Imperialist scramble for Mali – defeat and kick out the Swedish troops

In August of last year, US and allied troops left Afghanistan, after a 20-year occupation. The Afghan intervention was always about securing US and Western geopolitical interests, about control over the region and of oil, but was described publicly in completely different terms: as an intervention for “human rights” and democracy. The Swedish political establishment was united in its support of the Swedish part of the intervention. For example, the Left Party voted four times in support of the Swedish intervention. However, the intervention failed in both aspects – as an imperialist plunder and as a way to build “democracy”. It was a fiasco, not least to the Afghan people.

But Afghanistan is not the only imperialist campaign to come to a catastrophic end. In 2013, in the shadow of Afghanistan, France launched an intervention in its old colony Mali in Western Africa, under the name Operation Serval. The French campaign was, in a tired old refrain, supposed to quickly stabilise the country and fight Islamist rebel groups, among others. That France was the initiator was no coincidence – since its formal independence in 1960, Mali has been tightly knit to its former colonial power, with French companies dominating the country’s economy. The semi-colonial rule has served French capital well, but impoverished the Malian people, making them one of the poorest in the world. (For more on the French intervention in Mali, see French troops out of Mali, down with French colonialism!). Apart from the French intervention, a UN mission, MINUSMA, was launched in 2013 after an “invitation” from the non-elected Malian interim president, who promised “total and relentless war” against ethnic groups in rebellion against the state. 220 Swedish troops participate in MINUSMA since 2014, after parliamentary support from the Social Democrats and the Left Party. Eight Swedish officers also participate in a EU military training mission.

From MINUSMA to Task Force Takuba
The UN mission quickly repelled the Islamist groups, at least for the time being, but stayed in place, while France stepped up its intervention with Operation Barkhane, from 2014. This French intervention is not UN approved, but continues the “war against terror” with 5,000 troops. After intensive lobbying from Swedish Minister of Defence, Peter Hultqvist, Swedish special forces joined Operation Barkhane in February, 2021. Sweden is part of Task Force Takuba, a military task force with access to helicopters and air support. The Swedish contribution was prepared with joint exercises with NATO member France in the north of Sweden, and Sweden is, with its 150 troops, a key element of the operation, joined by a few Estonian and Czech forces and, until recently, Danish ones.

On the Swedish Armed Forces website¹, it is said that the Swedish initiative is a “long-term involvement to further security and, in time, support a peaceful development in the country”. One year later, how did these aspirations pan out?

Under the French, and later French-Swedish, intervention, Malian civil society and the French-backed state structure has continued to collapse. As Social Democratic writer Olle Svenning notes in Aftonbladet (April 24, 2021):

Thousands of civilians have been murdered. 55 French soldiers have been sent home in Tricolour draped coffins. UN soldiers, not in Mali in order to fight, have been killed more frequently than in most similar UN missions. In Mali, militias have carried out massacres and torched entire villages. In an area around the city of Mopti, last year 1,500 people were killed in such attacks. Human rights organisations account for hundreds of people killed without trial. The prisons are horribly overcrowded, Guantánamo style re-education camps litter the country. The French military have murdered civilians, for instance bombing 19 wedding guests to death last year.²

Several peace agreements have been signed between the regime and the Tuareg rebels, in order to soon break down in further fighting. What started out as an attempt to push back Tuareg rebels and to fight Islamist groups have, as the situation has worsened, more and more turned into a chaotic intervention in a raging civil war, where French (and, thus, Swedish) forces ally with groups who abuse civilians and carry out extrajudicial killings of people thought to be connected to the Islamists. As the violence spirals, the popularity of the intervention, in Mali as in France, has lessened. And resistance in Mali isn’t only expressed through mass demonstrations – in April of 2021, three Swedish soldiers were injured by a road-side bomb,⁴ and as late as January 22 of this year, the Task Force Takuba bases in Gao and Menaka were shelled with grenades, killing one non-Swedish soldier⁵. Speaking to Swedish Radio⁶, a Swedish officer of the UN mission MINUSMA recounts how the military base was first constructed in the middle of the city of Gao, to then be moved outside the city, to a new, walled-in base, as the security situation worsened.

