Niger’s Coup and America’s Choice

Washington Should Push for Mediation, Not Military Intervention – By Hannah Rae Armstrong

On July 26, Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum was detained at his home by his own presidential security force. Within 48 hours, the chief of Bazoum’s guard, General Abdourahmane Tchiani, had secured support from the military and named himself the head of a transitional government. As of late August, Bazoum is apparently still stuck in his presidential palace while France and a bloc of West African states are preparing for a military intervention. Tchiani has dug in, warning that any foreign attempt to reverse his takeover will be no “walk in the park.”

Coups in Niger are a relatively routine affair, a largely bloodless reshuffling of elites in the capital. Over the last six decades, the country has experienced five coups. But this one is different. It comes a mere two years after the first democratic transition of power in a country now widely seen as the West’s last bulwark against terrorism in the African Sahel. Visiting Niger in March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared the country a “model of democracy.” But the West deluded itself into thinking that Niger was on a more stable course than it really was.

This crisis should not have come as a surprise. Over the past decade, efforts aimed at stabilizing the Sahel—led by France and backed by the United States—have steadily weakened the region’s civil institutions and failed to deliver security. They swept military rulers into power in four of the five Sahel states; after the West withdrew support for those new regimes, the juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso turned to Russia for security assistance. The West’s appreciation of Bazoum was detached from reality on the ground in Niger, where he faced rising discontent since he took office in 2021.

More is at stake now than in past coups. The crisis keeps gaining terrible new dimensions: immediately after taking power, the Nigerien junta canceled French defense agreements and met with leaders of the brutal Wagner paramilitary company to discuss possible forms of cooperation. Just as quickly, attacks by groups aligned with al Qaeda and the Islamic State multiplied on its borders. Meanwhile, two erstwhile rebel leaders allied with Bazoum launched new armed movements to restore him to power.

But a rift has opened over to how to resolve the crisis, with France and West African countries seeking to use force to restore Bazoum and others urging a diplomatic solution. Many observers expected the United States to follow France’s lead, as it typically has in the region. So far, however, Washington has wisely encouraged mediation, recognizing that a military intervention in Niger would likely trigger new conflict between regional factions backed by rival foreign powers. The United States should refuse to abandon its position and spare no effort to prevent war.

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

Domestic tensions were the immediate trigger for the coup. But the crisis was also the culmination of a decade of ill-conceived foreign-led stabilization policies in the Sahel. In 2013, when jihadi groups seemed poised to seize Bamako, France sent several thousand troops to Mali. While the French did eliminate some top jihadi leaders, its pursuit of them caused the jihadis to fan out across central Mali and into the tri-border region alongside Niger and Burkina Faso.

What started as a contained intervention suffered from mission creep. Ignoring Sahelian calls for political dialogue, France ended up playing an outsize role in multiple Sahel countries’ security and politics. In the late 2010s, facing increasingly widespread rural insurgencies, France established counterterrorism partnerships with ethnic militias aligned with the Malian government. As communal tensions mounted, fighters massacred civilians and communities that had recently lived in relative peace had to arm themselves for the sake of self-defense.

The relentless spread of violence turned many ordinary Sahelians against the regimes that partnered with France. Soldiers resisted being sent to their slaughter; civilians increasingly perceived their own leaders to be proxies of Paris. The spiraling violence and the sharp rise in anti-French sentiment led to coups in Mali in 2020 and Burkina Faso in 2022. In August of that year, as its relations with Bamako unraveled, France completely withdrew its forces from Mali.

Paris did not send its soldiers home, however. It shipped many to Niger. This illuminates why so many external observers were eager to tout the two-round election that Niger held in late 2020 and early 2021 as a kind of miracle—one that, overnight, created the Sahel’s “last bastion of democracy,” as the news outlet France24 put it. Niger had to carry Western hopes for stabilizing the Sahel alone.

WESTERN PUNT

But Westerners overlooked just how many Nigeriens perceived the vote as theater. Bazoum, a former cabinet minister, emerged from the inner circle of his predecessor, Mahamadou Issoufou. Issoufou handpicked him as his successor, and to smooth his path to power, Issoufou had Bazoum’s main opposition candidate arrested on false charges of child trafficking. In February 2021, when state media outlets announced Bazoum’s narrow victory, hundreds of opposition supporters took to the streets to declare the results fraudulent. Issoufou’s police promptly arrested nearly 500 people and shut off the Internet for weeks.

