UNITED NATIONS: UN experts said in a new report that Malian armed forces allegedly carried out an operation with “white-skinned soldiers” near the border with Mauritania in March, shooting and burning at least 33 civilians in one of several operations where the country’s ruling military appeared to work closely with likely Russian mercenaries.
In the first three months of this year, they said 543 civilians were killed and 269 injured, according to the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali.
In the grim and wide-ranging report obtained Friday by The Associated Press, the panel of experts said the political situation remains tense and warned that the 2015 peace agreement between Mali’s government and non-extremist armed independence groups “is threatened by a potential risk of confrontation between the parties for the first time since July 2017.”
They said 12 million people need humanitarian assistance, a sharp increase from 5.9 million last year, including 1.9 million people facing the threat of “acute malnutrition” during the current lean season which lasts through August.
Mali has struggled to contain an Islamic extremist insurgency since 2012. Extremist rebels were forced from power in Mali’s northern cities with the help of a French-led military operation, but they regrouped in the desert and began launching attacks on the Malian army and its allies. Insecurity has worsened with attacks on civilians and UN peacekeepers.
In August 2020, Malian President Boubacar Ibrahim Keita, who died in January, was overthrown in a coup that included Assimi Goita, then an army colonel. Last June, Goita was sworn in as president of a transitional government after carrying out his second coup in nine months and later in the year it reportedly decided to allow the deployment of Russia’s Wagner group.
Wagner passes itself off as a private military contractor but its long believed commitment to Russian interests have become apparent in Ukraine, where its mercenaries are among the Russian forces currently fighting in the country’s separatist eastern regions. In sub-Saharan Africa, Wagner has gained substantial footholds for Russia in Central African Republic and Sudan as well as Mali, where analysts said its role goes beyond merely providing security services.
The 78-page report by the UN experts doesn’t name Wagner in connection with any incidents, but it describes several operations where Malian forces were joined by white soldiers, including one on March 5 in the town of Robinet El Ataye in the Segou region near the border with Mauritania.
According to testimony the experts said, a group of “white-skinned soldiers” arrived in the town, which has a water well frequented by Mauritanians who cross the border in search of pasture for cattle, rounded up men and boys, tied their hands behind their backs and blindfolded them. Women and children were told to go home and the soldiers that reportedly stripped houses of “all possessions including bedding, cellular phones, jewelry, cooking utensils and clothing,” they said.
Later in the morning, the panel said, Malian soldiers arrived in the village started beating the bound and blindfolded men “with heavy sticks used by the herders on their flocks.”
The women heard screams but were blocked by soldiers from leaving their homes, and the Malian forces then released some younger men and carried off at least 33 men, 29 Mauritanians and four Malians who were ethnic Tuaregs, it said.
The women waited for the return of the men, but the panel said they were notified by relatives a day later that the men’s bodies had been found about 4 kilometers away, and they “had been shot and then burnt,” the experts said.
The panel said “a similar pattern of pillage and beatings” occurred at five other locations, but the only place civilians were killed was at Robinet El Ataye.
“In two other locations visited by the Malian Armed Forces, a helicopter carrying `white-skinned soldiers’ allegedly landed at the beginning of the operations” it said.
On the political front, the experts said the 2015 peace agreement is stalled, none of the political and institutional reforms in the agreement have been finalized, a high-level decision-making meeting on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration quotas for combatants initially planned for Feb. 9, 2021 has yet to take place, and there is “a perceptible lack of trust between the government and the signatory armed groups.”
UN experts: Malian military and ‘white’ soldiers killed 33
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UN experts: Malian military and ‘white’ soldiers killed 33
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
