By Tom Wheeldon
The death
of 13 French soldiers in a helicopter accident in Mali on November 25 has
underlined the challenges France's armed forces face in the Sahel, amid
intensifying insurgent attacks and doubts about the effectiveness of its
military allies in this vast region to the south of the Sahara Desert.
The
largest single loss of life for the country’s military forces since 1983,
Monday’s helicopter crash increased France’s death
toll in its Sahel campaign to 41.
France
started its military operations there in 2013, after Mali asked
it to help regain territory seized by Islamist extremists who had hijacked a
Touareg rebellion in the country’s northern desert regions the previous year.
The
French military succeeded in this initial task – but the jihadist insurgency
has since spread throughout Mali and across the border to Niger and Burkina
Faso. Despite the presence of 4,500 French troops throughout the Sahel,
escalating attacks have seen more than 170 Malian and Burkinabé troops killed
since September.
In a
statement on Tuesday, French Defence Minister Florence Parly said that now is
“not the time for questioning the merit” of Paris’ military engagement in the Sahel.
But some
analysts have suggested that she doth protest too much. “Since the beginning of
the French military involvement in the region, everything got worse,” Jeremy
Keenan, a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in
London, told Agence France-Presse. “There is no progress.”
The
hard-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) expressed a similar view on Tuesday:
the country needs “a serious and rational discussion to find a way out of a
war, the meaning of which is lost on a large number of our fellow citizens as
well as Malians themselves”, LFI MPs asserted in a public statement.
The
following day, none other than France’s most senior military officer added fuel
to this argument. General François Lecointre, the armed forces’ chief of staff,
declared on France Inter radio that “we will never achieve a definitive
victory” in the Sahel – although he insisted that France’s military operations
there are “useful, good and necessary”.
France’s
military presence in the region has by no means been unilateral; it has been
working with allies on the ground since 2013. That year, the United Nations
formed the MINUSMA peacekeeping force in Mali – one of the largest UN
deployments.
However,
it is also the most dangerous: more than 200 Blue Helmets have been killed in
Mali. MINUSMA troops “are shot like hares”, François-Xavier Freland, former
FRANCE 24 Mali correspondent and author of Mali, au-delà du jihad (Mali,
Beyond Jihad), put it last year.
In an
attempt to build a more long-term security solution in the region, the G5 Sahel
bloc was transformed into a military alliance at Paris’ behest in 2017,
bringing together forces from Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.
Yet, in
light of its constituent armies’ mounting death tolls amid mushrooming
insurgent attacks, it is clear that the G5 Sahel is “not working”, said Thierry
Hommel, director of the Forum for West Africa’s Future and a Sahel specialist
at Sciences Po University in Paris. “It’s a coalition of armies that nobody
trusts: they’re seen as inefficient and corrupt and benefitting from impunity,
which is to say that they can kill anybody they like and get away with it.”
“Military
figures tend to say the Chadian military is quite brave – the others tend to
run away when terrorists come,” Hommel continued. “But often even the Chadian
fighters don’t have guns because of corruption in procurement.”
Indeed,
the Sahel states score poorly in the most recent Transparency International Corruption Perception
Index: for example, Chad is ranked at 165 out of 180, and Mali at
140.
Corruption
is just one form of bad governance that engenders insurgent activity, said
Emmanuel Dupuy, head of the IPSE think-tank in Paris and an expert on the
Sahel. Countries in the region are “not paying attention to their peripheries,
and this is exactly where terrorist groups have found fertile ground – in
places where the state is incapable of performing its basic missions in terms
of providing public services, justice and simply administering the area, you
see terror groups replacing the state”, he pointed out.
In any
case, the vast, sparsely populated nature of the Sahel means that “large spaces
of territory there are difficult to control under the best of circumstances”,
added Andrew Lebovich, a specialist in the region at Columbia University and
the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Given
that insurgent groups are benefitting from such “fertile ground” just south of
the Sahara Desert, Paris’ rationale for its military role in the Sahel is that
stabilising the region will make Europe safer by preventing jihadist groups
from enjoying a safe haven in the continent’s near abroad. Macron reiterated
this idea at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, underlining that French military
engagement in the Sahel is aimed at “enhancing our own security”.
Hommel
argued that this thesis should be challenged: “None of the terror attacks on
European soil have been committed by people coming from the Sahel. It’s good
for insurgent groups there to say that they’re affiliated to people like
al-Qaeda but they seem to be acting on a local level – and if they are local,
they are not a threat to our security.”
Nevertheless,
France has been keen to persuade other EU countries to send troops to fight in
the Sahel. Thus far, only Estonia has signed up. The Baltic state intends to
send 50 troops. - France 24
No comments:
Post a Comment