As we move into 2022, no peace is in sight in Mali. Meanwhile, if anything the ties between Swedish and French imperialism have strengthened. For example, the Swedish government signed a letter of intent pledging closer military co-operation with the nuclear power France⁷, and in November of last year, Sweden took charge, alone, of Task Force Takuba⁸. In the media, the new, Swedish Task Force Takuba commander, appears using only his first name (“Peter”), and he poses, his face covered, in propaganda pictures on the website of the French Department of Defence.

Coups and military rule
Over ten years of UN and French interventions in Mali, the French occupation forces have relied on close co-operation with the Malian regime, long lead by president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (described by Olle Svenning as “a French puppet, a kleptocrat who emptied the state’s coffers with his family”). Last year, the protests grew against the president and the bloody French intervention in the country, and Keïta was deposed in a coup d’état in August. In May of 2021, soon after the arrival of Swedish special forces, yet another coup followed. Both times, factions of the military lead the coups. Since the latest coup, officer Assimi Goïta heads the military junta in power.

In an interview with the daily newspaper DN⁹, Diana Janse, Swedish ambassador to Mali until March of 202, questioned the Swedish intervention in light of the coups and military rule:  “This is our biggest military involvement abroad. (..) After the first coup, at least there was a process towards a civilian transitional structure which would take Mali back under democratic rule in early 2022. But now a junta leader is the president. (..) It’s not reasonable for Swedish special forces to support and train the military junta’s soldiers.” At the time, Minister of Defence Hultqvist had nothing to say about the fact that Swedish soldiers support and train the soldiers of a military dictatorship. The parliamentary decision on Mali still goes, said Hultqvist. This despite the fact that France already had started discussing withdrawing from the failed intervention in Mali.

Since then, two things have happened to make Hultqvist, and France, more hesitant about the intervention. Firstly, the elections promised by the junta have been postponed for five years into the future, and secondly – and most important to France and Sweden – the new junta is turning away from France and towards another imperialist protector: Russia.

Imperialist scramble for Mali
Russian influence in Mali is evident through the involvement of the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organisation thought to be close to the Kremlin. It is now active on the ground, assisting Malian government forces. The Russian involvement, as reported on in Swedish Radio¹⁰, isn’t unexpected from a historical standpoint: aside from the dependence on France, the Malian state has historically also relied on co-operation with the Soviet Union. Part of the Malian state elite has also been trained in Russian institutions.

But the closer connections to Moscow and the tighter control over state power wielded by the new junta, is not well received by political elites in Paris and Stockholm. After the latest coup, the regional political union ECOWAS, in which France is considered influential, turned against Mali and, in January, introduced extensive sanctions: all borders to the country were closed, financial transactions shut down, ambassadors called back, etc. – sanctions which, according to local experts, will mainly hit the already suffering Malian people. The junta responded with counter-actions of their own, and with expelling the French ambassador from the country, after the French government having called the junta rule “irresponsible”. As the junta Foreign Minister commented, correctly, regarding the French criticism of the postponed elections, French calls for democracy are selective: “France, which says it defends democracy, has gone to other countries and installed heads of state who have carried out coups, it has applauded them.”¹¹ The Malian regime also called for Denmark to “immediately” withdraw its special forces from the country.

Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ann Linde, is now openly worrying that the Swedish forces might be next in line to be expelled. According to the Swedish press¹², “intensive discussions” took place within Task Force Takuba in January over the future of the intervention. “The government [in Mali] has no legitimate position, and that they’ve brought over Wagner, a proxy for the Russian regime, is unacceptable”, says Minister of Defence Peter Hultqvist to a Swedish news agency. The Swedish government is supposed to inform parliament about a possible withdrawal of Swedish forces on February 18, at the latest. Several parties in parliament now demand that the withdrawal is pushed back from 2024, which is the current end date.¹³

Of course, the sudden Swedish-French turn against the latest military junta in Mali has nothing to do with “democracy”. As we saw, as late as this past summer, the Swedish Minister of Defence had no comments to his own ambassador’s criticism about Sweden backing up a military regime. In September, with the same junta in power as today, he still argued for extending the intervention.¹⁴ When Peter Hultqvist and his French counterpart, Florence Parly, bluster against the involvement of the Wagner Group and the lack of “legitimacy” of the junta is instead the rage of a colonial power, France, over the fact that their puppets aren’t doing as they are told. The hypocrisy is complete when Hultqvist, going further than France, explains that Sweden must stay in Mali in order to counter “foreign involvement” – from Russia. Foreign involvement of the right kind, to counter the wrong kind, that is.

In light of the current military escalation between NATO and Russia, with Sweden clearly on NATO’s side, Mali turns into yet another battlefield between the same parties, in a “race for Africa” where China, too, is involved. It is an imperialist scramble over Malian resources and over geopolitical power in the Sahel, where coups, massacres of civilians and increasing instability is a price for the Malian people to pay. And Russia, of course, has its own reasons to intervene in Mali. No more than France or Sweden does Russia have “democratic” reasons for its support to the military junta.

How complete the French withdrawal ends up being remains to be seen, but Peter Hultqvist makes it seem like the Swedish government is prepared to continue France’s colonial war on its own for at least two more years. One can speculate over Hultqvist’s reasons for this. One openly stated reason is, cynically enough, that the anonymous, masked Swedish soldiers are given a chance to train in Mali. A disintegrating state in Mali is thus turned into a lesson for Swedish imperialist forces. Another possible explanation can be gleaned from Sweden’s nefarious involvement in the occupation of Afghanistan. According to secret cables from a highly placed US embassy representative in Stockholm, leaked by Wikileaks last year¹⁵, one reason for Sweden’s involvement in Afghanistan was to marked Swedish JAS Gripen fighter aircraft. In the same way, the Mali intervention could be a global advertising poster for Swedish war production.

Sweden out of Mali
“We call them terror groups, because those are the methods they deploy against the civilian population. They terrorise them”, explains Anders Löfberg, who heads the special forces of the Swedish Armed Forces to Swedish Radio¹⁶, about the people the Swedes are in Mali to hunt down. But it is a failed hunt which, under French leadership, has obviously only caused to further the very disintegration in Mali that breeds the Islamist groups. And if you ask someone like Hamadoune Dicko, a Malian civilian whose friends were some of those killed by a French bombing at a wedding in January of last year, and who has also been interviewed by Swedish Radio, Löfberg’s description probably fits the French, and Swedish, troops better. France naturally denies that any civilians were killed in the attack, which has prompted Human Rights Watch, which has investigated the event and interviewed witnesses, to ask why France attacks the credibility of the very people they claim to be in Mali to protect.

In Mali, like in France, resistance grows against Operation Barkhane. Several large demonstrations have been held in Mali, under slogans such as “France – get out”. The mistrust in France also explains why some Malians now even welcome the Russian forces also now in place. “I am ready to make a pact with Satan to drive out France and its terrorist allies”, as one protestor told Reuters¹⁷ at a mass demonstration in Bamako this month.

Protests in Mali and France – but what about Sweden? Here, silence reigns over the Swedish contribution to the war. In December, Arbetarmakt organised a public meeting, “What’s happening in Mali?”, in order to start a discussion about the war in Sweden, to take the first steps towards an internationalist movement to end the war, and to discuss the demands to be posed for such a movement.

