The UN Security Council yesterday voted to end a decade-old peacekeeping mission in Mali as demanded by the country’s military junta.
The French-drafted resolution, adopted by a 15-0 vote, ordered the mission, known as MINUSMA, to immediately start the withdrawal of over 15,000 personnel.
The pullout is to be completed by the end of the year. Sri Lanka is among the countries that had contributed troops to the Mali peacekeeping mission.
The vote came two weeks after Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop called the UN operation a “failure” and urged its end. Mali’s relations with the United Nations and Western nations have deteriorated sharply since a 2020 military coup in the country.
The military regime also severed defence cooperation with France, the former colonial power. The junta has instead rallied behind Russia and brought in the paramilitary Wagner Group. The mercenaries have also been engaged in Moscow’s war in Ukraine and were part of a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military last week led by the Wagner Group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. The US blamed Prigozhin for contributing to the termination of the UN mission.
Prigozhin “helped engineer” the withdrawal of peacekeepers to “further Wagner’s interests,” US National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said in Washington. “We know that senior Malian officials worked directly with Prighozin employees to inform the UN Secretary General that Mali had revoked consent for the MINUSMA mission,” he said.
Following the vote, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said her country’s troops would exit Mali faster than Berlin’s original timetable.
“The Bundeswehr will now withdraw in an accelerated and orderly manner,” she said on Twitter on Friday. “The abrupt end of the entire UN mission is bitter news for the people in Mali to whom the mission gave protection and hope.” – DW