1 December 2022

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Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 21 November 2022, Mali's interim prime minister, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga,
issued a statement on social media announcing the government's decision 'to ban,
with immediate effect, all activities carried out by [French] NGOs operating in
Mali'. This announcement came a few days after the French government cut
Official Development Aid (ODA) to Mali, alleging that Mali's government is
'allied to Wagner's Russian mercenaries' (referring to the Russian private
military company, the Wagner Group). Colonel Maïga called the French claims
'fanciful allegations' and a 'subterfuge intended to deceive and manipulate
national and international public opinion for the purpose of destabilising and
isolating Mali'.

This is the latest expression of a new mood that has gripped the areas of
northern Africa where France once wielded colonial rule. The debates in these
countries - from Algeria to Burkina Faso - have brought into question France's
current military intervention in the region (a cycle that began with Côte
d'Ivoire in 2002) as well as its continued economic stranglehold of fourteen
countries in West and Central Africa through a set of monetary mechanisms
(including the use of the CFA franc as their currency, which had been under the
control of the French Treasury until December 2019). In recent years, Burkina
Faso and Mali - both governed by militaries - have ejected French troops from
their territories, while the eight countries of the West African Economic and
Monetary Union (UEMOA) and the six countries of the Economic and Monetary
Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) have made efforts to slowly unshackle their
economies from French control. For example, in 2019, UEMOA reached an agreement
with France to end the requirement that forced West African countries to keep
half of their foreign exchange reserves in the French Treasury and to remove the
French representative from the economic union's board as part of broader plans
to replace the CFA franc with a new regional currency named the eco.

French armed forces continue to have a strong presence in northern Africa,
having only partially withdrawn from the Sahel region while maintaining close
military and diplomatic links in countries such as Niger. 'There is no uranium
in France', Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the democratic socialist party La
France Insoumise, told me last year; 'we import it mainly from Niger and
Kazakhstan'. One in three lightbulbs in France is lit by uranium from Niger,
which is why French troops garrison the country's uranium-rich town of
Arlit. Does the French retreat hint towards the end of its neocolonial military
interventions and structures of accumulation in the region? The reality of the
situation is far more complex. These partial withdrawals are taking place in the
wider context of strains in the transatlantic alliance between Europe and North
America, a dynamic that requires careful assessment.

In October, I asked Abdallah El Harif of the Workers' Democratic Way Party in
Morocco about growing tensions between France and the Moroccan monarchy. This
past summer, ten countries participated in US Africa Command's African Lion 2022
military exercise, which was hosted partly in Morocco. This massive military
exercise and other such manoeuvres have sidelined France, which has openly
indicated its annoyance with this dynamic. Morocco, El Harif told me, 'has
enormously developed its military relations with the United States'.

While French troops are being evicted from the region, US and British troops
seem to be taking their place. In 2017, five West African countries created the
Accra Initiative to fight the expansion of the Islamist threat from the Sahel
region; two years later, in 2019, the initiative's anchor, Ghana, opened a US
military base in its international airport called the West Africa Logistics
Network. 'Hundreds of US soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving', Kwesi
Pratt, Jr., a leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana told me. 'It is
suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities in other West
African countries and generally across the Sahel'. A controversy is currently
unfolding in Ghana over Britain's participation in the Accra Initiative,
announced in the British parliament in November, and the deployment of British
troops in the country and region. As we indicated in dossier no. 42 (July 2021),
Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African
Unity, although the chairs are being shuffled between France, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, the militarisation of Africa continues.
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-- Cont'd at https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/malis-break-with-france-is-a-symptom-of-cracks-in-the-transatlantic-alliance/