By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Leaders of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), agreed on Dec. 4, during a summit in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, to establish a regional peacekeeping force to help restore constitutional order in a region that has seen several coups over the last few years. Part of the reason may be to limit increasing Russian involvement in this part of Africa.
Last June ECOWAS had already begun deploying a stabilisation force to Guinea-Bissau after the country was thrown into turmoil when President Umaro Sissoco Embalo escaped a coup attempt in February. The Guinea-Bissau Stabilisation Support Mission comprised troops from Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso have been hit by military coups in the last two years and were suspended from the decision-making bodies of ECOWAS. As well, many countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and southwards to the Gulf of Guinea, also have seen a wave of jihadism, which they have had difficulties controlling.
The trend of coups that began in 2020 in the region once infamously known as “the coup belt” continued in 2022. In September, soldiers overthrew Burkina Faso’s military government. Captain Ibrahim Traore led a coup to become Burkina Faso’s new leader, deposing Paul Henri-Damiba, who had come to power eight months earlier through his own coup.
In Mali, where a coup was thwarted, the military government which came to power through an August 2020 coup blamed an unnamed Western nation, widely though to be France. There were also attempted coups in the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tomé and Principe.
Expansionist violence by armed groups linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda made Burkina Faso a centre of conflict in 2022, largely driven by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the fastest-growing violent group in the world.
According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a leading aggregator of conflict statistics, a total of 1,315 events of organised political violence were recorded in Burkina Faso in 2021.
The increased wave of violence led to at least 2,354 fatalities. “The level of militancy is not comparable to any of the neighbouring countries,” reported Heni Nsaibia, senior researcher at ACLED.
The political situation in Mali also was a cause of the escalation of violence in Burkina Faso. “Malian forces significantly reduced their operations because the military has focused on staying in power rather than countering militants,” according to Fahiraman Rodrigue Kone, senior Sahel researcher at the Institute for Security Studies based in Pretoria, South Africa. So what started as a rebellion in neighbouring Mali by marginalized Tuaregs a decade ago has now set the entire Sahel region ablaze.
Experts maintain Burkina Faso has also become the epicentre of the conflict because armed groups are seeking to control the country’s gold mines and regional economic trade routes connecting other landlocked Sahel countries to the West African coast.
Benin and Togo, on the Gulf of Guinea witnessed a number of attacks from armed groups, heightening the fears about violence spilling over from the Sahel into coastal West Africa.
Anti-French sentiments over the perceived ineffectiveness of French troops to curtail the activities of armed groups in Mali created a vacuum being filled by Russian mercenaries, who are more ruthless. The French troops have since left to set up in Niger as their new Sahel base.
In recent years, Russia has made crucial inroads into Africa, renewing Cold War-era relationships. In March, only 28 of Africa’s 54 countries voted at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the same slim majority that subsequently voted in October to condemn Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
The Wagner Group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, began operating in Mali at the end of 2021. Their presence in Mali and Burkina Faso has been seen as proof of the West losing its near monopoly of influence in Africa.
Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo, who alleged that Burkina Faso is paying the Russian mercenaries with mining rights, has warned that violence could escalate. Reports also suggest that they have engaged in activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.
In the Central African Republic, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has welcomed the Russians as a more effective presence in keeping a fragile peace than the United Nations peacekeepers who have been stationed there since 2014.
A nation of chronic coups and rebellions, it had been grappling with conflict for years, but lurched into full-scale war in 2012, with fighting between the mostly Christian anti-Balaka militia and the mainly Muslim Séléka rebel coalition that has killed thousands.
When Touadéra was elected in 2016, he had effective control over only about 20 per cent of the country, so he turned to Russia in a bid to re-establish control over rebel-held areas. Now, though, the Wagner mercenaries have established control.
“Today, we have 5,000 Russians in the country,” Pascal Bida Koyagbele, the minister for strategic investment, said in an interview published in the New York Times Dec. 24. “Thanks to them we have retaken control of 97 per cent of our territory.”
But one Western ambassador called the Central African Republic’s status today as one of being a “vassal state” of the Kremlin.
No comments:
Post a Comment