Ahmad 
With Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathili accepting a new mediation mission in the Sahel region, the signs of his failure to lead the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) remain present in his new workspace.
Bathili’s new mission coincides with growing political, security and economic turmoil in the Sahel region, and also comes in an attempt to create a multilateral diplomacy to resolve complex regional conflicts, not only based on measures to deal directly with the Sahel crises, but also through the creation of flexible policies that begin with facilitating dialogue between the Sahel countries.
Bathili is expected to carry out this mission in a way that facilitates the restoration of stability in relations between the countries of the region, but his success remains dependent on his ability to provide balanced solutions to all parties, something he was unable to achieve in his previous mission to resolve the Libyan crisis.
Bathili’s mission and ECOWAS
Bathili will face the stumbling block that ECOWAS has encountered in its current policies towards the Sahel countries. The organization, which was established as a regional body to enhance economic and security cooperation between West African countries, has faced major challenges after Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso withdrew from its membership and formed the “Confederation of the African Sahel”.
These events come as a result of various political and security tensions, and also came with the increase in the activity of armed groups in the region that repeatedly carried out terrorist attacks. This security challenge revealed the organization’s inability to deal effectively to enhance political stability, and the withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger represented the peak of the crisis that swept the organization.
ECOWAS has succeeded in the past in settling some internal disputes and conflicts in countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, but it dealt differently with military coups in the three countries through harsh measures that included imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions, and this did not achieve success and prompted those countries to withdraw from the organization.
ECOWAS policies represented a failure that increased political tensions and created an unprecedented escalation within the organization’s countries, which prompted them to re-evaluate their strategy and launch an initiative for the return of the withdrawing countries to the organization through a new diplomacy. Batelli will lead this initiative, although the choices of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have moved far away from ECOWAS policies and adopted a different direction through the “Confederation of the African Sahel”.
Bathili and international politics in Africa
Doubts about the success of Bathili’s mission begin with the challenges he will face as a result of the interventions in the Sahel countries, as there is a real confrontation, at least on the political level, between those countries and Western interventions.
It is noteworthy that ECOWAS was unable to limit international interventions and did not take a clear position on Western policies that intervened in African affairs directly and under various pretexts. Bathili’s new mission will stand in the face of what was left behind by French policy, whose influence has clearly declined, and which was forced to withdraw its forces from the region in successive stages.
At a time when calls are mounting to end the French presence entirely, the French presence in the region and the missions it carried out, such as Operations Serval and Barkhane, affected the transformation that appeared in the countries of the African Sahel. France not only failed to achieve security and stability, but also aroused great resentment among the local population due to the treatment that took on a colonial form.
France has pursued policies that ignored local dynamics and the specificities of different African cultures, which has further complicated the situation. The Sahel region consists of 7 countries, extending from Senegal to the Red Sea, each with its own characteristics, language and ethnic diversity, and therefore we cannot deal with it as if it were a single bloc.
France has not learned from the lessons of the war in Libya or Afghanistan, and other wars that began in the name of fighting terrorism, and ultimately led to real disasters that weakened countries and plundered their resources. Certainly, Bathili’s new mission will be required to dispel the fears of those countries regarding the Western policies that are strongly present within the “ECOWAS” organization.
The decline of French influence prompted the United States to strengthen its presence in the Sahel region, as Washington focused on maintaining its military bases in Niger and imposing a special military reality on the Sahel countries under the pretext of combating terrorism. However, it wanted to expand its role not only militarily but also by leading international efforts in the region, especially since the Sahel countries have become convinced that relying on Russia and China is the best option, as the two countries do not have a colonial history or military bases on the African continent. Africa has also received millions of dollars in free financial and technical aid, and tens of thousands of African students have received their higher education in Russian universities.
Following World War I, and with the beginning of the collapse of the European imperial system, the world witnessed the rise of national liberation movements in Africa, and Africa witnessed constructive relations with Moscow during that period, starting with Liberia, Egypt and Ethiopia. With the end of World War II, Russian support for African liberation movements expanded, and strong relations were established with countries such as Ghana, Libya, Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia.
During the “Year of Africa” in 1960, 17 African countries gained their independence, and the Soviet Union became a major player on the continent, supporting Egypt and Algeria in North Africa, Ethiopia and Tanzania in the East, and even in Central and West Africa.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russia has strengthened its political and economic presence by investing in natural resources and infrastructure in countries such as Guinea, Nigeria, and Angola. The Russian-African summits in 2019 and 2023 confirmed this strategy, emphasizing the importance of Africa in Russian policy and the pursuit of a multipolar world order based on mutual cooperation, respect for sovereignty, neutrality, and non-interference in internal affairs.
This disparity in countries’ dealings with Africa, and the African Sahel in particular, will complicate the new balance at the international level of Bathili’s mission, because the United States has policies that will certainly contradict the state of African consensus outside the framework of American interests.
Doubts about Bathili’s mission
ECOWAS has faced constant criticism for its full adoption of Western policies, and Batelli’s mission is not far from this matter, as it seems to be an attempt to absorb the political transformations that have emerged in the African Sahel countries, and an attempt to contain their effects politically at least after the pressures on them have failed. Batelli’s assumption of his new mission in the Sahel brings the Libyan scenario back to the forefront of the event, as his mission dealt with foreign interventions and sought to draw balances between Western roles and the political solution.
The African Sahel is experiencing similar transformations, as the West is trying to strengthen its influence in a region rich in resources, and to break any possibility for the Sahel countries to formulate new policies that stand in the way of Western influence.
Abdullah Bathili’s mission in the Sahel has dimensions that go beyond the diplomatic framework of good intentions proposed by the initiative regarding dialogue, because its success is linked to international factors and broader Western influence within all ECOWAS countries, and the lessons learned from Bathili’s mission in Libya confirm doubts about his ability to complete his mission because it is ultimately an attempt to limit the options of the Sahel countries in confronting Western roles in the African continent in general.
By Nidal Al-Khedary
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