The French Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for the Armed Forces are visiting Niger and then Côte d’Ivoire at the end of the week. In a context of profound overhaul of the French military commitment in the Sahel, is France looking for its strategy in the region?
The least we can say is that the French executive has for many months been forced to sail on sight. Confronted, in spite of himself, with the political crises in the allied Sahelian countries which are pushing him today in the case of Mali to operate a forced march, shaking up all the calendars and forecasts of the Elysée or the general staff .
In this context, the two ministers, who are symbolically making their first visit to Africa since their appointment, are there, in the political vanguard, in order to ” consolidate a deep-rooted friendship with Niger, which has become one of the last friendly countries in the region. But also and above all to record the death of Operation Barkhane after nearly nine years of French presence ranging from the heroic glory of the saviors of Mali in 2013, to the withdrawal under high tension that we know today.
In Paris, we speak more readily of “rearticulation” of the military commitment
On the edge and with their backs to the wall, new elements of language had to be invented by French strategists. In military circles, there has long been a call for a change of course in the face of an almost impossible mission that had made the ” turn of the dial with 5,000 soldiers deployed over an area of 5 million km2 in the face of a protean jihadist threat and growing hostility from public opinion. We are talking today about “rearticulation” of a paradigm shift in the Sahel, a vast program which will now take root in Niger, hoping that political agitation and anti-French sentiment will not in turn reach the streets of Niamey.
The trip of the French ministers also foreshadows future visits by the French president
Emmanuel Macron, in his capacity as Supreme Chief of the French Armed Forces and following the announcement made last February, will come – in person – to mark the end of Barkhane as it is. A trip to Benin and Cameroon is planned by the end of July while it is rumored in diplomatic circles that the French president will probably visit Niger at the end of the summer, when the army will have made public the foundations of a new strategy at the beginning of September, and when above all, the very last French legionnaires will have definitively left the base of Gao, in this northern Mali where they had been parachuted in emergency in February 2013.