The French President has announced that it will remove its troops and its diplomats from Niger as per the request of the new Nigerien government:
France will pull its military and diplomats from Niger after a successful coup by anti-French forces, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday. The move will see around 1,500 soldiers leave by the end of the year.
“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron told France 2 television on Sunday. “And we will put an end to our military cooperation with the Niger authorities,” he continued, adding that French troops would return home in “the months to come.”
Niger’s pro-French president, Mohamed Bazoum, was ousted in a military coup in July. Capitalizing on widespread public dissatisfaction with France’s decade-long anti-insurgent operation in the region, the coup leaders immediately suspended a military cooperation agreement with the French government and demanded that French troops leave the country.
This is a small, but serious defeat for The Empire That Never Ended. Clown World is imperial and it’s European satrapies are economically dependent upon draining the resources from Africa without paying full price for them. The growing BRICSIA alliance is quickly winning over the allegiance of the African nations in part because they are offering genuine trade rather than corruption and parasitical neo-colonialism, although it will be interesting to see if China can resist the temptation to stake a similar claim to Africa’s rich natural resources when it has the power to do so.
Russia, of course, has no need for them.
In either case, this will probably not be the last African country to demand European or US troops to leave. And it probably won’t be too long before Asian countries start following suit, although it is unlikely that the USA will politely accede to any such demands from Japan or Korea.
And, of course, France hasn’t actually withdrawn them yet…