- Vijay Prashad: Mali's Break with France Is a Symptom of Cracks in the Transatlantic Alliance Archived Message
Posted by sashimi
on December 2, 2022, 12:58 pm
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1 December 2022 (quote) 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 French armed forces continue to have a strong presence in northern Africa, having only partially withdrawn from the Sahel region while maintaining close military and diplomatic links in countries such as Niger.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. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/malis-break-with-france-is-a-symptom-of-cracks-in-the-transatlantic-alliance/ |
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