The EU was yesterday set to double its funding for a multinational military operation in West Africa’s Sahel region to counter Muslim militant insurgencies as part of a broader effort to fight militants and people traffickers, EU diplomats said.
At a donor conference of about 50 countries including the US, Japan and Norway, military power France hopes to win enough backing to allow a regional force first proposed four years ago to be fully operational later this year.
“There is a direct European interest in restoring stability to the region,” a senior EU diplomat said. “There is a general awareness now that the future of the European Union is also the future of Africa.”
Fears that violence in the arid zone could fuel already high levels of migration towards Europe and become a springboard for attacks on the West have made military and development aid there a priority for European nations and Washington.
The G5 Sahel force, made up of troops from Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, needs more than 400 million euros (US$493 million) to be able to meet the demands of its Western backers, up from the 250 million euros it has now.
France, which has more than 4,000 troops in the region, hoped to reach at least 300 million yesterday, as the EU pledged another 50 million euros to take its contribution to 100 million for the force that has struggled to meet expectations while militants have scored military victories in West Africa.
So far, the US has pledged 60 million euros to support it. Another 100 million euros has been pledged by Saudi Arabia, 30 million by the United Arab Emirates and 40 million on a bilateral basis by EU member states, separate from the EU’s joint effort.
Separately, France is set to pledge 1.2 billion euros to fund development in the region over the next five years, a 40 percent increase over current levels, an EU diplomat said.
The deaths of two French soldiers this week in Mali and four US soldiers in October in Niger, where most Americans did not know the US had forces, has highlighted the security threat in the vast scrublands spanning from Mauritania to Chad.
French President Emmanuel Macron was to call for more to be done to support a separate EU train-and-advise mission in Mali and is seeking about 50 more EU troops after Belgian soldiers ended their tour in the mission, a second EU diplomat said.
France has been frustrated that it is the only EU member with combat troops on the ground, although others have contributed trainers.
By training African forces, Paris sees an eventual exit strategy for what is its biggest foreign deployment, diplomats said.
“There’s a lack of EU training troops that we must fill,” an EU diplomat said.
Macron will also call to redouble efforts to broker peace through talks with Tuareg rebels in the desert north.
Tuaregs and Muslim militants took over northern Mali in 2012, before French forces pushed them back in 2013 in an intervention that alerted Washington to the growing threat in the region.
The G5 Sahel operation, whose command base is in central Mali, is set to swell to 5,000 men from seven battalions and will also engage in humanitarian and development work.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that training soldiers was not the only strategy and called for greater efforts to relieve the roots of the conflict in poverty, poor governance and climate hazards.
“When you add more weapons, you add more suffering,” ICRC deputy head of operations for Africa Patrick Youssef said. “That needs to be accompanied with real measures to alleviate the suffering that is the main reason why this war was created.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS