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UN peacekeeping force in Mali concludes withdrawal

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The United Nations said in a statement on Monday that its peacekeeping mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, is about to conclude its evacuation from the nation.

MINUSMA chief, El-Ghassum Wane, said, “UN funds, agencies and programmes were in Mali well before the deployment of MINUSMA and will stay in Mali well after the withdrawal.”

Security analysts caution that the region may now be the centre of a conflict in the north as rebel organizations and the army try to retake areas that the United Nations has left unoccupied, further destabilizing Mali, where Islamist militants associated with the Islamic State and al Qaeda are also present.

Since the military junta that overthrew the government in a coup in June 2021 ordered the UN to withdraw from its ten-year peacekeeping mission, violence in Mali has increased. In response in June, the UN Security Council voted to end its decade-long peacekeeping mission to Mali as relations with the junta led by Col Assimi Goita fall apart.

Mali, under Goita, has aligned with Russia in its bid to fight against Jihadist terrorists and has engaged the controversial Russian mercenary group, Wagner. The position has not sat well with the UN, the United States and France, and has affected ties with the West African country.

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Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

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Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

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Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

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New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.

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