Brussels, 18/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - At the end of the first meeting of the EU and the Sahel G5 foreign ministers (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad) in Brussels on Wednesday 17 June (see EUROPE 11336), more operational cooperation between the EU and Sahel region was launched in order to address their common challenges.
Deemed by both parties to be fruitful, this meeting will now be held on a regular basis and will be institutionalised in this format. The three big priorities for this cooperation to make the EU's 2015-2020 action plan for the Sahel more concrete are (1) the fight against terrorism and organised crime; (2) the common management of migratory flows and the fight against trafficker networks; and (3) climate change and the sustainable development of the Sahel region (one of the world's poorest).
“We have decided to work together in a way that is more operational and more active, and to move on from action plans to concrete action. We decided that there should be regular meetings at ministerial level and that we should ask our services, at the technical level, to work on these three priority areas in a very concrete way”, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini told press on Wednesday evening.
Mogherini stated that the EU will allocate over €5 billion in development aid to the Sahel region between 2014 and 2020, or over €8 billion if member states' bilateral aid is added. In her view, “this is the primary way to address the two challenges that we share - the fight against terrorism and the management of migratory flows - because it's by giving hope, opportunities and jobs to the region's young people that we can address these challenges effectively”, she said.
Alongside Mogherini, Moussa Faki, Chad's minister for foreign affairs and African integration, spoke on behalf of his colleagues, saying that there was a “total convergence of views” on the “main challenges” - which are “the security challenge in its various dimensions (the fight against terrorism, trafficking, cross-border crime) and the development issues in a disadvantaged region that gets ravaged by droughts”.
“The Sahel countries are committed. It's to address the common challenges that they have organised themselves into the Sahel G5”, Faki said, announcing that “the G5 summit will be held in N'Djamena [Chad] in a month, or in a month and a half, to roll out a number of concrete actions”.
Among the “very urgent situations”, Faki spoke of “the migration that challenges us” - be it in the transit countries or those of destination. “It's from these areas in sub-Saharan Africa, crossing the Sahara, that most migrants reach Europe, and find an uncontrolled stopover point - Libya”, Faki stated. He was therefore pleased about the convergence of views on the need to cooperate “to find a solution in order to be able to get a state back afloat that is unfortunately becoming a void state”.
In Faki's opinion, fighting against Boko Haram, “which is wreaking havoc in the Chad basin”, is the second emergency being attended to by the EU and Sahel leaders. The region's summit on 11 June, at which the unanimous decision was taken “to make the mixed multi-national force operational (that also received the EU's aid)”, bears witness to this - as does the decision taken by the EU to send a delegation to Abuja the same evening as the EU-Sahel G5 ministerial meeting. “I think we've found the best line of attack in working together and making this step concrete to save the Sahel region - a region that is really in a very, very difficult humanitarian, political and security situation”, Faki concluded. (Aminata Niang)