Middle East Online
Ministers gather in Rabat seeking to boost border security and confront Islamist linked-violence plaguing vast desert region.
By Simon Martelli – RABAT
Terrorism cannot be confronted with individual efforts
Ministers from countries across the Sahel and Maghreb gathered in Rabat on Thursday seeking to boost border security and confront Islamist linked-violence plaguing the vast desert region.
As part of Western efforts to aid the security push, France announced it had signed a contract to train 1,000 policemen in Libya, one of the countries worst affected by the regional unrest.
“We hope to sign another contract to train another 2,000 policemen for counter-terrorism, and an accord with the head of (Libya’s) national security directorate,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the conference.
Tripoli, which hosted the last regional conference on border security in March 2012, has struggled to impose order since NATO-backed rebels overthrew and killed veteran dictator Moamer Gathafi in 2011.
“The Sahel region has become an open space for different terrorist groups, and drugs and arms trafficking networks threaten the security of the whole region,” Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar told delegates.
“The countries of the region have all the political willingness but need the means… to confront the different security challenges they face,” he added.
Delegates at the last meeting adopted an action plan aimed at boosting coordinated efforts to combat terrorism, illegal immigration and organised crime, including drug and arms trafficking.
But Islamist-linked violence that has swept the region since then, including in neighbouring Tunisia and Algeria, highlights the need for ever greater efforts.
Fabius said he had received evidence that members of Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which Washington added to its terror list this week, had received training in Mali’s Infoghas Mountains.
Mali continues to suffer deadly attacks by Islamist insurgents, 10 months after France launched a military operation against Al-Qaeda-linked groups occupying the north, where two French radio journalists were executed at the beginning of November.
Libya’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Abdelaziz on Thursday announced plans to set up a regional task force to monitor implementation of the Tripoli action plan, which he said could be ready within two months.
“The Libyans have been given the mandate to start, in consultation with the neighbouring countries, to establish this mechanism,” Abdelaziz said.
He said another conference would be held to adopt the plan and thrash out “the terms of reference of this task force and the time frame”.
Reflecting the difficulty of closer regional cooperation, Algeria’s Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra did not attend the conference following a major diplomatic spat with Rabat over the Western Sahara, a conflict that has long divided the Maghreb arch-rivals.
Lamamra was instead represented by a foreign ministry official who said he knew nothing about the planned task force.
Despite their vying for influence among African allies, Algeria remains a security heavyweight in the region, and shares long, porous borders with Libya and Mali.
The ongoing cross-border security threat in the Sahara was most starkly illustrated in January when Islamist gunmen overran a gas plant in the Algerian desert, in a bloody four-day siege in which at least 37 hostages were killed.
Stephen O’Brien, Britain’s special representative for the Sahel, emphasised the need for social and economic development alongside the coordinated political track.
“It’s not just a question of the political will at the general level… Above all (we must) also recognise that there is a need to understand the essential basic services that are required by many of the communities.”
Another key focus at the conference is illegal immigration, with memories still fresh of two shipwrecks that claimed more than 400 lives off the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Conflicts in the Sahel region have merely fuelled the flow of sub-Saharan Africans seeking to cross the Mediterranean in the hope of a better life in Europe.
As part of efforts to manage its own migration problems, Morocco this week unveiled “exceptional” measures to give official papers to some of the estimated 25,000-40,000 illegal immigrants in the country.
