Rundale

Fionn Wallace

On 3 January 2021, just one day after the first French female soldier was killed in Operation Barkhane in Mali, France carried out airstrikes near the central Malian village of Bounti. French military sources claimed that they had bombed an area outside the village, killing “dozens of fighters” from rebel groups. The Malian Ministry of Defence issued a statement claiming that in these attacks the French Barkhane Force had “neutralised several dozen terrorists” and this was “on the basis of very precise intelligence”.

In late March 2021, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) published the findings of its investigation into the Operation Barkhane attack. It found that at least 23 people had been killed in the attack and at least 8 injured. They found no evidence of weapons at the scene and concluded the overwhelming majority of the people affected by the attack were civilians attending a wedding.

In effect, the UN mission in Mali had accused France of a war crime. The French authorities maintained their real-time intelligence had given them absolute confidence this was a terrorist gathering. How many other civilian gatherings had they called in airstrikes against, based on this quality of intelligence assessment?

The case of Mali is instructive to examine as the Dublin government rams through legislation to dismantle the Triple Lock. Here we have Irish Defence Forces deployed within the terms of the Triple Lock to an EU-led mission with a UN mandate. If the Triple Lock is dismantled and we start operating outside of the UN mandate system, EU-led full-combat peace-enforcement missions will be the first port of call for future Irish military engagement abroad. Sadly, what the EU gets up to when it puts itself forward as “a global actor” on the world stage is no less neo-colonial and destabilising than the imperialist adventures of the US.

The “War on Terror” comes to the Sahel

In the wake of the disastrous 2011 NATO war of aggression against Libya, the country descended into instability and civil war. Tuareg fighters that once served as part of Gaddafi’s armed forces returned to Northern Mali well-armed and organised. They established the Azawad National Liberation Movement (MNLA), and very quickly had large, desert areas of Mali under their control.

Denis M. Tull and Wolfram Lacher of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) argue that the roots of this uprising lay in policies of the Malian leadership under President Amadou Toumani Touré (2002– 2012). Touré had been stoking tensions by allowing certain Tuareg militias free reign to participate in the Northern Mali drug-trafficking and ransom trades. This criminal activity also facilitated the rise of Al-Queda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in the region. When the Tuareg fighters returned from Libya’s civil war in autumn 2011, the Tuareg groups that had been losing out as a result of Touré’s policies suddenly gained the upper hand. These were primarily the MNLA and Ansar al-Dine.

The violent expulsion of Mali’s government forces from the North amplified tensions between the defeated armed forces and the government. This spurred some young officers to conduct a coup in the Southern capital Bamako on March 22, 2012. They demanded better arms and equipment to combat the instability in the North. These demands converged with the 2011 EU Sahel Strategy – namely a bigger EU footprint through ‘security sector reform’ and militarisation of a region some EU top officials were talking about as Europe’s “backyard”.

In early April 2012 the MNLA declared the North of Mali independent, while extremist Islamist forces AQIM and Ansar al-Dine established themselves in the larger Northern cities. In December 2012, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution prepared by France, the US and others, mandating a military mission under the leadership of the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Before the ECOWAS mission could get going a large-scale French intervention named Operation Serval was launched on January 11, 2013. While resolution 2085 explicitly stated “military planning will need to be further refined before the commencement of the offensive operation”, the French barreled ahead regardless. The UN resolution was used as justification for the rapid expansion of a French initiated and commanded military intervention.

Serval was wound up after 6 months and replaced by Operation Barkhane, which brought in contingents from Burkina Faso and Chad to join French units in Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. Barkhane basically ran riot across France’s former colonies fighting an expanding French ‘war on terror’. This left the UN stabilisation mission MINUSMA established in April 2013 to concentrate on the long-term situation in Mali. A training mission (EUTM) was also set up in Mali, approved by the Council of the EU in mid-January 2013.

Overseas Missions

20 Irish Defence Forces personnel were part of EUTM Mali from its inception in 2013 until a reduction to 14 personnel in late 2022 and full withdrawal in 2023. The initial mandate of the mission was to advise, train, and build up the Malian Armed Forces to be ​​capable of conducting military operations to restore Malian territorial integrity and reduce the threat posed by terrorist groups.

The fact that a specific request for an EU military training mission came in writing from Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traoré, in December 2012, does give the mission some basis in international law. That being said, Traoré was the interim leader of an administration that had freshly emerged from a military coup, and here he was requesting assistance to “restore Malian territorial integrity” – to engage in counterinsurgency and wrestle back territory from the secessionists in the North. In the words of German military analyst Christoph Marischka, “in this respect, the military training of the EUTM in Mali can certainly be seen as a massive foreign participation in what is referred to under international law as a non-international armed conflict, in other words, a civil war”. This didn’t seem to bother the Council of the EU at the time, nor the Irish government for that matter (Eamon Gilmore, the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time, in response to written questions even downgraded the coup to an “attempted coup”).

EUTM Mali was rife with operational problems. There was no mechanism in place to know if they were training the same soldiers multiple times. In 2021 there were reports that over 6,500 people on the payroll of the 15,000-20,000 strong military either did not exist or were not on duty. There was no monitoring or assessment of what the soldiers got up to when they went out into the field. Human Rights Watch and a UN commission of inquiry documented dozens of instances where the Malian military arrested, tortured, and executed members of ethnic groups deemed sympathetic to the militants fighting the French backed government and intervention forces. Former EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Josef Borrell, claimed EUTM Mali trained 90 percent of the Malian armed forces. Unsurprising then that sources have demonstrated Malian military personnel trained by EUTM Mali went on to carry out numerous atrocities.