As we discussed at that meeting, and as was pointed out in Marco Lassalle’s article on the French involvement in Mali, such a movement needs to start with the demand for all French troops and its allies to leave Mali, including “peace-keeping” missions from the EU and UN. The example of Afghanistan shows clearly what imperialist attempts to create “peace” in its former colonies result in. Indeed, the war in Mali is now referred to as “France’s Afghanistan”.

The forces fighting the imperialist occupation in Mali today are likely largely politically reactionary, but that doesn’t change the fact that attacks on French and Swedish “terrorist” forces in Mali, in the eyes of us communists, are rightful, no matter who happens to hold the gun. As socialists, we naturally want the struggle to be carried out by progressive forces, but building a movement in Mali to kick out the French forces and to bring down the junta starts from acknowledging the anti-imperialist struggle as legitimate. To us Trotskyists and internationalists active in Sweden, it’s of particular importance to show our solidarity especially with the struggle against Swedish soldiers in Mali. The main enemy is at home – defeat and kick out the Swedish forces from Mali! But if French and Swedish forces leave the country only to be replaced by Russian ones, which currently looks like one possible outcome, nothing is won. In the imperialist infighting between EU and Russia over Mali, we Trotskyists do not take sides for one imperialist power over another. All imperialist forces out of Mali, including the Russian paramilitaries! Neither would the Islamists taking power be any step forward – the working class of Mali must lead the struggle!

When the war against Afghanistan started, and the war against Iraq, Arbetarmakt took up anti-imperialist slogans much like the ones described above. We lead contingents in the big anti-war demonstrations under slogans such as “Defend Iraq” and “Smash Swedish imperialism!” Today, that anti-imperialist movement is no longer present on the streets here. Rather, parties like the Left Party has moved further in a pro-imperialist direction, supporting the invasion of Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya, and offering at the most very mild protests against the NATO war drive against Russia.

A rejuvenated, large anti-war movement in Sweden would not have to limit itself just to demonstrations. Through strikes and workers’ action, we could physically stop Swedish war materiel from reaching Mali, or for that part to Israel, where it’s used in the war against the Palestinians. That is the international solidarity Mali needs now, and which Arbetarmakt fights to lay the groundwork for. We call on all anti-war activists, anti-imperialists and internationalists to join us in that struggle.

Arbetarmakt, Swedish section of the League for the Fifth International

¹Mali – Task Force Takuba, Swedish Armed Forces
²Varför deltar Sverige i kriget i Mali?, Aftonbladet, 2021-04-26
³According to Jonathan Pedneault, Human Rights Watch, interview in Sverige på frontlinjen, Konflikt, Sveriges radio, 2021-01-30
⁴Tre soldater lindrigt sårade av vägbomb i Mali, Swedish Armed Forces, 2021-04-22
⁵Granatattacker i Mali – inga svenskar skadade, Swedish Armed Forces, 2022-01-23
⁶Sverige på frontlinjen
⁷”Frankrike och Sverige ska utöka försvarssamarbetet”, DN Debatt, 2021-09-23
⁸Sverige tar över befäl för elitstyrka i Mali, SVT, 2021-11-01, och Task Force Takuba nu under svenskt befäl, Swedish Armed Forces, 2021-11-11
⁹Svensk militär insats i Mali ifrågasätts, DN, 2021-06-27
¹⁰Ryska legosoldater stör Sverige, Konflikt, Sveriges radio, 2021-01-30
¹¹Mali junta expels French ambassador: state TV, AFP, 2022-01-31
¹²Hultqvist: Oacceptabelt med ryska legosoldater, TT, 2022-01-28
¹³Sverige lämnar Mali 2024, DN, 2021-10-15
¹⁴Peter Hultqvist vill förlänga Sveriges farligaste insats, SvD, 2021-09-25
¹⁵Ur telegrammet ”Urging Sweden to do more in Afghanistan”, dated 2009-01-11, Wikileaks
¹⁶Sverige på frontlinjen
¹⁷Thousands take to the streets of Bamako in anti-French protest, Reuters, 2022-02-05