Analysis:
Mali - one African war France could not avoid
By
Mark John and John Irish PARIS | Sun
Jan 13, 2013
(Reuters)
- 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
neighboring, 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 600 km (375 miles) 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 legitimized by U.N. 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 signaled 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
neighboring 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 radicalization 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 U.S.-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 neighbors 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 U.S.-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.
For
Hollande, whose poll ratings are at record lows because of his hesitant leadership
and failure to cut unemployment, Mali could emerge as his political crucible.
It
was already diverting attention away from a mass march on Sunday in protest at
his plans to legalize gay marriages, and meant that a late-night Friday deal
between trade unions and employers on reforming the labor market went little
noticed.
"This
is not just any old baptism of fire," said Bruno Tertrais, head of
research at Paris's Foundation for Strategic Research. "This is a baptism
of fire in his very role as chief of the armed forces."
