Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade announced his country was taking back military bases held by former colonial power France at midnight as the country marked 50 years of independence yesterday.
“I solemnly declare that from 00H00 [midnight] April 4 Senegal will take back all the [military] bases formerly held by France and intends to exert its sovereignty,” Wade said in an address to the nation on public TV.
“Regarding the time frame for the release of these bases, I have asked the prime minister and army chief of staff to begin talks with the French side,” he said.
PHOTO: EPA
Wade was speaking on Saturday on the eve of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Senegal’s independence from France, on April 4, 1960.
As Wade spoke, French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux was arriving to represent France at yesterday’s ceremonies, which were to include a military parade in which French soldiers were to take part.
“This year will be different from the others,” Wade said at the start of his speech.
Following independence, Senegal had agreed to let its former colonial masters France keep military bases there, he said.
“Over the years, this situation has appeared more and more incongruous and has often been felt by our populations, particularly young people, civil servants and the army, as an incomplete independence,” he said.
In Paris, a French defense ministry spokesman said talks between the two countries were ongoing on future cooperation and the maintenance of a smaller French force on Senegalese territory.
On Friday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy raised the question of their military presence in Senegal in a message to Wade, in which he said France wanted to maintain political and military cooperation.
He is not attending the ceremonies in Senegal marking the 50th anniversary of independence.
France and its former colony Senegal have been bound by a defense agreement since 1974, and 1,200 French soldiers are currently “prepositioned” in Dakar at one of three permanent French bases in Africa.
On Feb. 19 Wade’s spokesman Mamadou Bamba Ndiaye said “the French military bases will leave Dakar in virtue of an agreement signed by both parties” ahead of the independence celebrations.
The French defense minister confirmed the same day that Paris intended to close its military bases in Senegal but intended to preserve a “center of military cooperation with a regional purpose.”
At the end of February Sarkozy announced that only 300 soldiers, 900 fewer than there are today, would stay in Dakar.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement