Re: Africa
Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2023 2:18 pm
Mass protests against French troops intensify in Niger as the deadline for their withdrawal approaches
France refuses to withdraw its ambassador and troops from Niger, and reiterates its threat of supporting military invasion by ECOWAS, while the regional bloc itself is “determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts”
August 29, 2023 by Pavan Kulkarni
Anti-French protesters rally in support of the Niger's military government on August 28 in Niamey. Photo: Issifou Djibo / EPA / TASS
Niger’s military government reportedly cut off electricity and water supply to the French embassy in capital Niamey on Sunday, August 27, after the expiry of the 48-hours it gave the French ambassador, Sylvain Itte, to leave the country.
It has also instructed suppliers to stop providing the water, electricity and food supplies to the French military base, warning that anyone continuing to supply the base with goods and services will be treated as “enemies of the sovereign people.”
The 1,500 troops-strong military base in Niamey has become a site of frequent demonstrations, with people demanding that Niger’s former colonizer withdraw its troops. Thousands gathered outside this base on Sunday, demanding that its ambassador and troops leave the country, waving the national flag of Niger, reportedly alongside those of the BRICS countries and the DPRK.
A similar protest was also held on Friday, August 25, hours after the military government, the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Country (CNSP), ordered the French ambassador out of Niger. Protesters raised anti-French slogans, and threatened to invade the base if the troops did not leave Niger in a week.
Earlier this month, the CNSP ended Niger’s military agreements with France and ordered its troops to leave by September 2. With France refusing to withdraw on the grounds that it does not recognize the authority of the military government, protests are expected to intensify as this deadline approaches.
‘Niger doesn’t belong to France’
“Niger doesn’t belong to France. We told the French to leave, but they said ‘no’,” complained Aicha, a supporter of CNSP protesting outside the base. “As citizens we don’t want the French here. They can do whatever they want in France, but not here,” she told Al Jazeera.
The popular sentiment against the presence of French troops has manifested in several mass demonstrations, especially militant over the last two years. By cracking down on the anti-French movement and inviting into the country more French troops, ordered out of neighboring Mali by its military government, former Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum had consolidated domestic perception of him being a puppet of France.
His removal from office on July 26 in a military coup led by the then head of the presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, has won popular support, with thousands repeatedly taking to streets to rally behind the CNSP, reiterating the demand for the withdrawal of French troops.
‘The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger’
“The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger,” CNSP member Colonel Obro Amadou said in his address to a crowd of around 20,000 supporters who had gathered in Niger’s largest stadium in Niamey on Saturday, August 26. “It’s you who are going to drive them out,” he added.
Insisting that “France must respect” the choice of Nigerien people, Ramatou Boubacar, a CNSP supporter in the stadium, complained about the continued control France maintained over successive Nigerien governments even after the end of colonial rule. “For sixty years, we have never been independent [until].. the day of the coup d’etat,” she told the AFP.
French President Emmanuel Macron has however remained obstinate. “[W]e do not recognize the putschists, we support a president [Bazoum] who has not resigned”, he said in his remarks on Monday, August 28, reiterating French support for a military invasion of Niger by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), “when it decides”.
Expressing its “full support” to France and reiterating that the European Union (EU) “does not recognize” the CNSP, its spokesperson for foreign affairs, Nabila Massrali, also raised the specter of war. “The decision of the putschists to expel the French ambassador,” she said, “is a new provocation which cannot in any way help to find a diplomatic solution to the current crisis.”
‘ECOWAS is determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts’
However, the current chair of ECOWAS, Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu, said on Saturday, August 26: “We are deep in our attempts to peacefully settle the issue in Niger by leveraging on our diplomatic tools. I continue to hold ECOWAS back, despite its readiness for all options, in order to exhaust all other remedial mechanisms.”
Tinubu has toned down his initially aggressive and threatening rhetoric against Niger after facing anti-war protests and opposition domestically. On August 5, a day before the one-week deadline given by ECOWAS on July 30 to the CNSP to reinstate Bazoum was to expire, the senate of Nigeria refused to support military action.
Without the participation of Nigeria — which has Africa’s largest economy, amounting to about 67% of ECOWAS’ GDP, and the largest military in the sub-region — the bloc’s capability of undertaking a military action is drastically reduced.
This is especially the case because Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea — which are among the 15 countries in ECOWAS, but suspended and sanctioned after similar popularly-supported coups backed by the domestic anti-French movement — have extended support to Niger.
Mali and Burkina Faso, whose military governments have successfully ordered the French troops out of the country, have committed to mobilize their military in defense of Niger. Together, these four countries amount to nearly 60% of ECOWAS’ land area.
