THE BROOKS BLACKBOARD: Race, Politics & Social Change : Sahel

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Tuesday, September 26, 2023

French decision to withdraw troops from Niger is a testimony “to the determination and will of the Nigerien people”

After withdrawing from Mali and Burkina Faso, and now on the way out from Niger, Chad is the last of the now practically defunct G5 Sahel country to host a permanent base of France.

September 25, 2023 by Pavan Kulkarni

French president Emmanuel Macron said on September 24 that the country will withdraw its troops from Niger. The announcement came after the country had refused to do so in a nearly two-months-long stand-off with Niger’s military government which ordered the French troops to leave the country soon after taking power in a popularly welcomed coup on July 26.

The withdrawal of its 1,500 troops will take place over “the months and weeks to come” and conclude by the end of this year, Macron said on Sunday.

France also decided to withdraw its ambassador, Sylvain Itté, who had earlier been asked to stay put in the embassy even after Nigerien authorities canceled his diplomatic card and visa late last month, and ordered the police to expel him. “In the next hours, our ambassador…will return to France,” added Macron.

“This Sunday, we celebrate the new step towards the sovereignty of Niger,” its military government, the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP), said in a statement soon after. “It is a historic moment which testifies to the determination and will of the Nigerien people…Imperialist and neo-colonialist forces are no longer welcome on our national territory.”

The CNSP was formed after the coup on July 26, ousting former Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum, who had welcomed more French troops and instituted a crackdown on the domestic protest movement against the French deployment.

Amid mass-demonstrations welcoming the coup and demanding the withdrawal of French troops, CNSP terminated the military agreements that had allowed France to deploy troops in Niger. The agreements entailed a one-month notice period which ended early this month.

However, French troops had continued to stay “in a position of illegality”, the CNSP-appointed Prime Minister, Ali Mahaman, had complained earlier this month. The former colonizer had refused to withdraw its troops on the grounds that it did not recognize the authority of the CNSP, insisting that Bazoum remains Niger’s president.

Even on announcing the withdrawal, Macron said, “We will consult the putschists, because we want this (withdrawal) to be done peacefully,” but maintained that France does not recognize the CNSP and continues to regard Bazoum as the “sole legitimate authority”.

Abdoulaye Seydou, national coordinator of the anti-imperialist M62 movement who had been imprisoned under Bazoum and released post-coup, had warned France late last month that “all the villages, all the surrounding communes will descend” on its base in capital Niamey, if its troops do not to leave. By the start of this month, protests demanding troop-withdrawal had become an almost daily event outside the French base.

France, however, had remained obstinate, and even extended support to the military action threatened by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to restore Bazoum to Niger’s presidency. However, the regional bloc was beset with protests and domestic opposition to war in several of its member states.

The Senate in neighboring Nigeria, the strongest military power in the bloc, refused to support the deployment of its troops. The African Union (AU) also refused to support the French-backed military intervention by ECOWAS.

In the meantime, Niger was assured of military support by Mali and Burkina Faso, which, like Niger, were also suspended from ECOWAS and sanctioned after popular coups, following which their military governments ordered French troops to leave.

After entering into a defense pact, with an agreement that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all the three, inviting a joint military response, the three countries went on to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) on September 16.

In an open letter to the transitional presidents of the three countries, the West African Peoples’ Organization (WAPO) welcomed the formation of AES, “as the beginning of the realization of the ideals of the Founding Fathers of Pan-Africanism including Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Modibo Kéita, Patrice Lumumba, etc.”

It called for devolution of “power to the masses through defense committees” in its letter to the heads of AES, one of whose objectives is to counter the “armed groups, irregular armed forces or mercenaries”.

France accused of supporting terrorist groups in Sahel

One of the reasons Macron gave for his decision to withdraw troops was that the Nigerien authorities “no longer wanted to fight against terrorism”.

However, Mali, which has lost several dozen soldiers in the fight against Islamist insurgency over the last year, including 20 only this month, had alleged in August 2022 that France had breached airspace more than 50 times that year and dropped weapons to terrorist groups. While France rejected the allegation, Niger’s CNSP also said on September 22 that France was financing and equipping terrorist groups in Sahel.

Over the last decade, Islamist insurgencies have spread across Sahel in the aftermath of the destruction of Libya by NATO’s war, in which France was a key participant. With the stated aim of defeating these insurgencies, France started Operation Barkhane in 2014. By the time the operation ended in failure last year, violence involving Islamist Militants had nearly tripled in the Sahel.

At its peak strength, France’s Barkhane force had 5,500 troops deployed in what was called the G5 Sahel – namely Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, where it had permanent bases, and in Mauritania.

After withdrawing from Mali and Burkina Faso, and now on the way out from Niger, Chad is the last of the now practically defunct G5 Sahel countries to host a permanent base of France. While threatening military action against Niger ostensibly to restore democracy, France supports military rule in Chad. However, its future in Chad is far from secure, with a rising resentment against France and the military regime it is seen to have imposed on Chadian people.

This article originally appeared at PeoplesDispatch.org on September 25th, 2023.

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Friday, September 22, 2023

Is this the end of French neo-colonialism in Africa?

