Niger won’t be the first: Recalling Ecowas’ past military interventions

The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) was established in 1975 primarily to promote economic development among Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sénégal and Togo. The bloc’s operational mandate has, however, since stretched to political, security, health, environmental and other concerns to address the wider human security complexities.

It’s within this stretched mandate that the Ecowas Monitoring Group (Ecomog) was formed as a military arm to eliminate, majorly, military coups and armed conflicts within the region.

However, even when Ecomog has been previously used to deter coups in the region, sequences of military coups are still witnessed with the latest on July 26 when Gen Abdourahamane Tchiani led a coup against president Mohamed Bazoum in Niger.

The regional group has since threatened to use force in case of failure by the coup leaders to reinstate Bazoum.

Although the resolution seems so unlikely on various grounds, if Ecowas risks to use force on Niger, it won’t be the first time. Let’s recall when Ecowas has used force in similar circumstances.

                                                  Libera, 1990

Although Ecomog’s inaugural intervention in Liberia was widely criticised for several human rights abuses, 1990 was a year for an unprecedented intervention in which the group restored some security in Liberia.

West African leaders sent a military force to intervene in the Liberian civil war between the forces of President Samuel Doe and two rebel factions; the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) led by Charles Taylor and the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), a splinter faction of the NPFL led by Prince Johnson.

An estimated number of 12,000 troops stayed in Liberia under Ecomog until 1999, two years after Charles Taylor was elected president.                                                                        

                                               Sierra Leone, 1998

Ecomog would intervene in Sierra Leone’s civil war in 1998 to drive out a junta and rebel allies from the capital Freetown and reinstate President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who had been ousted in a coup in 1997.

Two years later, the force withdrew, handing over peacekeeping operations to a UN mission.

                                                Guinea-Bissau, 1999

A year later, about 600 Ecomog troops were sent to preserve a peace deal in coup-prone Guinea-Bissau. However, about three months later, the force was withdrawn when rebels seized power.

Still in Guinea-Bissau, Ecomog troops were deployed following another coup in 2012. This time the mission lasted for eight years; from 2012 to 2020 obliged to deter the military from intervening in politics and to protect political leaders.

In 2022, another contingent of 631 personnel was sent in Guinea-Bissau to stabilise the country after a failed coup.                                                               Ivory Coast, 2003

Ecomog troops were also sent to support French troops to monitor the implementation of a peace deal between rebels and President Laurent Gbagbo’s loyalists.                                                                              

                                                   Mali, 2013

The military arm of Ecowas was sent to Mali in 2013 as part of a mission to drive rebels linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist group from the north. The force would later hand over to a UN peacekeeping mission as had been the case in previous cases.                                                

                                             Gambia, 2017

The last time Ecowas used force against its own member was in 2017 when around 7,000 Senegalese troops were sent to compel former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh to go into exile after refusal to cede the presidency to Adama Barrow, who had defeated him in an election in 2016.

In a mission dubbed Operation Restore Democracy, Jammeh’s security forces gave up without resistance to the mission, Jammeh ran to Guinea, Conakry from where he went to Equatorial Guinea, where he still remains in exile.

This time, if Niger is to be the next Ecomog’s ground of action, a number of geopolitical complexities must be consciously calculated by Ecowas.

Mr Charles Tweheyo is an analyst of politics and international relations.