Discretion. This is what West African editorialists retain above all from the French strategy of military cooperation which is being reshaped with the Sahelian countries and some of their coastal neighbors hit by armed terrorist groups, against the backdrop of the rearticulation of Operation Barkhane. “Efficiency in discretion or the art of doing a lot with less presencesums up the Burkinabè news site Wakat Sera. […] The experience that turned to divorce in Mali is not unrelated to this reorientation of French military cooperation on the black continent.
Discretion, which will also prevent France, “marked, as with iron, with the original sin of a colonizing country, of being taxed as a foreign occupying force”, adds the Nigerian news site Mourya, the Voice of Niger.
The 2,400 French soldiers who were deployed in Mali are supposed to complete their withdrawal from the military base in Gao and from the country by the end of the summer, pushed out by the authorities in Bamako. This represents about half of the strength of the Barkhane force. This will retain some 2,300 men, who will be distributed in Chad and Niger. And it was in Niamey, the Nigerien capital, that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, and her colleague from the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, went on July 14 and 15, who then took the direction of Côte d’Ivoire. .
“Security-development diptych”
“After an interview with the President [nigérien,] Mohamed Bazoum, the head of French diplomacy, Catherine Colonna, clarified the objective of their visit in these terms: ‘We are here to respond as best as possible to the needs you express’”, connects the daily Burkinabè The country. Niger, he recalls, is