Emmanuel Macron brings together the African heads of state of the G5 Sahel on Monday January 13 and Tuesday January 14 in Pau. The summit, originally scheduled for December 16, was postponed after a jihadist attack at the Inates camp (Niger) that left 71 dead.
In addition to the presidents of Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Mauritania, the summit will welcome the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, the President of the Commission of the African Union, Moussa Faki, and the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
The French president will first go to the base of the 5th regiment of helicopter gunships from Pau, from which seven of the 13 French soldiers killed in operations in Mali in December came. With his African counterparts, he will lay a wreath in their memory.
Anti-French feeling
The five leaders had been invited to Pau in early December by the French president, irritated by criticism of their public opinion against the 4,500 French soldiers of the Barkhane force. By issuing this invitation, perceived as a "summons" by some Sahelian presidents, Emmanuel Macron had warned that he would put all options on the table, including that of a withdrawal or a recession of Barkhane.
Anti-French sentiment is developing in particular in Mali, where a thousand people demonstrated again on Friday in Bamako to demand the departure of French and foreign troops. Monday, Paris wants above all to obtain a joint declaration of the five countries which will emphasize that France acts at the request of its leaders, in order to "relegitimize" its presence, explains the presidency.
"We must first of all get political leaders a clear position on what they want or not," ruled on Saturday the Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly. "The meeting will be decisive, in that it will put on the table all the questions, all the grievances, all the solutions," said Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in early January.
Appeal to Europeans
In addition to its political component, the Pau summit also aims to review the military strategy against the jihadists in this area as vast as Europe and call for increased participation by international allies, especially European. Nigerian President Mahamadou Issoufou thus intends to launch "an appeal for international solidarity" so that the Sahel and France are not alone in this fight against the jihadist "scourge".
France is also in the process of setting up an operation called "Tacouba", bringing together special forces from a dozen European countries. Paris hopes that the Pau summit will convince reluctant Europeans, favorable to the fight against jihadists in the region but worried about France being criticized.
Another concern is the hesitation of the Americans, whose military support in the region is irreplaceable, explains the Élysée. Because since the attack on Inates, blood has been shed in this semi-desert Sahelian area, which since 2012 has become the field of action of several jihadist groups, some of which are affiliated with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State organization. . Last Thursday, the Nigerien army suffered one of its worst losses in a jihadist attack: 89 soldiers killed, in the Chinégodar camp, near Mali.
According to the UN, more than 4,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks in 2019 in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The number of displaced has increased tenfold, approaching one million.
With AFP
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