Why French troops have moved into Mali.

FRENCH President Francois Hollande said at different times: ‘France will not be the policeman of Africa……In no event will France intervene in Mali’.

Months later, on January 11, 2013, he sent 2,500 troops and warplanes into the Mali crisis in Operation Serval.

The president saw a need for immediate intervention because Mali was being overrun by jihadists from the north who were moving towards the capital Bamako.

UN members have backed the French intervention.

A French poll on January 16 showed that 75 per cent of those surveyed supported the president’s initiative. French politicians, too, backed the decision in the first few days.

But criticism soon emerged from the opposition.

Former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who spoke out against the war in Iraq at the UN in 2003, criticised the ‘haste’ of ‘warmongers’. He said such wars create a spiral of violence, and more so as none of the conditions for success had been met in the case of Mali which has no single war objective, no credible support in Mali as a failed state with a failed army, and no genuine regional support.