To not miss any African news, subscribe to the newsletter of “World Africa” from this link. Every Saturday at 6 a.m., find a week of news and debates covered by the editorial staff of the “World Africa”.
Russian flags waved while those of France blaze in opposition demonstrations in Chad. A junta in power in Mali which, with some popular support, is breaking all bridges with Paris to get closer to Moscow. Social networks that only seem to buzz with one music. Has France already lost the battle of public opinion in the Sahel against Russia?
The objectives and sustainability of Russia’s reinvestment in Africa are still uncertain, but its strategy is now better known. Although its economic activity is limited to a few mining operations, Moscow has been able to establish itself thanks to an unparalleled security offer: a combination of official defense agreements and unofficial links with the Wagner Group, a nebula close to the Kremlin, supplying mercenaries like in Mali, the Central African Republic or Libya, and experts in “informational warfare”. With obvious success so far.
Also listen Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, Vladimir Putin’s “phantom army”
The recent story of the true-false mass grave of Gossi, in central Mali, is, in this respect, a textbook case. At the end of April, the general staff of the French armies unveiled, for the first time, a video filmed by one of its drones. There appear a dozen men in uniform, non-French, burying bodies in a mass grave. Two days earlier, the French soldiers had transferred their base to the Malian armed forces (FAMa) as part of their withdrawal from the country. The dissemination of these images was intended to defuse an elaborate intoxication operation, according to Paris, by Wagner, the new Russian ally of Bamako, and intended to accuse the French of being responsible for this crime.
“VRP of the Russians”
Paris thought to take the other side quickly and win a battle in what the Chief of the Defense Staff, General Thierry Burkhard, calls the “war of perceptions”, but the argument came back to him like a boomerang, sent back to social networks by Malian activists. In particular one of the noisiest of them, Adama Diarra, known as “Ben le Cerveau”. On his Facebook page dated April 26, this founder of the pan-Africanist Yéréwolo movement standing on the ramparts saw in these images the proof that “”Barkhane” voluntarily spied on the Gossi camp to stick the responsibility for the mass grave on the FAMa”. In the process, he demanded the departure of all “foreign occupying forces”.
You have 70.6% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.