Algeria exports security threats to Sahel- SIPRI
Algeria has shown reluctancy to support its southern neighbors in their joint efforts to counter terrorism through the G5 force, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a recent study.
Algeria “has shown itself willing to export security threats to Mali to secure its own territory and safeguard its oil and gas exploitation sites,” said SIPRI.
The study ascribes Algeria’s unwillingness to back G5 as initiative because it views such a collective security initiative as “advancing the French agenda”.
“Algeria has made last ditch to revive its own inchoate Joint Operational Staff Committee (Comité d’état-major opérationnel conjoint, CEMOC), a force that it has failed to mobilize since 2010, in part due to Algeria’s reluctance to give its Sahelian neighbors a reciprocal right of pursuit past its borders,” SIPRI noted.
The study also points to the chronic insecurity in the Sahel as a fallout of the Malian crisis has been complicated by development challenges and weak institutions in a region where terrorist groups took advantage of porous borders to advance their agenda, the Stockhom International Peace Research Institute said in a recent study.
The study, entitled Pursuing Elusive Stability in the Sahel, said the attack last month on villagers in Mali highlights the numerous challenges to stability in the region posed by Sahel state incapacity to address natural hazards, food insecurity, extreme poverty (80 per cent live on less than €2 per day), a lack of educational opportunities and high youth unemployment.
“These development concerns add to the region’s already precarious stability and, at times, compete with state-level security and economic issues,” the research paper available on SIPRI website said.
Despite the creation of the G5 in the name of collective security between five Sahel states, “efforts to stabilize the region often rely on weak, corrupt or absent state institutions, whose derelictions incite a marketplace of alternative actors attempting to provide the missing links for populations, further delegitimizing central governments.”
