French fighter jets began bombing missions over northern Mali on Sunday, where they are targeting Jihadist bases and supply depots, in the second - and what President François Hollande hopes will be the final – stage of France’s military campaign to oust the rebels from the West African country, and which began on January 11th.
US Vice-President Joe Biden, who met with Hollande in Paris on Monday, backed mounting French pressure for African nations to rapidly provide a force capable of taking over from the French military mission. Speaking at a joint press conference, Biden said an African force should be put in place "as quickly as reasonably possible", after which peacekeeping should be transferred to the authority of the United Nations “as quickly as is prudent”.
While Hollande underlined that the campaign to regain Mali’s “territorial integrity” was not yet over, he and his government have stressed over recent days that the mission of France’s 3,500 troops in Mali is strictly for the short term.
On Saturday, Hollande visited Mali, with a symbolic first stop in Timbuktu, formerly under rebel control. “The combat is not over, and it would be a mistake to think that because we have been able, with our Malian friends, to secure the towns, like Gao, like Timbuktu, we can stop there,” Hollande said, speaking alongside acting Malian President Dioncounda Traoré.
“The Malian authorities, and it is their responsibility, want to regain the territorial integrity which was, for a while, taken away from them,” Hollande continued. “And so, we will be at their side to finish, further north, this operation. But we do not have the vocation to stay because our African friends will be able to do the work that was ours up until then. And then, afterwards, the [UN-backed African-led International Support Mission to Mali] AFISMA, the Malians, will ensure the security of all of the territory of Mali."
However, the delays in forming a credible 8,000-strong pan-African force to take over from the French, in no small part due to financial difficulties, have raised fears that the handover process may turn into a lengthy one.
Added to this, the retreat of the Islamist militants, essentially made up of five hard-line Jihadist groups - who include AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and Tuaregs - to the mountainous regions of northern Mali, a terrain with which they are particularly familiar, threatens a much tougher battle than the relatively smooth advance the French forces have completed until now.
Hollande’s decision to wage war against the Islamists in Mali, who in early January were moving south and threatening to take the capital Bamako from the tattered Malian army, was a risky one that has since, and so far, become a political triumph at home. While his popularity was tumbling in opinion polls, unable to shake off a harsh political reputation as being a ditherer, what Joe Biden described on Monday as Hollande's “decisive action” in Mali has provided a turnaround in his political standing, not only in France but also abroad. "The fight against AQIM may be far from America's borders, but it is fundamentally in America's interest," Biden added.
Since he was elected in May 2012, Hollande has regularly spoken of his concerns about the situation in Mali, and the issue was central to his speech before the United Nations last September. The following month, while on a visit to the Senegalese capital Dakar, he warned that unseating the Islamists from their power bases in Mali “is a major question for security on the continents of Africa and Europe.”
But the original intentions of the French President were not to launch a French-led war against the rebels. “It is not France that will proceed with I don’t know what kind of operation [sic], no, those times are over”, Hollande said at a press conference with Senegalese President Macky Sall during his October visit. “We, France, we will lend support with logistical and material means, but it is the Africans who will put into place the operation.”
Hollande 'had his back against the wall'
While behind the scenes French diplomats were working hard on the international scene to argue the necessity of a military intervention in Mali, Hollande’s advisors were adamant that France should not lead a military campaign on its own. Just weeks before the French President’s trip to Senegal, presidential staff told journalists that such a campaign would be led with the Malian army as the “core” force, with “logistical support from the north” and the involvement of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the 54-member state African Union.
Since the start on January 11th of Operation Serval, the presidency has repeatedly told journalists that a decision to go ahead was taken in all urgency. French daily Le Monde reported that the decision to launch the campaign was taken “in the space of 24 hours”, while a defence ministry source told Mediapart it was decided “within hours”. One French diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the sending of French troops “was not the plan”, adding: “Even the [UN October] resolution was not designed for a solitary intervention.”
