As planned, Emmanuel Macron has decreed the official end of the Barkhane operation which was intended to fight jihadists driven out of northern Mali in 2013 by the Serval intervention.
The French President presented the Strategic Review of Defence and National Security on November 9 in Toulon.
For the French Head of State, “the traditional forms in which France’s vocation to provide security in sub-Saharan Africa is expressed” must be radically reinvented.
“Our commitment alongside our partners in Africa must now be centred on a logic of support and cooperation with their armies,” said Emmanuel Macron, who believes that “this must be translated into a lighter and more integrated mechanism with them.” This is why, he assured, we will launch in the coming days a phase of exchange with our African partners, our allies and regional organizations to change the status, format and current missions of French bases in the Sahel and West Africa, in order to build with those involved an organization of common and shared instruments to support the armies of the region.
With this in mind, the French leader gave himself six months to “finalise” a strategy with his African partners centred on “interventions limited in time.” It will be above all a question of “principles defined with them,” declined “at the level of each country, according to the needs that will be expressed” by each one in terms of “equipment, training, operational partnerships, long-term support and strategic intimacy.”
Macron is convinced that “our partnership only makes sense if it is a genuine partnership that responds to the explicit needs expressed by African armies,” and is “complementary to the economic, political and administrative partnerships in these countries.”
From 5,000, the French military presence has been reduced to 3,000 soldiers deployed in Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad.
France’s decision to suspend the current form of deployment of its armed forces in West Africa comes against the backdrop of deteriorating diplomatic relations with Mali and increased cooperation between that country and Russia. But also, of a supposed collaboration of the controversial Russian military company, Wagner, with the decision-makers in Bamako.
The junta, which has been in power since May 2021 after a coup against the transitional president it installed nine months earlier, denies the presence of Russian mercenaries on Malian soil and claims that they are rather “instructors” called in to fill the gap left by France, which is accused of “abandoning in mid-air.”
AC/lb/abj/APA