Most Nigeriens expected little change under Bazoum. He tolerated corruption and kept in place repressive Issoufou-era policies such as a 2019 cybercrime law used to prosecute journalists, bloggers, and civil society activists who protested government repression and security-force abuses. But it was Bazoum’s choice to allow France to make Niger its new base for its Sahel military operations that hurt him the most.

To shore up its position in the Sahel, in the second half of 2022, France deployed 1,000 soldiers to Niger; from France, Bazoum received 70 million additional euros in new grants and loans for badly needed food and infrastructure. This was a risky deal for Bazoum, but he made a bet that he could keep the French presence discreet, humbled as France was by its retreat from Mali.

This bet cemented his status as a darling of the West. The United States, too, needs a stable and friendly Niger; it has also developed substantial security interests there. Washington uses a CIA drone base in Dirkou to conduct secret surveillance missions over southern Libya. Recently, it invested over $100 million in an air base in the northern regional capital, Agadez, to expand U.S. intelligence capabilities in the region. The United States keeps roughly 1,000 of its soldiers at bases there and in the capital, Niamey.

LIFE IS A BOOMERANG

But Bazoum’s courtship of the West put him dangerously out of step with his own population. Even before France’s recent West African military adventures, Nigeriens had a marked distaste for the country. For decades, France has used corrupt and sometimes even illegal practices to secure cheap access to Nigerien uranium for its nuclear power industry, leaving Niger unable to profit from its exports.

A November 2021 killing of three protesters by a French convoy entering Niger reopened decades-old wounds, and throughout 2022, a civil society coalition, the M62 movement, held demonstrations in the capital to demand the departure of French forces. In January, Bazoum detained the group’s leader, Abdoulaye Seydou, on charges of undermining public order.

This popular dissatisfaction emboldened disgruntled military actors. Bazoum had always struggled to rein in his military. After thwarting an attempted coup days before his inauguration, he purged dozens of senior officers. This past April, he fired the Nigerien army’s chief of staff, and just before the coup, he was reportedly on the verge of sacking Tchiani.

Bazoum’s courtship of the West put him dangerously out of step with his own population.

Both would end up leaders of the junta. Bazoum’s pro-Western stance and his crackdown on the generals forged an unlikely alliance between his civil society and military opponents: after the coup, the junta agreed to release Seydou in exchange for M62’s support.

Bazoum’s mistakes, however, must not obscure his successes. The approach taken by France, Burkina Faso, and Mali toward battling insurgents—partnering with ethnic militias—sent violence skyrocketing. Bazoum, by contrast, looked for ways to address root causes and prevent escalation. He engineered a uniquely wise security policy he called an “open hand” approach, facilitating political dialogue between insurgents and the government, brokering cease-fires, and offering amnesty to defectors.

At the same time, he beefed up formal border-security operations by his military and secured French and U.S. air support. The approach paid dividends: Niger’s roughly 200-square-mile border zone with Mali saw an 80 percent drop in violence against civilians between 2021 and 2022.

Historically, northern Nigeriens have been excluded from government, making the area particularly restive. The tight-knit relationships Bazoum carefully cultivated with northern elites also quietly shored up stability there. It is regrettable that Bazoum, a former philosophy professor, did not get the chance to make good on his promise to rebuild the Nigerien education system, a profoundly urgent need in a country with a high fertility rate (6.8 births per woman), a low literacy rate (37 percent), and persistent food insecurity.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

It is critical to ensure that the progress under Bazoum is not lost. But some very powerful players are now acting as if the region can be saved only by saving Bazoum. Leading this coalition are France and the Economic Community of West African States, a regional political and economic union. Fearing coups could go viral in the region, ECOWAS has been particularly bellicose: along with its preparations to deploy troops to Niger, it has imposed harsh sanctions that have already cut off 70 percent of the country’s power supply. France, fearing the loss of its last ally in the Sahel, has stated that it intends to lend military support to the ECOWAS efforts.

The United States, however, has broken from France to advocate for a more pacifist response. Washington’s stance has come as a surprise. The United States has generally been content to follow France’s lead in the Sahel in exchange for support for U.S. endeavors in the Middle East. But the United States has stopped short of calling the situation a “coup”—a declaration that, by U.S. law, would require it to sever military assistance to Niger. A full three weeks after the junta took power, the Pentagon was still describing the crisis as an “attempted coup.”

