Malian president accuses France of secretly arming terrorist groups to provoke war

In a statement made last Friday to the Russian news service RIA Novosti, Malian Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga accused the French government of secretly arming Islamist terrorists to maintain the conflict in the country and justify the French military occupation.

Maiga’s statement, about which the French press has maintained a deafening silence, is an indictment of the French state and its NATO allies. Two French presidents, François Hollande of the Socialist Party and Macron, and their allies have been waging war in Mali since 2013. Yet Maiga, installed in power by the Malian army that enjoys the support of Paris, accuses them of using criminal methods to justify a bloody war in his country.

Moreover, the same Islamist terror networks have committed attacks in Paris and across Europe, which Hollande and Macron used to justify a state of emergency and conduct a violent crackdown on strikes and “yellow vests” in France. Maiga’s accusation compromises all the official justifications for this reactionary offensive against the working class in Europe.

Maiga blamed French forces that arrived at the beginning of the war in Kidal, in the north of the country, where several militias hostile to the central Malian power in Bamako were active. “France created an enclave in Mali, it formed and trained a terrorist organization in Kidal,” he said, adding: “Having arrived in Kidal in 2013 during the offensive against the armed groups in the northern regions, France prohibited the Malian army from returning to Kidal.”

He continued: “Ansar Dine, the leader of an international terrorist organization, a branch of Al Qaeda in Mali—the French took his two deputies to form another organization… The Malian government so far does not have authority over the region of Kidal. However, it was France that created this enclave, a zone of armed groups trained by French officers. We have proof of this.”

To back up his accusations against Paris, Maiga recalled that the war in Mali started from conflicts between militias that fled Libya after the war waged against that country by Paris and London in 2011 in alliance with Al Qaeda. “You know, the terrorists first came from Libya,” he said. “Who destroyed the Libyan state? It was the French government with its allies.”

Source: WSWS