General
Three Countries Officially Quit Major West African ECOWAS Alliance
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger accused the bloc of having double standards in punishing their military juntas. Negotiations failed to change their minds.
Three military-ruled countries have officially withdrawn from the West African regional alliance known as ECOWAS, the bloc said on Wednesday, defying pressure from the group to return the countries to civilian democratic rule.
The alliance, the Economic Community of West African States, offers its members visa-free travel, favorable trade tariffs and access to a $702 billion market for the region’s 400 million people. The three nations — Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — announced their intention to leave last year.
Negotiations between their leaders and the bloc then failed to reach an agreement that would keep them in. Instead, the three juntas are forging ahead with their own grouping, the Alliance of Sahelian States, A.E.S. by its French acronym, and have created a military force of 5,000 troops.
The three juntas presented their exit as essential for their sovereignty and portrayed the alliance as a neocolonialist force carrying out a foreign agenda.
“ECOWAS and the jihadists are the same,” Assimi Goïta, Mali’s president, said on Jan. 10, referring to the extremists who have destabilized a vast area of the Sahel, the arid belt that stretches coast to coast below the Sahara. “The only difference is that some carry weapons and others do not.”
Their withdrawal will weaken ECOWAS, which celebrates its 50th year this May and had 16 members at its founding. It will now have only 12: Mauritania left in 2000. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, though not the most populous or economically strong countries in the region, account for more than half the alliance’s 1.9 million square miles and 17 percent of its 400 million population.
