BAMAKO, Mali
Three West African countries run by military juntas will be launching a new biometric passport “in the coming days” as part of their withdrawal from the wider regional bloc Ecowas.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger,
whose military leaders took over power in series of coups between 2020 and
2023, announced their plan to leave the bloc in January.
Following the coups, West
African countries sanctioned the juntas, aiming to push them to quickly restore
civilian rule.
But the three nations that now
form the Alliance of Sahel States have so far resisted the calls, opting to
cement their alliance.
"In the coming days, a
new biometric passport of the [alliance] will be put into circulation with the
aim of harmonising travel documents in our common area," Malian junta
leader Col Assimi Goïta said in a televised address on late on Sunday.
Col Goïta, who is the acting
president of the Sahel alliance, spoke a day before the military governments
were due to mark the first anniversary since they made a decision to create
their own alliance.
He said they were also
planning to launch a joint service that would promote a “harmonious
dissemination of information in our three states”.
Burkina Faso had earlier
revealed its decision to launch a new biometric passport without the Ecowas
logo.
It remains unclear how the new
passports will affect the travel of their nationals to other Ecowas states
where they enjoyed visa-free movement as holders of a 15-nation regional
passport.
In July, the junta chiefs said
they were “irrevocably” turning their backs on Ecowas.
They said they wanted to build
a community of sovereign peoples based on African values and "far from the
control of foreign powers”.
The latest announcement comes
as Ecowas is engaged in efforts to get the three Sahel nations to return to the
bloc.
Ecowas recently warned that
formalisation of the breakaway group posed a risk of regional disintegration
and worsened insecurity.
No comments:
Post a Comment