FRANCE IS “at war” with al-Qaeda in north Africa and will respond to the murder of a French aid worker by intensifying military support for governments in the region, Prime Minister François Fillon has said.
He made the remarks a day after President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed that Michel Germaneau, a 78-year-old French hostage kidnapped in Niger and held by the self-styled al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim), had been killed following a failed Franco-Mauritanian rescue mission. Mr Sarkozy said the crime would not go unpunished.
“We are at war with al-Qaeda and that’s why we have been supporting Mauritanian forces fighting al-Qaeda for months,” Mr Fillon told Europe 1 radio.
He said France had signed accords with the Mauritanian and Malian governments to pursue terrorists across borders in the Sahel region and bring them to justice.
“France doesn’t engage in revenge,” he said, but “the fight against terrorism continues, and against Aqim it will be intensified.”
The aggressive French rhetoric reflects growing unease about the threat posed by Islamists in the Sahel, a wide stretch of land just south of the Sahara, and frustration at the failure of regional authorities to police large expanses of desert in Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner was dispatched to north Africa within hours of Mr Germaneau’s death being confirmed by the Elysée Palace on Monday, and he is thought to be pressing regional leaders for enhanced cross-border co-operation.
The foreign ministry estimates that there are some 9,000 French expatriates living in Mali, Mauritania and Mali, and Mr Kouchner urged them yesterday to step up their safety measures.
Mr Fillon said last week’s rescue attempt, which resulted in the deaths of six Islamists, was “a last chance operation” after Mr Germaneau’s captors refused to engage in discussions with France and its intermediaries.
An ultimatum was received on July 12th indicating that Mr Germaneau would be killed in two weeks unless unnamed Aqim prisoners were released from jail, Mr Fillon said. In view of that “vague . . . strange and abnormal” ultimatum, he speculated, it was possible that the hostage was already dead when it was issued.
Aqim emerged in 2007 out of a ruthless Algerian guerrilla group that had largely been overpowered by Algeria’s security forces. Numbering about 400 fighters, according to the French government, its cells are spread across a vast desert to the south of Algeria.
Last week’s raid has revealed tensions between states involved in countering Aqim in the Sahel. Malian officials have complained they were not consulted on an attack in its own northern desert, which went beyond the pursuit clauses in regional accords.
While French officials portray Mali as the weak link in fighting Aqim, Paris has been assiduously developing its ties with neighbouring Mauritania. It has a full-time military training unit based in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, and relations have remained close despite the coup d’etat – condemned by France at the time – which brought Gen Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to power in August 2008.
The US has also been developing closer relations with governments in the region, and recently sent hundreds of special forces soldiers to train regional armies.
Algeria, which hosts a regional military headquarters for fighting Aqim and is known to be frustrated by its southern neighbours’ timid response to the Islamist threat, also appears to have been excluded from plans for the Mali raid, while Spain was reportedly angered at the lack of consultation. Two Spanish citizens are still being held by an Aqim faction in the Sahel.
For France, the desire to see Aqim defeated must be balanced with the need not to be seen to be stamping its authority on former colonies, feeding its adversary’s propaganda in the process. Mr Fillon said yesterday France was on maximum security alert and several attempted attacks were thwarted on French soil and in neighbouring countries each year.