Dispute with government escalates
Lambrecht suspends Bundeswehr operation in Mali
08/12/2022 11:47 am
The Bundeswehr mission in Mali is currently Germany’s largest foreign mission. Recently, however, the situation between Berlin and Bamako was very tense. After the repeated refusal of overflight rights, Defense Minister Lambrecht is now taking action.
Germany is suspending the Bundeswehr mission in West African Mali until further notice. This was announced by a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense in Berlin. The Malian government had repeatedly denied the Bundeswehr overflight rights, it said in justification. With the flight, the staff on site should be rotated.
In principle, Germany is still willing to take part in the international peace mission, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit assured. However, this only makes sense if it is supported by the government there. Federal Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht sharply criticized her Malian counterpart Sadio Camara. “Camara’s actions speak a different language than his words,” complained the SPD politician. On Thursday, she is said to have received assurances in a telephone call from Camara that troop exchange flights could be resumed.
Just at the beginning of the week, the head of the political department of the Federal Foreign Office for Africa, Latin America, the Near and Middle East, Christian Buck, traveled to Mali for negotiations. It was then said that the Malian side had signaled that the rotation of troops could be resumed in the near future.
FDP warned against withdrawal from Mali
FDP politicians had previously warned against a hasty withdrawal of troops from Mali. The Chair of the Bundestag Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, said it was “definitely not in our interest” for international terrorism to spread further in an unstable Sahel region. “The danger that terror will reach Europe again is very great – just as massive flows of refugees are feared as a result,” said Strack-Zimmermann. It is obvious that Russia is also involved here and “deliberately wants to trigger chaos in the region in order to increase the pressure on Europe,” said the FDP politician. If the UN and the West leave the country, Russia’s influence in Mali would “only continue to grow,” warned FDP foreign policy officer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff.
Mali, with a population of around 20 million, has experienced three military coups since 2012 and is politically extremely unstable. Since the most recent coup in May 2021, the country has been led by an interim military government tasked with maintaining close ties with Russia. Since then, the deployment of the UN peacekeeping force Minusma, in which the Bundeswehr is also involved, has been repeatedly impaired.