Category: Key Issues

Officials in Mali say the country’s interim president and prime minister have been released, one day after they resigned while in military custody.

The military arrested interim president Bah N’daw and his prime minister, Moctar Ouane, on Monday in the capital, Bamako, triggering a fresh political crisis in the troubled West African country.

Vice President Colonel Assimi Goita has effectively taken power in what amounts to Mali’s second coup in nine months.

Reuters news agency quoted a top aide to Goita, Baba Cisse, as saying the release of N’daw and Ouane was scheduled and that officials “have nothing against them.”

Colonel Goita, who also led the coup that toppled then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita last October, said Tuesday he removed N’Daw and Ouane because they neglected to advise him about a cabinet reshuffle that left out two members of the military, a move he said violated the agreement that created Mali’s civilian transitional government.

Goita said the country was still on track to hold presidential and legislative elections set for next February.

The detentions of N’Daw and Ouane sparked outrage among the international community.

A joint statement issued Tuesday by ECOWAS, the United Nations, the African Union and other international bodies called for their immediate release, while French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the move as a “coup d’etat.”

The U.S. State Department voiced support Wednesday for the ECOWAS statement and said it is “suspending all security assistance that benefits the Malian security and defense forces.”

Mali has been in turmoil since then-President Amadou Toumani Touré was toppled in a military coup in 2012 that led ethnic Tuareg rebels to seize control of several northern towns, which then were taken over by Islamist insurgents. France deployed forces to repel the insurgents the following year, but the rebels have continued to operate in rural areas.

Source: Voice of America

Two investigative reports this year accused the Burkina Faso representative of tobacco giant Philip Morris of funding terrorism through tobacco smuggling. In an exclusive interview with VOA, Apollinaire Compaoré rejects those findings.

Selling cigarettes to smugglers who pay jihadists to protect their convoys.

That’s the accusation leveled against the Burkina Faso representative of Phillip Morris International by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP.

In a February report, the Sarajevo-based group cited officials, rivals and former colleagues of Apollinaire Compaoré who accused him of indirectly funding terrorism by working with smugglers who carry not only cigarettes, but drugs and people into Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Libya.

It also accused Burkina Faso authorities and the Swiss American tobacco giant of being complicit in a vast smuggling operation centered around a warehouse in the northern town of Markoye.

“Indeed, we think Phillip Morris was aware of what he was doing,” Aisha Kehoe Down, OCCRP Investigative Journalist told VOA. “There’s also clear indications that parts of the Burkinabe state, including customs, were involved in the warehouse at Markoye. In fact, the customs officer we interviewed characterized it as a mafia at the top of the state.”

Burkina Faso’s customs department was not available to comment on the accusations against the agency or against Compaore, who also owns a major bank and telecom company.

In a written response, Phillip Morris said there is no evidence of wrongdoing by the company and no information indicating their products shipped to Burkina Faso were smuggled into neighboring countries.

But a 2019 U.N. report also found that a company owned by Compaoré supplied regional smugglers, says one of the report’s authors.

“He knowingly supplies those that traffic, and he must be aware of this because there’s no legal market for those cigarettes once he brings them to northern Burkina Faso,” said Ruben de Koning, United Nations Finance Expert.

In an exclusive interview for VOA, Compaoré refuted all these accusations.

He says the United Nations lied and that those who worked on the report for the U.N. are no longer employed by them.

One of the richest men in Burkina Faso, Compaore also dismissed claims in the OCCRP report that two of his companies have never paid taxes.

“Are they the director general of taxes?” he asked. He said they are all lying to harm him. “They are lies,” he insisted.

When asked if there is any evidence of Compaoré being involved in cigarette smuggling, Moumouni Lougue, the general manager of Burkina Faso’s tax department, cited confidentiality laws.

What is known, he said, is that the tax administration is very vigorous, very rigorous, and does not in any case let this type of fact pass it by without it going unpunished.

Whether or not authorities take action, the allegation that cigarette smuggling supports Sahel terrorism is not expected to go away any time soon.

Source: Voice of America

French President Emmanuel Macron was in Rwanda’s capital Thursday, where he acknowledged France’s role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and said he hoped for forgiveness.

Speaking alongside Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the Gisozi genocide memorial in Kigali, Macron said, “I hereby humbly and with respect stand by your side today, I come to recognize the extent of our responsibilities.”

Macron is the first French leader since 2010 to visit the East African nation, which has long accused France of complicity in the killing of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans.

The visit follows the release in March of a French inquiry panel report saying a colonial attitude had blinded French officials, and the government bore a “serious and overwhelming” responsibility for not foreseeing the slaughter.

But the report absolved France of direct complicity in the genocide, a point Macron made in his comments, saying “France was not an accomplice,” but that his nation “has a role, a history and a political responsibility in Rwanda.”

Rwanda released its own report that found France was aware a genocide was being prepared and bore responsibility for enabling it by continuing in its unwavering support for Rwanda’s then president, Juvenal Habyarimana.

It was the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane, killing the president, that launched the 100-day frenzy of killings.

Macron said only those who survived the genocide “could perhaps forgive, and so could give us the gift of forgiving ourselves,” and repeated, in Rwanda’s native language, the phrase “Ndibuka,” meaning “I remember.”

Rwanda’s Kagame called Macron’s speech “powerful,” and said his words were something more than an apology. “They were the truth. Speaking the truth is risky, but you do it because it is right, even when it costs you something, even when it is unpopular,” he said.

Macron said he proposed to Kagame the naming of a French ambassador to Rwanda, a post that has been vacant for six years. He said filling the post and normalizing relations between the nations could not be envisioned without the step he took on Thursday.

Source: Voice of America