Time to defeat poverty in Mali

In this context, the Economic Community of West African States is accelerating the preparations for an operation to help Malian troops re-conquer the north, the cities of Timbuktu and Gao, in what will be a long and perilous mission.

On January 29, the African Union will hold a conference in Addis Ababa with potential donors to raise funds for the planned African military intervention in northern Mali. The International Support Mission in Mali, as the African force is called, consists of troops from across the continent, including Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo and Burundi.

When Fabius announced the AU donors at the special ECOWAS meeting on Jan 19 in Abidjan, 13 heads of state from the Western part of the continent, UN Special Representative for West Africa Said Djinnit and AU High Representative for Mali Pierre Buyoya were present to express their support.

But the future of Mali, and the Sahel region, cannot be separated from a long-term effort for socio-economic development backed by a cohesive international community. Radical ideologies flourish in poverty and despair. While the world's per capita GDP is about $10,000, Afghanistan's and Somalia's per capita GDP are less than $600 and $100. And Mali, among the 25 poorest countries in the world with a per capita GDP of less than $700, remains an easy target for extremists.

In close partnership with the AU and the ECOWAS, the European Union, the US and China - Mali's first export partner in 2011 - have the responsibility to design a series of mechanisms to change the Sahel region's path and, by doing so, to demonstrate that they look at Africa not as a field for new forms of rivalries but as a land of synergies.

It is the role of the UN Security Council to create the conditions for better security in the Sahel region, but the call of an international conference on Mali could be useful to coordinate global actions on its socio-economic development.

The French military's action to counter extremism did not affect the cohesion of the UN Security Council. So now is time for a unified community of nations to battle economic exclusion, the long-term ally of terrorism.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, Beijing & Accra, and founder of Euro-China Forum.

(China Daily 01/21/2013 page9)