Niger's junta has ordered French ambassador Sylvain Itte to leave the country, as relations between the West African country and its former colonial ruler deteriorated further.
“On Friday, Niger's foreign ministry announced that French ambassador Sylvain Itte had 48 hours to leave, claiming he refused to meet with the new rulers and citing French government actions that were ‘contrary to the interests of Niger’.
Paris has since rejected the demand, saying that ‘the putschists do not have the authority to make this request’.
‘The French ambassador, instead of leaving, thinks this is the land of his parents’, said Idrissa Halidou, a healthcare worker and CNSP member who was attending Saturday's rally in Niamey.
‘We are people of war, we are ready to fight against’ the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), he added.
The West African bloc has applied sanctions against the new regime and threatened to use military means to remove it if the new rulers do not hand back power to Bazoum.
Efforts to find a diplomatic solution are continuing, however, with Molly Phee, the top U.S. diplomat for sub-Saharan Africa, visiting Nigeria to meet ECOWAS officials.
They met in Nigeria's capital Abuja, which holds the ECOWAS presidency.
The U.S. State Department said Phee was also consulting senior officials in Benin, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Togo -- fellow members of the ECOWAS regional bloc.
The new rulers in Niamey accuse ECOWAS of being in France's pocket.
France has 1,500 soldiers based in Niger who had been helping Bazoum in the fight against jihadist forces that have been active in the country for years”. -Elisha Bala-Gbogbo, Yahoo News
Any Western intervention in Niger is all but predestined to destabilize the West African region and lead to a migrant crisis, just as the French, U.S., and NATO intervention in Libya did.
And because the Niger junta has shown it’s unwilling to back down in the face of sanctions and give in to the principle demand of the Economic Community of West African States, that is, the reinstatement of Mohammed Bazoum, if the anti-Western junta doesn’t relinquish power, ECOWAS staging an intervention in Niger could touch off a major regional war as Burkina Faso and Mali have warned they would consider the action a declaration of war on them.