Arrested at Bamako airport on July 10, 2022, the situation of the 49 Ivorian soldiers detained by the military junta in power in Mali since 2020 quickly turned into a diplomatic crisis between the two states.
Indicted by the Malian courts last August for attempting to undermine the external security of the State, Abidjan assures that they were on a mission for the UN, as part of logistical support operations for the United Nations Mission in Mali (Minusma),
the 49 Ivorian soldiers had been described as “mercenaries” by Mali. Since then, many mediations have been initiated, including one by the Togolese Head of State, which led to the release of 3 female soldiers on September 3, a “humanitarian gesture” from Mali.
While things were going well, the situation escalated further when the head of the Malian junta, Colonel Assimi Goïta, made the release of the other 46 soldiers conditional on the extradition of Malian personalities living in Côte d’Ivoire, a request considered as “unacceptable blackmail” by Abidjan, which qualifies the detention of its soldiers as “hostage-taking”.
Following this umpteenth reversal of the situation, the Ivorian authorities after a meeting of the national security council invoked the recourse to an extraordinary summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as soon as possible.
Informed of the desire of the Ivorian authorities to have recourse to the Community authority, the Malian authorities, through the interim Prime Minister, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga declared that the case “is purely judicial and bilateral” while warning against any instrumentalization of ECOWAS by the Ivorian authorities to evade their responsibility vis-à-vis Mali, adding that the mediation initiated by Togo is “the only framework for settling the file”.
In this climate of crisis, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres during an interview granted to France 24 and RFI on Sunday September 18, 2022 declared that the soldiers arrested in Bamako are not mercenaries: “No, this are not mercenaries and that is obvious. I appealed to the Malian authorities to resolve this problem. We are in constant contact with them. I did not speak directly with Goita, but I will receive the delegation from Mali and this is something that is very important to me. This problem needs to be solved”.
In this case, the UN had recognized “dysfunctions” in a note addressed to the Malian government and admitted that certain measures had not been followed.
These remarks by the UN Secretary General contradict Bamako’s accusations, and seem to give new impetus to this crisis which has turned into a showdown between the two states.
The diatribe of the Malian Prime Minister during the General Assembly of the United Nations is not made to fix things.
We will come back to this last point very soon.
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