Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba has chosen Mali for his first trip outside Burkina Faso.
The head of the Burkinabe junta met four days ago in Bamako, his Malian counterpart, Colonel Assimi Goita. This trip was made the day after the death of several dozen civilians in northern Burkina Faso after the attack on their convoy and four months after the departure of Mali from the G5 Sahel, a military alliance that fights against terrorist groups in the region since its creation in 2014.
The stakes were therefore high for Ouagadougou, which shares a border of more than a thousand kilometres with Bamako, an area affected by numerous deadly attacks by jihadist groups. After sending a delegation of his closest collaborators in April to discuss military cooperation, “it was appropriate to (come this time) to meet the authorities” Malian, said Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.
With his Malian counterpart, the Burkinabe transitional president said he discussed ways to strengthen operational cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries against terrorist groups. “We intend, in the coming days, to better examine and strengthen the military partnership that exists between us to better address the security challenges facing our people,” said the soldier, who came to power last January after the fall of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.
In addition, the return of Mali to the G5 Sahel was not mentioned publicly even if Burkina Faso and Niger had invited Bamako to “return to assume its responsibilities” in the framework of this sub-regional cooperation to fight against jihadism. “We reviewed the sub-regional situation and we thought that Mali is today the great absentee in the field of defence cooperation. (…) We need to work so that Mali can come back and assume its responsibilities and play its role,” Niger’s Defence Minister Alkassoum Indattou pleaded after an audience with Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba in Ouagadougou last August.
Three months earlier, Mali had invoked a “loss of autonomy” and “instrumentalisation” within the G5 Sahel to act on its withdrawal from this regional military organisation formed with Mauritania, Chad, Burkina and Niger.
However, observers believe that Ouagadougou will do everything to forge a strong military alliance with Bamako if negotiations for its return to the G5 Sahel fail. The challenge is to unite their respective forces to fight the terrorist groups that regularly cross the Malian border into Burkina Faso.
“For President Damiba, there is now a need to create a bilateral framework to make counter-terrorism operations more effective. Bamako and Ouagadougou must optimise their anti-terrorist actions and fight against a phenomenon that affects them both,” Windata Zongo, a member of the African Centre for Analysis and Diplomatic and Strategic Research, told TV5.
ODL/cgd/lb/abj/APA