In June 2019, Dáil Éireann passed a motion in line with the conditions of the Triple Lock to deploy 14 Army Ranger Wing Defence Forces to the MINUSMA stabilisation mission based out of the German-run Camp Castor in Gao, central Mali. The original July 2013 mandate of this mission was exceedingly broad. On paper, MINUSMA was a military mission set up to recreate the entire state while conflict and instability expanded around it.

By the time Irish forces deployed to the mission in September 2019, the general security situation in Mali had deteriorated badly. Concerns about the nature of the mission were raised by Professor Ray Murphy of Galway University in a February 2020 article for RTÉ. He argued that while the mission was subject to violent attacks it did not have an explicit counter-terrorism mandate from the UN Security Council. Yet he points out that MINUSMA was clearly aligned to other forces conducting anti-terror operations.

Murphy stressed that one of the most worrying activities of the Irish Army Ranger Wing was reconnaissance and intelligence gathering as it would be shared with the anti-terrorism missions to facilitate airstrikes and drone attacks. In the investigation into the Bounti atrocity detailed at the beginning of this article, MINUSMA found that the massacre raised significant concerns that Operation Barkhane was not applying the precautionary principle when assessing whether targets were military or not. They also intimated that this kind of attack was not an isolated event.

This raises serious questions around the role of the Irish Defence Forces in the MINUSMA mission. They were deployed in Gao as part of an Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance unit in a partnership with the Bundeswehr (German Defence Forces). The French anti-terror mission and Germany both used Gao airport, next to which they both had their field camps. Germany, in cooperation with French arms company Airbus, had Heron-1 reconnaissance drones stationed there, the data from which was transmitted to the MINUSMA mission in real time. Professor Murphy says this information was shared with Operation Barkhane.

Whether the German drones and by extension the Irish Defence Forces were implicated in the Bounti massacre is not known. The German government had a response to a written question from a Bundestag MP as to whether Bounti was part of the operational area of the German Heron drone declared classified. Christoph Marischka argues that with the proliferation of the use of drones, France increasingly resorted to bombing groups of people, reporting the number of victims only in increments of ten (“around twenty”, “around thirty”), and classifying them all as terrorists. The deciding factor in whether they were deemed terrorists being the absence of women and children among the dead.

Based on what is laid out above there is a serious concern that Irish forces in Mali have not only trained soldiers that went on to commit atrocities, they may have also aided in the committing of war crimes perpetrated by France.

Imperialist Union

The Mali missions have been wound down primarily as a result of anti-imperialist resistance from sovereignty–seeking forces on the ground. This latter development raises questions around what a supposedly neutral country like Ireland was doing over the course of a decade in missions that have been identified as neo-colonialist and imperialist structures by the anti-imperialist forces that now hold power in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

In the European Parliament I worked on many files dealing with the Sahel. Between 2019 and 2024 I watched in real time as decisionmakers refused to learn anything from what was unfolding in front of them. They simply would not accept that underlying structural issues around resource extraction, transfer mispricing, crushing IMF and World Bank debt, the exploitative French colonial currency, lack of basic infrastructure, education, health, and agricultural development, had to be addressed as part of any moves towards stability. The EU position remained overwhelmingly focused on “securitisation” – a policy that was only serving to spread instability and line the pockets of the defence sector.

Mali and the Sahel is not an isolated instance. Wherever the EU intervenes it is there for its interests, not stability. On the African continent this means maintaining extraction flows established under colonialism while controlling the movement of people fleeing the consequences of this exploitation. From policing the Mediterranean, to funding gulags in Libya, the expansion of Frontex’s border regime into West Africa, EU member states backing opposing sides in the Libyan civil war, the role of French, US, and Italian fossil fuel extraction in the Mozambique civil war, and the role of European corporate mining interests in the immiseration of the people of the DRC. That people have the nerve to speak of the EU as some kind of shining example in the world is incredible. This is not to mention EU support for and facilitation of the genocide unfolding before us in Gaza.

The Triple Lock

The Triple Lock is inadequate to protect our neutrality; it needs to be strengthened not dismantled. Within its terms, our Government has been complicit in a neo-colonial resource war spearheaded by the predominant European NATO military powers, France and Germany. This is an insult to Ireland’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist history. Our natural affinity is firmly with the colonised and the oppressed. The solidarity of the people of Ireland with the people of Palestine and Gaza is a striking reminder of that.

Dr. Karen Devine has shown that our attachment to neutrality is deeply linked to our understanding of ourselves as a people and the importance we attach to independence. The government’s anti-democratic attack on Irish neutrality will subordinate our independence to imperialist powers and endanger our Defense Forces. Our sons and daughters will be coming home maimed, traumatised, or in body-bags for the interests of the same powers that are doing to Gaza today what the British did to the Irish in the mid-1800s. Our comprador politicians have no understanding of the concept of sovereignty, of independence, of our history, of what it means to be true to your roots. We must endeavour to show them that we do.