Abigail Okunade
The European Union has suspended its military training mission in Mali, but says it will not terminate it for the time being, the bloc’s top diplomat Josep Borrell disclosed on Tuesday.
“We decided to reaffirm our decision of suspending operational training …, but we are not canceling this mission,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief told reporters in Brussels after a meeting of the bloc’s defence ministers.
He criticised the junta for failing to distance itself from Russian mercenaries, the Wagner group.
The group that has come to the aid of Mali’s military is being blamed for human rights violations.
“On the contrary, we have seen an increasing pattern of collusion and allegations of grave human rights abuses, being investigated by the United Nations,” he added.
According to Borrell, the EU still has not received guarantees by the Mali junta on non-interference by Russian mercenaries.
The country’s military junta in a statement on Sunday said Mali was pulling out of a multinational military force fighting Islamist militants in the West Africa’s Sahel region, TOS NEWS reported.
The statement by Mali’s junta, which ousted former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and took power in a 2020 coup, said that this was a protest against its rejection as head of the G5 regional group.
It also blamed a lack of progress in the fight against the Islamists and the failure to hold recent meetings in Mali.
The G5 Sahel force includes troops from Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.
It was set up in 2017 to thwart jihadists’ actions that have swept across the region in recent years, killing thousands of people and forcing millions to flee their homes.
But the force has been hobbled by a lack of funding and has struggled to reduce the violence.
