Will Morrow
The French and German governments are expanding their nearly seven-year-old neo-colonial occupation of Mali and the resource-rich Sahel region of western Africa.
At a joint press conference on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Biarritz last month, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a new “partnership for the security and stability in the Sahel,” or P3S. The details of the partnership will be released later this year. It will reportedly incorporate more African nations into the occupation of the country, beyond the current G5 Sahel force of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.
“Faced with the extension of the terrorist phenomenon, we have decided to … increase this support,” Macron said. “All our efforts are obviously useful, but our aim is a change of scale and method.”
There are already approximately 4,000 French troops stationed in Mali, and more than 800 German soldiers operating as part of a United Nations force of over 15,000 military and police personnel.
An MQ-9 Reaper drone
Now this brutal occupation is to be expanded further. Under the cynical and fraudulent banner of the fight against terrorism and protecting the population, the intervention by German and French imperialism is aimed at subjugating the resource-rich region of West Africa, and stabilizing the puppet regime in Bamako against rising opposition among the country’s workers and oppressed masses. The Bamako regime is despised and has a documented record of carrying out summary executions and torture of its opponents.
The French military has already deployed four unarmed surveillance Reaper drones, purchased from the US military, to provide targeting for air strikes and ground operations in the Mali war. In March, the Macron administration announced that by the end of 2019, the French military will deploy armed drones into the country, the first time they will be used anywhere by France. By 2020, they are to be equipped with Hellfire missiles.
The drone attacks will be controlled from a French military base at Niamey, in neighboring Niger. In parallel, the military’s supply of drones will be increased from five units currently to 12 in 2025, and 25 in 2030. This spring, the Cognac air base in southern France will inaugurate its first squadron dedicated to drone warfare, the “Surveillance, reconnaissance and attack squad.”
In other words, the war in the Sahel is the testing ground for French imperialism to develop the methods for wars of occupation in the Middle East and Africa perfected by the CIA and the US military over the past 20 years in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia. The expansion of France’s armed drone fleet makes clear that the ruling class envisages years of uninterrupted wars on a scale eclipsing what is already taking place.
After more than six years, the war in Mali has led to the deaths of at least 6,000 people. It has caused a refugee crisis, with tens of thousands of people forced to flee their homes.
France intervened in January 2013 against a collection of separatist and Islamist forces that gained arms in the course of the NATO war in Libya in 2011 and traveled to northern Mali in 2012. Paris, Berlin and their imperialist allies and local proxies have been unable to achieve their objective of establishing control of northern Mali for the Bamako government. The occupying forces are correctly viewed in the native population as a hostile force tasked with subjugating the country. The Bamako regime they are backing is guilty of horrific crimes against the population.
A report published by Human Rights Watch in April 2018, for example, documented the deaths of at least 27 men and the torture of two others at the hands of the military during a single operation in the Mopti region of central Mali from February to March of that year. It cited “multiple accounts of mass arrests followed by the discovery of common graves.”
The killings targeted the Muslim ethnic Peuhl community. The investigators interviewed relatives in Sokolo who said that the army arrested seven Peuhl men celebrating a baptism on February 21, including the head of the village and several of his family members. Six days later, the Malian government reported that all the men had been killed during “fighting” in the region.
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