Nevertheless, the ECOWAS heads of state met again in Nigeria on August 10 and ordered their Chiefs of Defense Staffs “to immediately activate” the bloc’s stand-by force. The Chiefs of Defense Staffs of ECOWAS member states subsequently held a two-day meeting on August 17 and 18 in Ghana.
Ghana’s president is also facing domestic opposition and may be unlikely to be able to secure approval of the parliament where the main opposition party, opposed to military intervention, has the same number of seats as the ruling party.
Nevertheless, “We are ready to go any time the order is given,” Abdel-Fatau Musah, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, declared at the conclusion of this meeting, adding that an unspecified “D-day is also decided. We’ve already agreed and fine-tuned what will be required for the intervention.”
He introduced a caveat, however, that, “As we speak, we are still readying [a] mediation mission into the country, so we have not shut any door.”
A week later, on Friday, July 26, the ECOWAS said it was still “determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts.” ECOWAS commission president Omar Touray, former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Gambia told the media: “For the avoidance of doubt, let me state unequivocally that ECOWAS has neither declared war on the people of Niger, nor is there a plan, as is being rumored, to invade the country.”
Invading Niger will not be the walk in the park, warns CNSP President, Gen. Tchiani
Nevertheless, stating that “threats of aggression on the national territory are increasingly being felt,” Brigadier General Moussa Barmou placed the Nigerien military on “Maximum alert” on August 25, “in order to avoid a general surprise”.
Abdoulaye Diop and Olivia Rouamba, Foreign Ministers of Mali and Burkina Faso, visited Niamey on Thursday, August 24, reiterating their “rejection of an armed intervention against the people of Niger which will be considered as a declaration of war” on their own countries.
They also welcomed the two orders signed by the CNSP president Abdourahamane Tchiani that day, “authorizing the Defense and Security Forces of Burkina Faso and Mali to intervene on Nigerien territory in the event of an attack.”
“If an attack were to be undertaken against us,” Tchiani said in his televised address on Saturday, “it will not be the walk in the park some people seem to think.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/29/ ... pproaches/
******
Red Alert no. 17: No Military Intervention against Niger
AUGUST 24, 2023
Why is there an increase in anti-French and anti-Western feeling in the Sahel?
From the mid-nineteenth century, French colonialism has galloped across North, West, and Central Africa. By 1960, France controlled almost five million square kilometres (eight times the size of France itself) in West Africa alone. Though national liberation movements from Senegal to Chad won independence from France that year, the French government maintained financial and monetary control through the African Financial Community or CFA (formerly the colonial French Community of Africa), maintaining the French CFA franc currency in the former West African colonies and forcing the newly independent countries to keep at least half of their foreign exchange reserves in the Banque de France. Sovereignty was not only restricted by these monetary chains: when new projects emerged in the area, they were met by French intervention (spectacularly with the assassination of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987). France maintained the neocolonial structures that have allowed French companies to leech the natural resources of the region (such as the uranium from Niger, which powers a third of French lightbulbs) and have forced these countries to crush their hopes through an International Monetary Fund-driven debt-austerity agenda.
The simmering resentment against France escalated after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) destroyed Libya in 2011 and exported instability across Africa’s Sahel region. A combination of secessionist groups, trans-Saharan smugglers, and al-Qaeda offshoots joined together and marched south of the Sahara to capture nearly two-thirds of Mali, large parts of Burkina Faso, and sections of Niger. French military intervention in the Sahel through Operation Barkhane (2013) and through the creation of the neocolonial G-5 Sahel Project led to an increase in violence by French troops, including against civilians. The IMF debt-austerity project, the Western wars in West Asia, and the destruction of Libya led to a rise in migration across the region. Rather than tackle the roots of the migration, Europe tried to build its southern border in the Sahel through military and foreign policy measures, including by exporting illegal surveillance technologies to the neocolonial governments in this belt of Africa. The cry ‘La France, dégage!’ (‘France, get out!’) defines the attitude of mass unrest in the region against the neocolonial structures that try to strangle the Sahel.
Why are there so many coups in the Sahel?
Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries have seriously desiccated. Many parties with a history that traces back to the national liberation movements and even the socialist movements (such as Niger’s Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme-Tarayya) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who, in turn, are conduits of a Western agenda. The entry of the al-Qaeda-smuggler forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further squeeze the political environment, reducing already limited trade union freedoms and excising the left from the ranks of established political parties. The issue is not so much that the leaders of the mainstream political parties are ardently right-wing or centre-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They have become – to use a word often voiced on the ground – ‘stooges’ of the West.
