the military in power obtain the departure of the United Nations mission

Friday, June 30, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to end the mandate of Minusma, the United Nations multidimensional integrated mission for stabilization in Mali. The military junta, in power in Bamako since 2021, had urged, on June 16, the end of the UN mandate… leaving the field open to the Wagner group. The last blue helmets should have left the country by the end of the year. Until the end, Mali (supported in the Security Council by Russia, whose mercenaries from the Wagner group support the junta on the spot) had asked to accelerate this withdrawal of the UN contingent, to rush it, in three months.

This was totally unrealistic, replied the UN officials. France had taken ten months to evacuate its Barkhane force from Mali in 2022 and had only 3,000 men on site. The UN Blue Helmets are more than 14,000, military, police and civilian, from 60 different countries. Such a logistical puzzle could not be solved in three months.

The ruling junta backed by Wagner

The reproaches of the Malians towards the Minusma, and which explain their denunciation of the UN mission, are rather vague. Publicly, the power of Bamako stigmatizes the fact that the blue helmets of the UN do not sufficiently support the Malian Armed Forces (and the Wagner group) in their fight against the attacks of the jihadists affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. But this military support was never in the mandate of the United Nations in Mali: it was France and Operation Barkhane that were supposed to play this role.

The blue helmets were mandated to “secure” the country: rather to organize police operations, to protect the populations by their mere presence. They were also to contribute to the implementation of the Algiers agreements which, in 2015, put an end to the rtuareg ebellion in the north of the country. Their mission was also to ensure respect for fundamental rights in Mali. And it is clearly this “human rights” component that most bothered the military in power in Bamako.

The Moura massacre, a detonator

Concretely, it is a report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations published on May 20, 2023 which, for the junta, broke the camel’s back. Based on nearly 200 direct testimonies, this report denounced a real massacre committed by the Malian Armed Forces and Wagner’s men in the town of Moura, in the center of the country, in March 2022. Nearly 500 civilians had been passed through the weapons, Russian helicopters not hesitating to bomb the Moura market.

This departure of the peacekeepers risks accelerating the deterioration of the security situation in the country. According to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which precisely maps crises and armed conflicts, the number of violent deaths has more than doubled in 2022. Jihadist groups, but also the Malian Armed Forces and Wagner are multiplying raids, raids and executions.

The death of the Algiers Accords

Wagner’s ways of doing things are very similar in Mali to what the Russian mercenaries were already practicing in Syria: aerial bombardments without any attention paid to civilians, systematic executions of all suspects of jihadism (all men with beards). This risks throwing the populations who are victims of these abuses into the arms of armed terrorist groups.

As for the ex-Tuareg rebels, they are now deprived of the intermediary that were the blue helmets in their exchanges with the power in Bamako. Last week the Tuaregs of northern Mali indicated that a departure from the United Nations meant “the death of the Algiers agreements” and, at the same time, a possible resumption of clashes with the central power.