One presidential advisor, whose name is also withheld, commented: “François Hollande did everything to avoid going there. He accepted [the need for French intervention] with his back against the wall.”
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Hollande’s decision to send the French force was validated at a meeting of the select defence council, composed of the president, who under the constitution is the chief of France’s armed forces, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, the ministers of defence, foreign affairs and the interior, along with military and intelligence chiefs.
These included Hollande’s special chief-of-staff for military affairs, General Benoît Puga, who was also in the post under Hollande’s conservative predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. Puga, who served Sarkozy during the NATO intervention in Libya and who is described by one source close to him as playing “a capital role”, is an unlikely figure in a socialist administration: a father of 11 children, he is the brother of the priest of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet church in Paris, which serves as the gathering base for the hardline movement of the French Catholic Church. French daily Libération last month cited “a source close to Hollande” as saying: “Pugat has never expressed any concern about serving a socialist, his only preoccupation today is to wage war”.
Other members of the select defence council (conseil restreint de défense), which has met regularly throughout the campaign in Mali, include three more figures who were also already in post under Sarkozy. These are French intelligence chief, Érard Corbin de Mangoux, armed forces chief-of-staff, Admiral Édouard Guillaud and the secretary-general of the national defence and security department, Francis Delon.
Keeping the generals at bay
The principal military coordinator of Operation Serval is General Didier Castres, who from 2005 to 2009 served as deputy chief-of-staff of military affairs to former president Jacques Chirac and his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy. The commander of French forces on the ground in West Africa is Brigadier General Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, normally based in Dakar. Saint-Quentin served as a ranking member of France’s military cooperation force in Rwanda in 1994, where he was a witness to the shooting down of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6th that year, an assassination that sparked the genocide of the country’s Tutsies by the Hutus.
While the French presidency has insisted that the decision-making for the French campaign in Mali is under strict political control, with President Hollande naturally kept closely informed of events and defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian receiving three daily briefings, some have expressed concern at the extent of the military’s influence, beginning with the decision intervene.
“Since September, the defence [chiefs] have carried out an intense lobbying for intervention with the Elysée,” said one informed source who asked not to be named. “And the military staff took hold of the opportunity offered by the regrouping of the Jihadist elements and the fall [on January 10th] of Konna. From the beginning, the defence [chiefs] have had the primacy and impose a military vision of the situation in Mali.”
Paul Quilès, a defence minister between 1985 and 1986 under socialist president François Mitterrand, warned that the government was in danger of playing second fiddle to the generals. “If France’s objective is not clearly set out, a risk exists that the military take the lead and make themselves autonomous,” he told Mediapart, although he added “we’re not there yet”.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Speaking in private, members of the presidential staff dismiss the suggestion, even mocking the lack of charisma on the part of several leading military figures and their supposed inability to impose their views on a minister. The warnings were also dismissed by the president of the French parliament’s defence commission, Socialist Party Member of Parliament, Patricia Adam. “French military culture is that of rendering account,” she said. “We’re not in the United States. The army has a [French] republican tradition and it is trained to obey […] and François Hollande never has just one source of information. He has multiple and diverse sources of information, and he’s the one who leads.”
Meanwhile, the language employed by Hollande and his ministers has caused unease among some in the Socialist Party, who see references to the ideology of former US President George W. Bush. The defence minister has talked of a “war against terrorism”, foreign minister Laurent Fabius has described the French campaign as targeting “criminal terrorists” and the president himself has announced the aim of “destroying the terrorists” (see more here ).
“The politicians had to react in just a few hours. They didn’t yet have all the tools to hand,” commented one Elysée source who said such language resulted from “ideological unpreparedness” rather than any ideological conversion.
“There is perhaps for some a degree of ideological blurring, but that’s not the case either for the president or for the foreign affairs minister,” said Yves Aubin de La Messuzière, a former French ambassador to Chad, Tunisia and Italy, and a recognised specialist on the Maghreb. “It’s more about a lack of mastering language.”
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English version: Graham Tearse