Mali summons French ambassador after Macron’s “regrettable” remarks

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MALI – Bamako summoned the French ambassador on Tuesday (October 5th) after remarks deemed “regrettable” by the president Emmanuel Macron against the military junta in power and its call for “the state to return” to Mali.

“The minister called on the French authorities to exercise restraint, avoiding value judgments,” commented the Malian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

The text castigates the “unfriendly and derogatory remarks” of Emmanuel Macron and expresses a “strong protest against these regrettable remarks”.

Emmanuel Macron called on Tuesday, October 5, for “the state to come back” to Mali, in a context of strong tensions with the Sahelian country, where France is in the process of reducing its military system.

“The State must return with its justice, its education, its police everywhere, in particular in Mali”, where whole swathes of territory remain on their own in the face of jihadists, inter-community tensions and trafficking, a- he said.

“Shame”

Before that, the French president had qualified last Thursday as “shame” the accusations of “abandonment in full flight” of Mali by France brought by the transitional Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga to the UN platform.

Malian diplomacy, in its press release, calls on France to “focus on the essential, in particular the fight against terrorism in the Sahel”.

In the Sahel, where it has intervened militarily since 2013 against jihadist groups, France undertook in June to reorganize its military system with a reduction in its personnel by 2023 to 2,500-3,000 men, against more than 5,000 today.

The French see their influence contested in Mali, in particular by Russia. The Malian junta in power plans to use the services of Russian paramilitaries from the sulphurous private company Wagner. However, a presence of these “mercenaries” would be “incompatible” with the maintenance of the French military presence in Mali, Paris constantly warns.