The scene looks like deja vu. Concert of horns, slogans “Down with France”, here and there Russian flags. On the afternoon of Friday August 11, thousands of Nigeriens gathered around the Escadrille roundabout, not far from the French military base on the eastern outskirts of Niamey, Niger’s capital. Since the July 26 coup perpetrated against President Mohamed Bazoum by General Abdourahamane Tiani, the head of the presidential guard who proclaimed himself head of state, the approximately 1,500 French soldiers deployed in Niger, mainly in within the planned air base of Niamey, are waiting for their fate to be sealed.

The message sent by the junta united within the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland (CNSP) is clear: French soldiers, present since 2013 alongside the Nigerien army to fight against jihadist movements – the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (affiliated with Al-Qaeda) and the Islamic State in the Sahel – must pack up. During an address on national television on August 3, Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane, spokesperson for the CNSP and now Minister of Youth and Sports, officially denounced the five military cooperation agreements signed with France between 1977 and 2020. A break justified by “France’s casual attitude and reaction to the internal situation prevailing in the country”.

These texts provide a legal framework for the presence and action of French forces in the Sahel stationed in Niger – the name given to the French deployment in the area since the end of Operation “Barkhane” in August 2022. “Only the legitimate authorities of Niger can denounce [them],” the Foreign Ministry fired back during a press briefing in Paris on August 4.

A “thirty day notice”

“For now, Paris’ position remains defensible,” said Julien Antouly, a researcher in the law of armed conflict. A large majority of the international community still recognizes President Mohamed Bazoum. But if the junta really takes power, the French will have to recognize the fait accompli. In this case, the presence of French forces in the Sahel based in Niger, at the expiry of the denunciation period provided for in the agreements, will be illegal. »

In Mali in May 2021 and in Burkina Faso in September 2022, the juntas in power had also exploited the hostility of their public opinion to the French military presence and denounced the cooperation agreements signed with Paris, with the aim in part of welding around their power a youth sensitive to pan-Africanist and sovereignist ideas. This was followed by the departure of the last French soldier from Mali in mid-August 2022 and elements of the Saber task force – the name of the French special forces based in the Sahel – from Burkina Faso in February 2023. by the Malian and Burkinabé military authorities had been redeployed to Niger.

The distrust expressed by the Niamey junta, if it is not surprising, cannot be ignored by the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The clauses governing military cooperation are confidential, but the CNSP spokesperson mentioned, during the speech on August 3, a “thirty-day notice of [withdrawal]” for the two most important agreements, which concern the “legal regime of the intervention of French soldiers in Niger” and “the stationing and activities of the French joint detachment” in the country. In other words: the putschists are asking French forces to have left the country by the beginning of September. A request “impossible” to satisfy, according to specialists interviewed by Le Monde.

“We would need at least three months to transport the containers, pack the equipment, and get it out of the country with obviously all the soldiers,” said an official French source. In 2022, it took the army six months to evacuate the approximately one thousand vehicles and three thousand containers used to store its equipment and house its soldiers in Mali – more than four thousand more had already been released during the winter of 2021-2022. . A logistics operation of an extraordinary scale, which had required the mobilization of the means of the army but also those of civil companies, such as the ships of the Compagnie maritime nantaise, the trucks of Bolloré Logistics or the wide-body Antonov planes of Ruslan Salis.

“Much less time”

“The situation of the French military forces in Niger is even more complex than that of the men who were in Burkina and Mali, because Paris still has much less time to organize the departure of many soldiers and heavy equipment”, summarizes a Western diplomat in the Sahel. The planned Niamey air base has been equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. Several Mirage 2000D fighter planes and attack helicopters (Tiger) or maneuver helicopters (Caiman) are deployed there, not to mention dozens of armored vehicles used to support anti-terrorist operations carried out with the Nigerien armed forces and MQ-9 Reaper drones, the very first to be armed with bombs.

The withdrawal, if it were to take place, looks all the more perilous as the junta risks giving in to one-upmanship. “They will play with us, like a cat with its mouse, until the end”, slips an official French source. It’s already the case. Thursday, August 10, the CNSP recalled, in the middle of the night on national television, that “the period granted to the French army to leave Nigerien territory in accordance with these agreements [was] running”.

Paris was also accused of “seeking to land in Arlit without a pre-established flight plan, once again cutting off all means of communication and monitoring”, proof according to the putschists of the “hidden agenda” of the French military in Niger. Paris affirms, letter in support, that these flights were approved by the Nigerien military.

Several air rotations have indeed taken place in recent days from N’Djamena, the Chadian capital, to repatriate a small detachment of French soldiers who were in the outpost of Aguelal, about fifty kilometers east of Arlit, in the Aïr massif, near the uranium mines operated by Orano (ex-Areva). “There are no more French people present on the spot and therefore no more operational interest in keeping men there”, explains to Le Monde a French military source, specifying that this was not a question of a withdrawal. but of a “rearticulation of the device”.

On Wednesday, the CNSP had already accused an A400M that had come to pick up French soldiers who were to be evacuated from Aguelal of having violated Niger’s airspace, which was closed on August 6, and “liberated terrorists”. Paris had again refuted this accusation. Friday evening, August 11, the general staff specified that all the French soldiers stationed in Aguelal had been repatriated to N’Djamena.