels--which are transported on the hoof to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Its imports include almost everything it needs, from drinking water to butter, meat and matchsticks.

As if Djibouti’s journey into independence weren’t perilous enough, civil war struck the country in 1991 when the minority Afars of the north took up arms against Gouled’s Somali-speaking Issa tribe. The tiny Djibouti army fell apart and its commander in chief was suspended on corruption charges. Within weeks the Afar-based Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) controlled two-thirds of the country.

France keeps 4,000 troops and legionnaires here--its largest military presence in Africa--but refused to intervene in the fighting. Left to his own devices, Gouled built up a 15,000-man army, largely made up of Issas recruited from Somalia and Ethiopia.

By September, the Afars had been driven into the volcanic mountains of the north and across the border into Ethiopia. The war for now, at least, has sputtered to an end with the Afars the apparent losers.

Although FRUD boycotted the May, 1993, multi-party election that Gouled won handily, the government hopes to get peace talks under way with the rebels, perhaps this summer, and has announced plans to demobilize its army. In response to French urgings, Gouled has allowed an increasing degree of political debate.

France, which colonized Djibouti in 1862 as a fueling stop for its Saigon- and Madagascar-bound ships, has left an imprint on this run-down capital that is as evident today as it was a century ago; from an Air France cargo flight each Wednesday comes such an abundance of fine foods and luxury goods that a visitor might wonder if he were in Paris instead of Africa.

In Place Menelik, Djibouti’s dingy square, among cafes and bars nestled under urine-drenched arches, little stores, some with French shopkeepers, offer the latest fashions, finest jewelry and freshest vegetables from France.

In the Cafe de Paris, the recent menu included sea trout in leek sauce, endive and walnut salad, and sea bream with cucumbers and pink peppers, complemented by a wide selection of wines and cheeses.

Outside, on Rue de Paris and Rue de Marseille, children hawked postcards and chewing gum and handless beggars thrust their stumps in pedestrians’ faces.

The stifling heat of day had diminished with the dusk when a group of French legionnaires headed into the Blue Note and ordered Stella Artois beers. It could have been 1976.

Djibouti, though shabbier and dirtier, seemed largely unchanged by its journey into statehood.