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France in turmoil in the Sahel

An the end of eight years, France’s military intervention in five French-speaking Sahelian countries has failed to eradicate the jihadist threat. The continuation of Operation Barkhane therefore raises many doubts. The Elysee has not announced any withdrawal schedule and some ask the question very bluntly: is the former colonial power really the best placed to stabilize the area?

Mistrust of local populations

Internationally, in this case, it is often considered that France has the capacity to act in Africa because it knows the terrain well and could therefore better meet the expectations of its allies within the European Union and the G5. Sahel, the “Group of Five” formed by Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. The problem is that its strengths are also weaknesses.

On the tactical level, first of all, France has effectively maintained almost uninterrupted military cooperation in Chad and Niger since the period of independence. But relations were much more erratic with the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, or even with Mali and Burkina Faso, which were close to Moscow and Tripoli during the Cold War. It is in fact the “global war against terrorism” which led the French army to renew contacts and to rebuild relations of partnership in these three countries.

The status of former colonial power also feeds many lawsuits in the Sahel. Always suspected of making and breaking governments in the region, France is not seen as neutral. On the contrary, it is regularly accused of seeking to promote a hidden agenda, for example to get its hands on more or less imaginary natural resources.

Historically marked by a strong anti-imperialist tradition, Mali and Burkina Faso show it well. The opinions expressed on social networks and by some of their leaders indeed suggest that France would support jihadist groups in order to destabilize sovereign states and take advantage of their weakness to recolonize the Sahel. In Mali, in particular, the population does not hide its distrust of the Barkhane force. On the other hand, she has a very good opinion of her army. According to recent surveys of 1,200 adults, more than four in five Malians trust their soldiers to defend the country.

Such a result seems rather surprising because the soldiers who recently seized power in Bamako proved incapable of stemming the jihadist threat in the north. In addition, they became known above all for their atrocities and through the putsch which deeply destabilized the region in 2012 and then 2020. In reality, the capital of sympathy enjoyed by the Malian army reflects above all the unpopularity of the previous regime and the exacerbated nationalism of Sahelians deeply humiliated at having to rely on the former colonial power to ensure their security, more than half a century after independence – unless it is rather to see the fear of displeasing the authorities , knowing that a third of those polled believed that the investigators were sent by the government.

Old disputes

In Mali, it is true that the suspicion towards France also has its roots in older disputes linked to the expulsion of clandestine migrants and a supposed support for Tuareg rebels in the North.

Two years before his departure in 1960, the colonizer had in fact tried, in vain, to create a sort of buffer state in the form of an “Organization common to the regions of the Sahara” which would have removed the northern areas of French Sudan and the oil wells of southern Algeria under the influence, respectively, of Bamako and the FLN separatists. The Malians have not forgotten it and, since then, Paris has often been suspected of secretly supporting the Tuareg separatists in order to modify a border which seemed all the more artificial because it had been drawn with a line.

What is more, when the jihadists from Algeria rose to power in northern Mali, the French secret services effectively armed “secular” independence movements to fight terrorist groups. They thus reproduced the mistakes made at the same time in Libya, where Paris supported the uprising against Gaddafi’s dictatorship by delivering shipments of arms which, for some of them, are deemed to have failed in the hands of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in June 2011. In northern Mali, Azawad’s proclamation of independence in May 2012 certainly respected the line of borders inherited from colonization, no doubt to spare the susceptibilities of the international community. But it also allowed the jihadists to seize power in Gao and Timbuktu, a situation which was ultimately to lead to the landing of French troops in January 2013.

The sequence of events then revealed the full extent of possible disagreements on the strategic priorities of military action. For Bamako, the Tuareg separatists were the main enemy to be defeated; for Paris, on the other hand, it was primarily the jihadists from Algeria. Until 2020, more precisely, the French army mainly targeted AQIM. At the same time, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger were more concerned with the rise of the Islamic State in the so-called “three borders” area.

Of course, allies often fail to agree on the priorities of targets to be eliminated and on lists of groups designated as terrorists. But, in practice, the G5 Sahel struggles to be operational and its dysfunctions directly question France’s leadership and coordination role. The contrast is particularly stark with the other counterterrorism coalition in the region, the Joint Multinational Force, which operates almost without external support and which brings together Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad to fight Boko Haram.

What role for France in the search for a political solution?

On closer inspection, the failures in the fight against jihadist groups in the Sahel highlight the limits of military cooperation that decision-makers appreciate in the number of hours provided instead of evaluating them in terms of combat performance and respect. humanitarian law. The bottom of the problem is however there. Undisciplined and highly corrupt, the African armies in the region fuel conflicts with their incessant rackets and massive violations of human rights. In combat zones, in particular, they have lost the confidence of many civilians, whom they are unable to protect. As a result, their atrocities have also legitimized jihadists who now present themselves as heralds of resistance in the face of ungodly troops in the service of Western imperialism.

Thus, there is little chance of winning the “war on terror” if the security forces continue to commit abuses with impunity. The solution to the Sahel crisis is first and foremost political and requires a profound reform of the States of the region, among other things to meet the demands of justice of the population. It is not obvious that France can play a decisive role in this regard, knowing that it would immediately be accused of neocolonialism if it dared to publicly criticize the mistakes of its African allies in the Sahel .


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