Absent any reliable political or democratic instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the Sahel countries turn to their urbanised children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born in 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun and studied geology in Ouagadougou, and Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta (born in 1983), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions. Their communities have been utterly marginalised by the hard austerity programmes of the IMF, the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded with no real political platform to speak for them, large sections of the country have rallied behind the patriotic intentions of these young military men, who have themselves been pushed by mass movements – such as trade unions and peasant organisations – in their countries. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from the capital city of Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. These young leaders do not come to power with a well-worked agenda. However, they have a level of admiration for people like Thomas Sankara: Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, for instance, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction.
Will there be a pro-Western military intervention to remove the government of Niger?
Condemnations of the coup in Niger came quickly from the West (particularly France). The new government of Niger, led by a civilian (former finance minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine), told French troops to leave the country and decided to cut uranium exports to France. Neither France nor the United States – which has built the largest drone base in the world in Agadez (Niger) – are keen to directly intervene with their own military forces. In 2021, France and the United States protected their private companies, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, in Mozambique by asking the Rwandan army to intervene militarily. In Niger, the West first wanted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to invade on their behalf, but mass unrest in the ECOWAS member states, including condemnations from trade unions and people’s organisations, stayed the hands of the regional organisation’s ‘peacekeeping forces’. On 19 August of this year, ECOWAS sent a delegation to meet with Niger’s deposed president and with the new government. It has kept its troops on stand-by, warning that it has chosen an undisclosed ‘D-day’ for a military intervention.
The African Union, which had initially condemned the coup and suspended Niger from all union activity, recently stated that a military intervention should not take place. This statement has not stopped rumours from flying about, such as that Ghana might send its troops into Niger (despite the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s warning not to intervene and the trade unions’ condemnation of a potential invasion). Neighbouring countries have closed their borders with Niger.
Meanwhile, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, which have sent troops to Niger, have said that any military intervention against the government of Niger will be taken as an invasion of their own countries. There is a serious conversation afoot about the creation of a new federation in the Sahel that includes Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, which have a combined population of over 85 million. Rumblings amongst the populations from Senegal to Chad suggest that these might not be the last coups in this important belt of the African continent. The growth of platforms such as the West African Peoples Organisation is key to the political advancement in the region.
https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert ... ervention/
France refuses to withdraw its ambassador and troops from Niger, and reiterates its threat of supporting military invasion by ECOWAS, while the regional bloc itself is “determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts”
August 29, 2023 by Pavan Kulkarni
Anti-French protesters rally in support of the Niger's military government on August 28 in Niamey. Photo: Issifou Djibo / EPA / TASS
Niger’s military government reportedly cut off electricity and water supply to the French embassy in capital Niamey on Sunday, August 27, after the expiry of the 48-hours it gave the French ambassador, Sylvain Itte, to leave the country.
It has also instructed suppliers to stop providing the water, electricity and food supplies to the French military base, warning that anyone continuing to supply the base with goods and services will be treated as “enemies of the sovereign people.”
The 1,500 troops-strong military base in Niamey has become a site of frequent demonstrations, with people demanding that Niger’s former colonizer withdraw its troops. Thousands gathered outside this base on Sunday, demanding that its ambassador and troops leave the country, waving the national flag of Niger, reportedly alongside those of the BRICS countries and the DPRK.
A similar protest was also held on Friday, August 25, hours after the military government, the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Country (CNSP), ordered the French ambassador out of Niger. Protesters raised anti-French slogans, and threatened to invade the base if the troops did not leave Niger in a week.
Earlier this month, the CNSP ended Niger’s military agreements with France and ordered its troops to leave by September 2. With France refusing to withdraw on the grounds that it does not recognize the authority of the military government, protests are expected to intensify as this deadline approaches.
‘Niger doesn’t belong to France’
“Niger doesn’t belong to France. We told the French to leave, but they said ‘no’,” complained Aicha, a supporter of CNSP protesting outside the base. “As citizens we don’t want the French here. They can do whatever they want in France, but not here,” she told Al Jazeera.
The popular sentiment against the presence of French troops has manifested in several mass demonstrations, especially militant over the last two years. By cracking down on the anti-French movement and inviting into the country more French troops, ordered out of neighboring Mali by its military government, former Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum had consolidated domestic perception of him being a puppet of France.
His removal from office on July 26 in a military coup led by the then head of the presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, has won popular support, with thousands repeatedly taking to streets to rally behind the CNSP, reiterating the demand for the withdrawal of French troops.
