Mali: An African war France couldn't avoid
2013-01-14 12:20
Paris - Just as its leaders were defining a new
"hands-off" strategy for Africa, France has been thrust onto the
front line of one of the continent's riskiest battlefields deep in the desert
of Mali.
President Francois Hollande's backing of air strikes to halt
Islamist rebels advancing on the capital Bamako raises the threat level for
eight French hostages held by al-Qaeda allies in the Sahara and for the 30 000
French expatriates living in neighbouring, mostly Muslim states.
It could also trigger an attack on French soil. But, in what
could be the biggest foreign policy decision of his presidency, Hollande bet
that inaction bore a greater peril of producing a jihadist state like
Afghanistan under the Taliban.
"We must stop the rebels' offensive, otherwise the
whole of Mali will fall into their hands - creating a threat for Africa and
even for Europe," his foreign minister Laurent Fabius told reporters to
justify backing Mali's dilapidated national army.
For months, military planners in Paris had been working on
discreet and limited support for an African-led effort due later this year to
try and drive Islamists out of France's ex-colony.
That scenario was swiftly overtaken on Thursday as rebels
captured the central town of Konna that is a gateway towards Bamako 600km
further south.
With Mali's army impotent, Hollande ordered the first
military strikes of his career. Now France has deployed 550 troops, C-160
transport aircraft, attack helicopters and has Rafale jets on standby the
question is: where does it go from here?
Hollande has wide backing - for now
The intervention came weeks after Paris conspicuously failed
to rescue the incumbent leader in Central African Republic, another ex-colony,
leaving President Francois Bozize no alternative but to accept a power-sharing
pact with insurgents threatening to take over his mineral-rich state.
The Bozize snub was a sign that Hollande's government was
banging another nail in the coffin of "Francafrique", the decades-old
system under which Paris propped up African leaders aligned to French business
interests.
Francafrique for years helped dictate the Africa strategies
of French companies in the mining and energy sectors such as the oil giant Elf
Aquitaine that became Total SA in 2003. Total's chief executive was quoted last
year as saying he believed Francafrique was dead.
Hollande's government stresses that by entering Mali, France
is not falling back into old habits.
Its presence is legitimised by the UN resolutions mandating
foreign intervention to support Mali forces and approval by the same African
leaders irked in 2011 when France and Britain ordered Nato air strikes in Libya
to oust Muammar Gaddafi.
The United States and Britain have also signalled backing,
and even opposition French conservatives mostly say Hollande did the right
thing. Shocking reports of public amputations in rebel-held northern Mali as
tough shariah Islamic law is imposed will persuade many French voters the
intervention was just.
But events on the ground could change that quickly.
While the Mali Islamists are a rag-tag army, they managed to
recoup many of the arms that spilled out of Libya during its war and can
inflict real damage including the downing of a French helicopter on the first
day of strikes.
By going to help the Malian army, Hollande defied threats by
the rebels' allies, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim), to kill the French
hostages taken across the Sahara in past years.
As the failure of a French commando bid late last week to
free a secret agent held in Somalia since 2009 shows, it will be very hard for
him now to guarantee their safety.
"With this [Mali] intervention, the French president
has shown he did not want to be taken hostage himself by the issue of the
French hostages held by Aqim. That is an act of political courage," said
Mathieu Pellerin, head of the Paris-based Centre of Strategic Intelligence on
the African Continent (CISCA).
Hollande said he believed the secret agent had been killed
during the abortive raid, an assertion which the Somalian al Shabaab insurgents
deny.
Reprisals risk
With some of the rebel Malian fighters living side by side
with their families, the further risk is of collateral damage that would drain
domestic and foreign support for the action.
"If we jump in then we could have horrific images of
children, women killed," said one French diplomatic source speaking before
last week's events, noting how civilian deaths caused by Nato operations in
Afghanistan damaged public support for the Western mission to dislodge Taliban
Islamists there.
Fears will also grow of reprisals on the large expatriate
French communities in neighbouring Muslim countries such as Burkina Faso, Niger
and Senegal.
"There are consequences, not only for French hostages,
but also for all French citizens wherever they find themselves in the Muslim
world," Sanda Ould Boumama, of the Malian insurgent group Ansar Dine,
warned on Saturday.
But the real political game-changer for Hollande is the
threat of an attack on French soil.
France is no stranger to such strikes, with eight killed
during a wave of bombings of the Paris Metro in 1995 by Algeria's Armed Islamic
Group (GIA), a guerrilla Islamist movement from which Aqim traces some of its
lineage.
Home to Europe's largest Muslim population of some five
million, France is acutely aware of the risk of radicalisation after an al-Qaeda-inspired
gunman last March went on a killing spree in the southern city of Toulouse, killing
seven.
Underlining that he takes the threat of attack seriously,
Hollande on Saturday announced he was stepping up security measures on French
transport and in public places.
Baptism of fire
For now, France said its aim is not to begin an operation to
take Mali's north back out of rebel hands. Hollande has stressed its exclusive
goal is to prepare for a subsequent intervention to be led not by Paris but by
the West African Ecowas bloc.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Sunday
France was pursuing strikes on rebel targets and residents said its aircraft
had even bombed the northern rebel stronghold Gao.
But Mark Schroeder, Africa-watcher for US-based risk and
security consultancy Stratfor, expected French troops largely to focus on
holding the line in central Mali in coming weeks and wait for the operation to
take on a more international feel.
"Behind that line, the European Union military training
mission will come in and African forces will start to arrive," he said of
troops from neighbours including Niger due to arrive from Monday to build a
total force around 3 300 strong.
While that could help France wind down its exposure, CISCA's
Pellerin said that would still depend crucially on the African-led coalition
gaining the necessary size and strength to lead the fight to push back the
rebels - not a given at this stage.
A rare dissenting voice, former foreign minister Dominique
de Villepin - who led world opposition to the US-led Iraq war in 2003 - warned
France could get sucked into a conflict where military victory was hollow
without political conciliation.
"It is time to break with a decade of lost wars,"
he said of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya which he argued merely created
the grounds for future conflicts.