Blinken has stated clearly that the Niger crisis has “no acceptable military solution.” He and other U.S. leaders are repeatedly calling for a peaceful resolution and the release of the president, not his reinstatement. This distinction acknowledges that the junta has ousted Bazoum from power.

Some powerful players are acting as if Niger can be saved only by saving Bazoum.

Two poles are emerging: those who believe that using force to reverse the Nigerien coup will solidify long-term security and those who believe a military intervention must be avoided. On August 9, in Washington, Blinken hosted Algerian Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf; Algeria is the Sahel’s most powerful mediator state. In an interview, Attaf declared that his country’s goal was a peaceful solution to the crisis. The African Union, too, has distanced itself from the outright saber-rattling of ECOWAS.

According to a top African diplomat, who spoke anonymously because he is not authorized to comment formally on the matter, the memory of Libya’s collapse weighed heavily on the AU ruling. “Now, you have a bad government” in Niger, he said. “But if you bomb them, you get no government. Just jihadis and factions.” He pointed out that 12 years after NATO’s intervention into the Libyan uprising, there is still no formal government in Tripoli.

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

Advocates of a military intervention are appealing to great-power rivalries to drum up support. A French foreign ministry spokesperson cited the prospect of Russian intervention to justify restoring Bazoum. Writing from detention, Bazoum himself warned in <span;>The<span;> <span;>Washington Post<span;> that if the coup succeeds, the “entire central Sahel region could fall to Russian influence.”

But Washington’s current course is correct, and U.S. policymakers must resist calls to back an intervention. It is by no means inevitable that a proxy war between Russia and the West will break out in the Sahel. In fact, a military intervention would only increase the likelihood of more extensive meddling in the region by Russia. The junta appears interested in partnering with Moscow, but to date, Moscow has remained equivocal. In the event of a challenge to the junta by foreign militaries, however, Russia could be obliged to make good on promises to protect its African partners.

The bigger obstacle to staying the course is that any serious push to resolve the crisis peacefully would likely require the United States to recognize the junta. In the immediate term, recognition conflicts with President Joe Biden’s values-driven foreign policy. But it would also be meaningful to Nigeriens to see a Western power finally acknowledge their deep wish to see a diplomacy-driven approach, not yet more foreign troops rampaging through their villages.

Washington’s moves carry a lot of weight in the Sahel.

For a peaceful solution to yield any long-term good, however, the United States must urgently turn its attention to two specific challenges. First, Bazoum’s smart security approach in the tri-border region is crumbling. With soldiers’ attention turned toward the capital, insurgents are taking advantage of the breach. Niger’s new military leaders may perceive a dialogue-driven strategy as too soft, following the lead of their counterparts in Burkina Faso and Mali and enlisting volunteers for militias. Because the United States runs training programs for Nigerien military officers, it already has close ties to some junta leaders. By impressing on them the gains of Bazoum’s approach, U.S. partners should encourage continuity on the security policies that were paying off.

Second, the United States must attend to the risk of rebellions in the north. Northern economic, political, and military elites enjoyed close links to Bazoum and his predecessor. Fundamentally, however, Niamey never delivered on most of its pledges in its 1995 peace agreement to end a four-year war with northern rebels, particularly its vow to help northern Nigeriens profit more from their uranium resources. Already, two Bazoum loyalists have opened new rebel fronts, seeking arms, recruits, and foreign backing to resist the junta.

A potential new generation of northern rebels has easy access to weapons as well as funds from mining and drug trafficking. The U.S. should leverage an offer of recognition or continuing military cooperation to urge junta leaders to include northern leaders in the new government. This inclusion would do much to reassure northern communities that they will not face persecution at an extremely precarious moment.

Washington’s moves carry a lot of weight. Unlike France, the United States still enjoys a favorable reputation and goodwill across the Sahel. Locals and officials have tended to perceive the discreet way it deploys its military in the region as an opportunity for partnerships rather than as a violent disruption. It must not disrupt that goodwill by repeating France’s mistakes. As undesirable as a coup may be, the risks of attempting to use force are far worse.

[Foreign Affairs]