‘The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger’
“The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger,” CNSP member Colonel Obro Amadou said in his address to a crowd of around 20,000 supporters who had gathered in Niger’s largest stadium in Niamey on Saturday, August 26. “It’s you who are going to drive them out,” he added.
Insisting that “France must respect” the choice of Nigerien people, Ramatou Boubacar, a CNSP supporter in the stadium, complained about the continued control France maintained over successive Nigerien governments even after the end of colonial rule. “For sixty years, we have never been independent [until].. the day of the coup d’etat,” she told the AFP.
French President Emmanuel Macron has however remained obstinate. “[W]e do not recognize the putschists, we support a president [Bazoum] who has not resigned”, he said in his remarks on Monday, August 28, reiterating French support for a military invasion of Niger by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), “when it decides”.
Expressing its “full support” to France and reiterating that the European Union (EU) “does not recognize” the CNSP, its spokesperson for foreign affairs, Nabila Massrali, also raised the specter of war. “The decision of the putschists to expel the French ambassador,” she said, “is a new provocation which cannot in any way help to find a diplomatic solution to the current crisis.”
‘ECOWAS is determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts’
However, the current chair of ECOWAS, Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu, said on Saturday, August 26: “We are deep in our attempts to peacefully settle the issue in Niger by leveraging on our diplomatic tools. I continue to hold ECOWAS back, despite its readiness for all options, in order to exhaust all other remedial mechanisms.”
Tinubu has toned down his initially aggressive and threatening rhetoric against Niger after facing anti-war protests and opposition domestically. On August 5, a day before the one-week deadline given by ECOWAS on July 30 to the CNSP to reinstate Bazoum was to expire, the senate of Nigeria refused to support military action.
Without the participation of Nigeria — which has Africa’s largest economy, amounting to about 67% of ECOWAS’ GDP, and the largest military in the sub-region — the bloc’s capability of undertaking a military action is drastically reduced.
This is especially the case because Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea — which are among the 15 countries in ECOWAS, but suspended and sanctioned after similar popularly-supported coups backed by the domestic anti-French movement — have extended support to Niger.
Mali and Burkina Faso, whose military governments have successfully ordered the French troops out of the country, have committed to mobilize their military in defense of Niger. Together, these four countries amount to nearly 60% of ECOWAS’ land area.
Nevertheless, the ECOWAS heads of state met again in Nigeria on August 10 and ordered their Chiefs of Defense Staffs “to immediately activate” the bloc’s stand-by force. The Chiefs of Defense Staffs of ECOWAS member states subsequently held a two-day meeting on August 17 and 18 in Ghana.
Ghana’s president is also facing domestic opposition and may be unlikely to be able to secure approval of the parliament where the main opposition party, opposed to military intervention, has the same number of seats as the ruling party.
Nevertheless, “We are ready to go any time the order is given,” Abdel-Fatau Musah, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, declared at the conclusion of this meeting, adding that an unspecified “D-day is also decided. We’ve already agreed and fine-tuned what will be required for the intervention.”
He introduced a caveat, however, that, “As we speak, we are still readying [a] mediation mission into the country, so we have not shut any door.”
A week later, on Friday, July 26, the ECOWAS said it was still “determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts.” ECOWAS commission president Omar Touray, former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Gambia told the media: “For the avoidance of doubt, let me state unequivocally that ECOWAS has neither declared war on the people of Niger, nor is there a plan, as is being rumored, to invade the country.”
Invading Niger will not be the walk in the park, warns CNSP President, Gen. Tchiani
Nevertheless, stating that “threats of aggression on the national territory are increasingly being felt,” Brigadier General Moussa Barmou placed the Nigerien military on “Maximum alert” on August 25, “in order to avoid a general surprise”.
Abdoulaye Diop and Olivia Rouamba, Foreign Ministers of Mali and Burkina Faso, visited Niamey on Thursday, August 24, reiterating their “rejection of an armed intervention against the people of Niger which will be considered as a declaration of war” on their own countries.
They also welcomed the two orders signed by the CNSP president Abdourahamane Tchiani that day, “authorizing the Defense and Security Forces of Burkina Faso and Mali to intervene on Nigerien territory in the event of an attack.”
“If an attack were to be undertaken against us,” Tchiani said in his televised address on Saturday, “it will not be the walk in the park some people seem to think.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/29/ ... pproaches/
******
Red Alert no. 17: No Military Intervention against Niger
AUGUST 24, 2023
Why is there an increase in anti-French and anti-Western feeling in the Sahel?
From the mid-nineteenth century, French colonialism has galloped across North, West, and Central Africa. By 1960, France controlled almost five million square kilometres (eight times the size of France itself) in West Africa alone. Though national liberation movements from Senegal to Chad won independence from France that year, the French government maintained financial and monetary control through the African Financial Community or CFA (formerly the colonial French Community of Africa), maintaining the French CFA franc currency in the former West African colonies and forcing the newly independent countries to keep at least half of their foreign exchange reserves in the Banque de France. Sovereignty was not only restricted by these monetary chains: when new projects emerged in the area, they were met by French intervention (spectacularly with the assassination of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987). France maintained the neocolonial structures that have allowed French companies to leech the natural resources of the region (such as the uranium from Niger, which powers a third of French lightbulbs) and have forced these countries to crush their hopes through an International Monetary Fund-driven debt-austerity agenda.
The simmering resentment against France escalated after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) destroyed Libya in 2011 and exported instability across Africa’s Sahel region. A combination of secessionist groups, trans-Saharan smugglers, and al-Qaeda offshoots joined together and marched south of the Sahara to capture nearly two-thirds of Mali, large parts of Burkina Faso, and sections of Niger. French military intervention in the Sahel through Operation Barkhane (2013) and through the creation of the neocolonial G-5 Sahel Project led to an increase in violence by French troops, including against civilians. The IMF debt-austerity project, the Western wars in West Asia, and the destruction of Libya led to a rise in migration across the region. Rather than tackle the roots of the migration, Europe tried to build its southern border in the Sahel through military and foreign policy measures, including by exporting illegal surveillance technologies to the neocolonial governments in this belt of Africa. The cry ‘La France, dégage!’ (‘France, get out!’) defines the attitude of mass unrest in the region against the neocolonial structures that try to strangle the Sahel.
Why are there so many coups in the Sahel?
Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries have seriously desiccated. Many parties with a history that traces back to the national liberation movements and even the socialist movements (such as Niger’s Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme-Tarayya) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who, in turn, are conduits of a Western agenda. The entry of the al-Qaeda-smuggler forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further squeeze the political environment, reducing already limited trade union freedoms and excising the left from the ranks of established political parties. The issue is not so much that the leaders of the mainstream political parties are ardently right-wing or centre-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They have become – to use a word often voiced on the ground – ‘stooges’ of the West.
Absent any reliable political or democratic instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the Sahel countries turn to their urbanised children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born in 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun and studied geology in Ouagadougou, and Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta (born in 1983), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions. Their communities have been utterly marginalised by the hard austerity programmes of the IMF, the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded with no real political platform to speak for them, large sections of the country have rallied behind the patriotic intentions of these young military men, who have themselves been pushed by mass movements – such as trade unions and peasant organisations – in their countries. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from the capital city of Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. These young leaders do not come to power with a well-worked agenda. However, they have a level of admiration for people like Thomas Sankara: Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, for instance, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction.
Will there be a pro-Western military intervention to remove the government of Niger?
Condemnations of the coup in Niger came quickly from the West (particularly France). The new government of Niger, led by a civilian (former finance minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine), told French troops to leave the country and decided to cut uranium exports to France. Neither France nor the United States – which has built the largest drone base in the world in Agadez (Niger) – are keen to directly intervene with their own military forces. In 2021, France and the United States protected their private companies, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, in Mozambique by asking the Rwandan army to intervene militarily. In Niger, the West first wanted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to invade on their behalf, but mass unrest in the ECOWAS member states, including condemnations from trade unions and people’s organisations, stayed the hands of the regional organisation’s ‘peacekeeping forces’. On 19 August of this year, ECOWAS sent a delegation to meet with Niger’s deposed president and with the new government. It has kept its troops on stand-by, warning that it has chosen an undisclosed ‘D-day’ for a military intervention.
The African Union, which had initially condemned the coup and suspended Niger from all union activity, recently stated that a military intervention should not take place. This statement has not stopped rumours from flying about, such as that Ghana might send its troops into Niger (despite the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s warning not to intervene and the trade unions’ condemnation of a potential invasion). Neighbouring countries have closed their borders with Niger.
Meanwhile, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, which have sent troops to Niger, have said that any military intervention against the government of Niger will be taken as an invasion of their own countries. There is a serious conversation afoot about the creation of a new federation in the Sahel that includes Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, which have a combined population of over 85 million. Rumblings amongst the populations from Senegal to Chad suggest that these might not be the last coups in this important belt of the African continent. The growth of platforms such as the West African Peoples Organisation is key to the political advancement in the region.
https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert ... ervention/