'End of an era' as France pulls out of Mali. Was the mission a failure?
France was welcomed as a saviour in Mali in January 2013 after it sent in troops to fight jihadism in the north of the country. Nine years on, the insurgency has grown and many Malians are applauding France's departure, suggesting it failed in its mission.
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In January 2013 Mali turned to its former colonial ruler for help in facing an armed rebellion which had emerged out of the war in Libya and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
Jihadist groups – notably Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam al-Muslimin (JNIM) – had taken control of the north and threatened to overrun the whole country.
Then-president François Hollande launched Operation Serval: 3,500 French troops and 1,900 from mainly Chad and Niger swiftly put down the 10-month insurgency, taking back control of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal airport.
"We have won the war," Hollande announced on 2 February as crowds of grateful Malians hailed him a "hero" and "saint".
Interim president Dioncounda Traoré thanked him warmly, not least "in the name of women freed from the prison of obscurantism".
Hollande told the crowds it was the most important day of his political career, that he had taken a "serious" decision risking the lives of men and women "in the name of France". Mali and France were fighting side by side "in fraternity".
"We are fighting here so that Mali lives in peace and democracy," he said.
Rupture
Nine years on, there's little fraternity, and no peace or democracy in sight.
More than 6,000 civilians were killed in Mali last year alone, there have been two military coups in as many years and relations between the transitional government and Paris are hostile at best.
Not only has the jihadist insurgency remained, it has spread beyond the north of Mali to the centre where most people live, to Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin,Togo, and some fear it will take root in Ghana.
While Mali’s military junta did not specifically ask for the French to pull out, President Macron's government was left with little choice.
Announcing on Thursday that France would begin a coordinated withdrawal of its 2,400-strong Barkhane force along with 800 of the French-led European Takuba task force, Macron said "multiple obstructions" by Mali's ruling authorities meant that the "conditions were no longer in place to operate in the country".
"We cannot remain militarily engaged alongside de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden aims we do not share," the president said.
France is angry over the junta reneging on an agreement to hold democratic elections and the fact Mali expelled the French ambassador when he objected.
But the red line was the junta's decision to invite mercenaries from the Russian security group Wagner to help it fight the jihadist groups.
The view from Paris
France’s nine-year military intervention has proven costly on all fronts: 8 billion euros and the lives of 53 French soldiers.
President Macron has denied that France's mission has been a failure, saying it had prevented the Malian state from collapsing.
French military knew it would not be easy. In 2019 the head of the armed forces General Lecointre warned there "would never be a definitive victory" in Mali.
But Colonel Pascal Ianni, spokesperson for the current chief, told RFI on Thursday: "French armies have fulfilled their mission in Mali" allowing the country to "recover all its territorial sovereignty faced with armed terrorist groups".
There have been military victories.
Barkhane forces knocked out leading jihadist Adnane Abou Walid al-Sahraoui, head of ISGS, in the summer of 2021. Abdelmalek Droukdel, head of the rival AQIM group was also killed in an airstrike in June 2020.
Thanks to military partnerships, African armies in the region have been strengthened via the European EUTM programme and the structuring of G5 Sahel.
Barkhane forces – which include troops from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad – have helped train and boost the Malian army which has grown from less than 3,000 trained personnel in 2013 to some 45,000.
But despite the success of Serval and some notable strikes, "you can't hide the fact France is in an impasse because terrorism is still raging in the region, especially in Burkina Faso and Niger," says Emmanuel Dupuy, head of the Insitute for European Perspective and Security Studies.
"With close to 6,000 Malian civilians killed just last year, and around 3,500 Malian soldiers killed since 2015, it's clear the situation is far from resolved," he continues. "The French find themselves in a situation where people are pleased they're leaving. It's not a fiasco, but a very mitigated success."
The view from Bamako
In Mali itself, France’s military intervention is largely seen as a failure.
"We’ve lost so many lives. When you’re given a mission you do it, and if you don’t deliver, you have to look for another solution," Mamadou Konaté, a Bamako-based printer, told RFI.
France’s military presence "serves no purpose," another Bamako resident said. "We see these military bases as occupying forces, they should pack their bags and go home."
Anti-French sentiment in Mali is rife, as an increasing number no longer see French military presence as defending the country’s interests.
RFI’s correspondent Kaoura Magassa notes there’s a lot of incomprehension as people struggle to understand how such a major European power like France has been unable to overcome terrorism.
Against such a background "new alliances, such as cooperation with Russia and the Wagner (mercenaries), are brandished as a reason to hope for an improvement in the security situation", Magassa said.
The M5-RFP movement, to which Prime Minister Choguel Maiga belongs, has been pushing for French withdrawal.
"It's good news because it's what Malians want," M5 spokesperson Jeamille Bittar.told RFI adding that they were not "anti-French" but "anti-French policy."
Bittar considers French forces "are not there to resolve security issues, but for indisclosed reasons". PM Maiga has clearly stated those reasons, namely to partition the country.
State failure
But France has also paid the price of Mali's own fragililty.
Successive governments have failed to govern the north of the country, leaving a power vacuum for jihadist groups to prosper.
"The main issue is to do with governance," says Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos from France's Research Institute for Development.
"Whether it's military governance or civilian governance, it is the issue of impunity and the lack of social justice that is at the root of the socio-political problems in the region."
For Dupuy, France was also up against a gargantuan task, trying to reign in an increasingly vast jihadi network with limited means and little outside support.
"The territory is seven times larger than Europe, and there were only 5,100 soldiers deployed, three armed drones, seven fighter planes, around 20 helicopters," he says. "France was too ambitious given the means they had."
Bruno Clement-Bollée, a retired general notes how difficult it is to have a lasting impact on Islamist terrorism in months, even years, but also acknowledges France may have tried too hard to hold centre stage.
"Perhaps we weren't that skilful in the way we put ourselves so much to the fore, effacing the others and what they were doing," he told RFI.
"Public opinion can swing very easily. And while a combat force can have a positive image, when you become a presence you quickly flip into an occupying force and that can have negative conotations, as we see."
End of an era
Much has changed since the glory days of Serval in 2013.
As Dupuy points out, the five presidents in power at that time are no longer on the scene: Idriss Deby Itno (Chad), Blaise Compaore and Roch Marc Christian Kaboré (Burkina Faso), Mahamadou Issoufou (Niger), Mahamadou Ould Abdel Aziz (Mauritania), Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (Mali).
"Maybe France's failure also consists in believing that political leaders with whom we made agreements would always be there," he notes.
While Macron has said he wants to break with françafrique – the system of close economic and political ties that has defined France's relationship with its former colonies since independence – it's easier said than done.
"To a certain extent what is happening in the Sahel, around Mali, shows a sort of end of reign," Dupuy explains.
"This historical approach, marked by françafrique, suggests France may have poorly evaluated the socio-economic relations and dynamics of these countries. It's as if France forgot that there aren't just presidents, there are people and they're not necessarily on the same page."
He refuses to be downbeat though. "There is still a chance to improve or at least revisit the very complicated relationship we have with the Malian authorities. It won't be, a priori, complicated forever."
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