{{Mauritania said Wednesday it would send soldiers to the UN peacekeeping force charged with ensuring security after elections in conflict-scarred Mali — but only to areas near their shared border.}}
The MINUSMA force has replaced an African military mission which had been supporting French soldiers who entered Mali in January to halt an Islamist advance and to help the government re-establish its authority over the vast country.
Mauritania has promised to provide up to 1,800 soldiers to the mission, which is made up of around 6,300 mostly African troops.
Mauritania’s contribution will be part of a planned doubling in the size of MINUSMA by the end of the year but Nouakchott says “technical details” have delayed the deployment.
“We have set our conditions. Our contribution will be the deployment of our forces to the border areas… and not other parts of Mali,” President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz told a “meet the public” event in the southeastern town of Nema.
{{New president}}
The proviso goes against the wishes of the Malian government, which has requested that the Mauritanian soldiers be deployed to its borders with Niger and Burkina Faso, a Mauritanian government source said.
Mauritania shares a 2,200-kilometre (1,350-mile) border with Mali, which has just elected former premier Ibrahim Boubacar Keita as its new president, 17 months after a coup which upended what was seen as one of the most stable democracies in the region.
Mauritania’s own coup in 2008 saw Abdel Aziz seize power and he was elected a year later, but the opposition has never accepted his rule as legitimate and said on Monday it would boycott parliamentary elections planned for October 12.
Abdel Aziz told the Nema meeting he would be prepared to postpone the vote “for two or three weeks at the most” to allow the opposition to change its mind.
{{NMG}}
Leave a Reply