France is a State Sponsor of Terror, AES Countries Declare

“Terrorism is being used” by imperialist forces “to pillage African resources,” said Burkina Faso’s Prime Minister Rimtalba Ouédraogo in his address at the 80th UN General Assembly (UNGA). “A case in point is France,” whose troops Burkina Faso expelled in early 2023.

Mali, which had also expelled French troops the year before, had sought a meeting of the UN Security Council in 2022, “so that my country could provide irrefutable proof of France’s support for terrorist activities,” recalled its Prime Minister Abdoulaye Maïga in his address. “So far, this request has not been followed up on,” while France continues its “sabotage”.

Lamine Mahaman, the prime minister of Niger, also pointed out that since the expulsion of French troops in 2023, “the government of France has established a subversive underhanded plan to destabilize my country” by “training, financing, and equipping terrorists”.

Spawning terrorist groups across the Sahel by destroying Libya with its NATO allies in 2011, France militarized the region by deploying thousands of troops, ostensibly to combat the threat of terror attacks, which only grew alongside its military deployment.

As states began to lose control over vast swathes of their territories, the troops deployed in these countries were increasingly seen to be guarding only France’s neocolonial interests, under the cover of fighting violent extremism.

A wave of protests against France’s continued domination of its former colonies swept away the regimes it had propped up in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in coups with mass support between 2020 and 2023. The popular military governments, which replaced them with the support of the pro-sovereignty protest movement, expelled the French troops. Having marched out of Mali and Burkina Faso, France refused and threatened war when Niger ordered its troops out in August 2023.

Mali and Burkina Faso came to Niger’s defense, signing a security pact which evolved into the AES, which is also a political and economic alliance. As a bloc, the three countries quit the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a French neocolonial institution through which it exerts power over its former colonies in the region.

“The AES is not a retreat, it is not a way of turning inwards,” clarified Ouédraogo. “It is us asserting that we have the right to determine what happens to us … It is our willingness to be the agents of our history, to write ourselves the future our children will live out.”

The alliance, he said, “is in keeping with the fight of Pan African figures such as Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah. Today, a new generation of leaders is taking up the baton.”

“The war in Ukraine and terrorism in the Sahel are connected”

However, “nostalgic for the colonial era and concerned by the loss of influence in Sahel”, France is intent on destabilizing the AES by providing intelligence, “logistical support, arms and ammunition” to the very terrorist groups they claimed to be fighting, said Maïga.

While France denies this accusation of supporting terror groups, its ally Ukraine, to which it has provided billions of euros in military support, has been less than shy. Spokesperson of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Andriy Yusov, said in an interview last year that it provided “information, and not only information,” to armed groups fighting the state in Mali. Le Monde further reported that Ukrainian authorities are also training an armed group to use drones.

“The war in Ukraine and terrorism in the Sahel are connected… The Ukrainian regime has become one of the main suppliers of Kamikaze drones to terrorist groups around the world,” Maïga added. The “Western states”, he insisted, “should stop supplying arms to Ukraine, because they risk contributing to the promotion of international terrorism.”

Last August, the AES had written to the UNSC, seeking action against Ukraine. “To this day, this request has gone unanswered. This ongoing silence further discredits this institution, leaving doubts about its implicit connivance,” said Ouédraogo.

“Today, the United Nations finds itself in the same situation as the defunct League of Nations”

Far from helping resolve the security crisis in the region, the UNSC, he added, has itself become “a pernicious body” and “a troublemaker as a result of tacit, underhanded, and sometimes active complicity of some of its permanent members, who are themselves major actors and financiers of the crisis”.

He further questioned its legitimacy, asking: “How can we understand the fact that Africa, the cradle of humanity and where there are so many conflicts, and which represents more than 1 billion human beings, remains excluded from the Security Council’s decision-making bodies?”

The General Assembly, which accommodates all countries, is toothless. Time and again, the vast majority of the nations of the world in the UNGA have reiterated the Palestinian right to statehood, condemned Israel’s illegal occupation, and now the genocide. Time and again, they have passed resolutions opposing the illegal US-led sanctions on states with left governments like Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

But “what can we do if the decisions of the General Assembly, which are not binding,” are “irredeemably inaudible and ineffective,” asked Ouédraogo. “Today, the United Nations finds itself in the same situation as the defunct League of Nations,” he added, warning the institution risks slipping into irrelevance in the absence of bold reforms that reflect the aspirations of the Global South.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch