Tribune. Eight years. Eight long years of military operations in the Sahel without peace and security having been achieved, and with them the macabre count by the thousands of civilian and military deaths. In eight years, Operation Barkhane, which cost the lives of 55 French soldiers, has been the subject of very little public debate. No more than the whole of French foreign policy in the Sahel, which remains largely dominated by a security approach to the detriment in particular of development efforts, as the Court of Auditors underlines in a recent report.
Convinced that another approach is possible and necessary, fifty associations, NGOs, researchers, representatives of Sahelian diasporas, unions and actors of Sahelian civil societies call for preparing the post-“Barkhane” in a more inclusive manner and for open the debate to the views of an overhaul of the Sahelian policy of France.
This debate is urgent because the militarization of the Sahel – at the initiative of France in particular – has not settled anything on the security level; we are even witnessing a continuous deterioration of the situation. The “neutralizations” of some heads of armed groups that the French general staff regularly claimed no longer concealed the appalling reality: violent incidents linked to these same groups have doubled every year since 2015. The impact on the civilian populations is dramatic: nearly 2 million people have had to flee the violence in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, and 13.2 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.
This spiral of violence raises questions all the more when it is the act of the state security forces with which the French army collaborates. In Mali, in 2020, more civilians were killed by soldiers (35%) than by so-called jihadist groups (24%). The Minusma [la force de maintien de la paix de l’ONU] also concluded that the French army was responsible for the death of 19 civilians during an operation in Mali on January 3, 2021.
Terrible signal
But, by rejecting these conclusions and opposing the opening of an independent investigation, France has sent a terrible signal which is helping to normalize impunity. In a Sahelian context deeply marked by the mistrust of the populations towards the authorities and while it already too often turns a blind eye to authoritarian deviance in the region, France must be uncompromising in the face of human rights abuses and violations. Without this, it can only fuel anti-French sentiment in the region.
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