The recent formation of the Alliance of Sahel States is further proof of the consolidation of anti-French sentiment in the region. Philippe Toyo Noudjenoume, President of the West Africa Peoples’ Organization, says that this sentiment is especially strong in the Sahel region but is common throughout French-speaking Africa

September 21, 2023 by Zoe Alexandra, Vijay Prashad

In Bamako, Mali, on September 16, the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger created the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Colonel Assimi Goïta, the head of the transitional government of Mali, wrote that the Liptako-Gourma Charter which created the AES would establish “an architecture of collective defense and mutual assistance for the benefit of our populations.” The hunger for such regional cooperation goes back to the period when France ended its colonial rule. Between 1958 and 1963, Ghana and Guinea were part of the Union of African States, which was to have been the seed for wider pan-African unity. Mali was a member as well between 1961 and 1963.

But, more recently, these three countries—and others in the Sahel region such as Niger—have struggled with common problems, such as the downward sweep of radical Islamic forces unleashed by the 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) war on Libya. The anger against the French has been so intense that it has provoked at least seven coups in Africa (two in Burkina Faso, two in Mali, one in Guinea, one in Niger, and one in Gabon) and unleashed mass demonstrations from Algeria to the Congo and most recently in Benin. The depth of frustration with France is such that its troops have been ejected from the Sahel, Mali demoted French from its official language status, and France’s ambassador in Niger (Sylvain Itté) was effectively held “hostage”—as French President Emmanuel Macron said—by people deeply upset by French behavior in the region.

Philippe Toyo Noudjenoume, the President of the West Africa Peoples’ Organization, explained the basis of this cascading anti-French sentiment in the region. French colonialism, he said, “has remained in place since 1960.” France holds the revenues of its former colonies in the Banque de France in Paris. The French policy—known as Françafrique—included the presence of French military bases from Djibouti to Senegal, from Côte d’Ivoire to Gabon. “Of all the former colonial powers in Africa,” Noudjenoume told us, “it is France that has intervened militarily at least sixty times to overthrow governments, such as [that of] Modibo Keïta in Mali (1968), or assassinate patriotic leaders, such as Félix-Roland Moumié (1960) and Ernest Ouandié (1971) in Cameroon, Sylvanus Olympio in Togo in 1963, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in 1987 and others.” Between 1997 and 2002, during the presidency of Jacque Chirac, France intervened militarily 33 times on the African continent (by comparison, between 1962 and 1995, France intervened militarily 19 times in African states). France never really suspended its colonial grip or its colonial ambitions.

Breaking the camel’s back

Two events in the past decade “broke the camel’s back,” Noudjenoume said: the NATO war in Libya, led by France, in March 2011, and the French intervention to remove Koudou Gbagbo Laurent from the presidency of Côte d’Ivoire in April 2011. “For years,” he said, “these events have forced a strong anti-French sentiment, particularly among young people. It is not just in the Sahel that this feeling has developed but throughout French-speaking Africa. It is true that it is in the Sahel that it is currently expressed most openly. But throughout French-speaking Africa, this feeling is strong.”

Mass protest against the French presence is now evident across the former French colonies in Africa. These civilian protests have not been able to result in straight-forward civilian transitions of power, largely because the political apparatus in these countries had been eroded by long-standing, French-backed kleptocracies (illustrated by the Bongo family, which ruled Gabon from 1967 to 2023, and which leeched the oil wealth of Gabon for their own personal gain; when Omar Bongo died in 2009, French politician Eva Joly said that he ruled on behalf of France and not of his own citizens). Despite the French-backed repression in these countries, trade unions, peasant organizations, and left-wing parties have not been able to drive the upsurge of anti-French patriotism, though they have been able to assert themselves

France intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to try to control the forces that it had unleashed with NATO’s war in Libya two years previously. These radical Islamist forces captured half of Mali’s territory and then, in 2015, proceeded to assault Burkina Faso. France intervened but then sent the soldiers of the armies of these Sahel countries to die against the radical Islamist forces that it had backed in Libya. This created a great deal of animosity among the soldiers, Noudjenoume told us, and that is why patriotic sections of the soldiers rebelled against the governments and overthrew them.

Anti-intervention

After the coup in Niger, the West hoped to send in a proxy force—led by the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS)—but the African military leaders demurred. Across the region, people set up solidarity committees to defend the people of Niger from any attack, with the threat provoking “revolt and indignation among the populations,” Noudjenoume explained. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was even forced to back down from ECOWAS’ crusade when his country’s Congress rejected the measure and mass protests occurred against militarily intervening in the neighboring country. As ECOWAS’ ultimatums to restore the deposed Nigerien leader Mohamed Bazoum expired, it became clear that its threat was empty.

Meanwhile, not only did it appear that the people of Niger would resist any military intervention, but Burkina Faso and Mali immediately promised to defend Niger against any such intervention. The new AES is a product of this mutual solidarity.

But the AES is not merely a military or security pact. At the signing ceremony, Mali’s Defense Minister Abdoulaye Diop told journalists, “This alliance will be a combination of military and economic efforts [among]… the three countries.” It will build upon the February 2023 agreement between Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali to collaborate on a fuel and electricity exchange, to build transportation networks, to collaborate on mineral resource sales, to build a regional agricultural development project, and to increase intra-Sahel trade. Whether these countries would be able to develop an economic agenda to benefit their peoples—and therefore guarantee that France would have no means to exert its authority over the region—is to be seen.

This article originally appeared at PeoplesDispatch.org on September 21st, 2023.