Western nations must engage with dictatorships in Sahel, says Tony Blair
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Western governments need to drop any objections to dealing with dictatorships in the Sahel and urgently engage with regimes in what is rapidly becoming “the most terrorism-affected region in the world”, former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s think-tank has urged.
The Sahel, the semi-arid strip below the Sahara that has been rocked by a wave of coups over the past four years, accounted for nearly half of all terrorism deaths worldwide in 2023, according to the Global Terrorism Index.
Groups affiliated with Isis and al-Qaeda were responsible for most of them, with Burkina Faso, which had two coups in 2022, suffering more deaths from terrorism than any other country, with 1,900 recorded fatalities.
Now, a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, published on Thursday, has called for a “new compact” between the volatile region and the international community. This would include not only the US and Europe, but also the Gulf States and Turkey, as well as bilateral and multilateral donors.
“Almost all of the broader Sahel — from Guinea to Sudan, the Atlantic to the Red Sea — is now under some form of post-coup-d’état military rule,” the report said. Unwillingness to engage with these regimes would result in an increasing outflow of migrants to Europe and “the influx of predatory actors”, particularly Russian paramilitary groups, with “security implications far beyond the porous borders of the region”.
Crowds poured on to the streets of Niger’s capital Niamey this week to call for the withdrawal of US forces only days after the arrival of dozens of Russian military instructors. Niger is the third post-coup country to expel French troops, along with Mali and Burkina Faso, and to strengthen military ties with Moscow, including with Africa Corps, the new name for the Wagner Group once headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Blair told the Financial Times that “the risk of contagion” was real, as was the threat posed by Russia. “Familiar predatory agents fan the flames of extremism, emboldening those who would further destabilise the region,” he said.
While it was vital to continue to advocate a return to constitutional rule, said the former prime minister, it was more urgent to talk to the generals who had seized power.
“Failure to engage all leaders in the Sahel now will guarantee that instability reaches well beyond its borders,” he added, implying that western attempts to isolate these military regimes via sanctions and the withdrawal of aid risked pushing them further towards Moscow and other potentially malign actors.
The report noted that, despite more than a decade of counterterrorism efforts, including by France, which sent troops to Mali in 2013 to fight Islamists who had taken over the ancient city of Timbuktu, success had been limited.
One potential solution was the intensification of efforts to bring electrification to a region where four out of five families have no access to the grid. “Development and security go hand in hand,” the report said. It also called for the disbanding of “state-sanctioned militias” that governments in Burkina Faso and elsewhere have encouraged to fight Islamists in the absence of an effective military response.
However, the biggest development challenge was a large cohort of disaffected youth, with two-thirds of the population below the age of 25. “The projected doubling of the Sahel’s population by 2050 and slow progress on development goals and poverty reduction, combined with multiple layers of fragility, do not bode well for a reduction in conflict,” it said.
Data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari
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