” Without delay “. Sixteen months after demanding the immediate departure of the soldiers of Operation “Barkhane” from Mali, it is up to the UN and its blue helmets deployed within the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (Minusma ) that Bamako has just asked to leave the country. Friday, June 16, the head of Malian diplomacy, Abdoulaye Diop, asked, before the United Nations Security Council, the “immediate withdrawal of Minusma”. Deployed since 2013 to restore state authority and protect civilians, the UN mission “did not achieve its fundamental objective”, namely “to provide adequate responses to the security situation in Mali”, said said the minister.
While the argument is hard to dispute, the break between the junta in power in Bamako since the August 2020 coup and the United Nations is the result of a long crisis of confidence, fueled by Mali’s collaboration with the private Russian paramilitary group Wagner and the recent accusations of massacres made by the UN against the authorities in Bamako.
If the withdrawal schedule remains uncertain, this request from Bamako should pave the way for the departure of some 15,000 soldiers, police and civilians deployed under the UN flag. “Peacekeeping is based on the principle of the consent of the host country, and without this consent, operations are almost impossible,” said El-Ghassim Wane, the head of Minusma, after the meeting. Friday.
“A nearly empty shell”
The member states of the Council had until the end of June to renew or not the mandate of the mission. The Bamako decision puts an end to the debates. It did not surprise most UN diplomats, however. In New York, it had been whispered for a few days that a “coup de brilliance” was to be expected from the Malian Minister of Foreign Affairs. An exit comparable to the request for the withdrawal of French soldiers from Mali after months of tension and inflammatory statements. In August 2022, the last soldiers of Operation Barkhane left the country.
The “rationalization of the mission” – without downsizing but closing bases – recommended by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in his report on Tuesday June 13, was rejected by the Malian junta. “Neither the proposals of the Secretary General, let alone the draft resolution being negotiated by the members of this Council, provide an appropriate response to the expectations of Malians,” said Abdoulaye Diop on Friday. In a report sent to the UN in December 2022, Bamako had listed its demands on Minusma: to give priority “to the security dimension of its mandate”, to strengthen “its support for the Malian armed forces” and to opt “for offensive actions and patrols”.
Since coming to power, the junta has promised to overcome the jihadist threat. Also, the Malian soldiers see the mandate of Minusma, which is not to fight against armed terrorist groups, as “an almost empty shell”, in the words of a Western diplomat. “For the junta, the Minusma is more a source of boredom than anything else,” he sums up.
Growing distrust since the arrival of the colonels
In his speech before the Security Council, Abdoulaye Diop denounced “the instrumentalization and politicization of the human rights issue”, before accusing the Minusma of fueling “inter-community tensions, exacerbated by allegations of extreme gravity and which are highly prejudicial to peace”. In early May, the UN accused in a report Malian soldiers and “foreign military personnel”, identified by witnesses and NGOs as mercenaries of the Russian private paramilitary group Wagner, of having executed at least 500 people during an anti-terrorist operation carried out in March 2022 in the village of Moura, in the center of the country.
The junta has since continued to protest against the conclusions of this report based, according to it, on “a fictitious account”. To the point of announcing, as noted by the UN in its latest report on the situation in Mali published on June 1, its intention to open a “judicial investigation against the fact-finding mission and its accomplices for espionage , threat to the external security of the State and military conspiracy”.
The case illustrates the level of tension between Bamako and Minusma. A mistrust that has continued to grow since the colonels came to power. The latter thus expelled Olivier Salgado, the mission’s spokesperson, in July 2022, then Guillaume N’Gefa, the director of its human rights division, in March 2023. On the ground, the junta is hampering the movements of peacekeepers. “Between April 1 and May 11, the mission requested 565 flight authorizations, of which 167 were not obtained”, notes the UN in its latest report, also specifying that four of the five requests made to the authorities for investigate human rights “have been denied” since January. These obstacles had prompted several countries to initiate the withdrawal or non-renewal of their contingent, recently causing a 17% drop in the mission’s workforce.
In New York as in Bamako, many diplomats are worried about the heavy impact that the withdrawal of blue helmets from the country could have. Because, although hampered in the exercise of its mandate, the Minusma, the deadliest mission for its participants with 187 soldiers killed in ten years, has so far ensured, in the north and center of the country, a deterrent presence towards jihadist groups.
