• Burkina Faso and Niger claim the G5 serves foreign interests.
• France’s legacy in Africa is the main source of contention behind the move.
Earlier this week the governments of Niger and Burkina Faso announced that they would be leaving G5 Sahel.
The G5 Sahel is an international security and development coalition created in 2014 during a summit of Sahel nations. The group was made up of Muslim majority countries Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad.
In large part G5 Sahel was created to combat an upswing in Islamist terrorism in the Sahel which began in the early 2000s, and has since left thousands of civilians dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram are two of the most notable terrorist organisations the G5 aimed to quell.
France played a significant role in the development of the group and in 2014 it launched Operation Barkhane to curb Sahelian nations from becoming what it called safe havens for terrorist activities.
And yet greater French involvement in the Sahel seems to have been the trigger for the recent Burkinabè and Nigerien exit. Both governments have argued that the G5 Sahel ultimately serves foreign interests (inferred to mean French interests). They claim that G5 hasn’t made the Sahel any safer and undermined their independence and dignity as sovereign states.
Mali also left the G5 last year. Mistrust between the three former G5 members and France is at an all time high. With all three of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger experiencing coups in the last 2 years, the new military governments of the countries and their citizenry have been hugely skeptical of France.
Their suspicion of French powers is rooted in the nation’s colonial legacy in their countries and fears that France is secretly using its presence in the Sahel to expand its power and maintain its neocolonial influence.
Furthermore, France’s military interventions in the Sahel have also denigrated its reputation in the face of Sahelians. While France maintains that the people killed in its military operations were terrorists, independent journalism has shown that France has attempted to cover up civilian deaths.
Only Chad and Mauritania make up the remainder of the G5. What started as an optimistic security pact is now becoming the latest failure in counterrorism policy.
