Mali President Resigns After Military Detention
Bamako: Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita resigned on Tuesday (Aug 18) and dissolved parliament hours after mutinying soldiers detained him at gunpoint, plunging a country already facing a jihadist insurgency and mass protests deeper into crisis.
Looking tired and wearing a surgical mask, Mr Keita resigned in a brief address broadcast on state television hours after troops seized him along with Prime Minister Boubou Cisse and other top officials.
"If today, certain elements of our armed forces want this to end through their intervention, do I really have a choice?," he said from a military base in Kati outside the capital Bamako where he had been detained earlier in the day.
Mali has seen months of protests against alleged corruption and worsening security in the West African country where Islamist militants are active, and there have been calls for Mr Keita to resign.
The M5-RFP coalition behind the protests signalled support for the mutineers’ action, with spokesman Nouhoum Togo telling Reuters it was “not a military coup but a popular insurrection”.
Hundreds of anti-government protesters poured into a central square in Bamako to celebrate and cheer the mutineers as they drove through in military vehicles and fired rounds of celebratory gunfire.
Later in the day, soldiers who staged the mutiny said they plan to form a civilian transitional government that will organise fresh elections.
In a statement broadcast on state-owned television, a spokesman for the mutineers calling themselves the National Committee for the Salvation of the People said they had decided to act to prevent Mali from falling further into chaos.
Flanked by soldiers, committee spokesman Colonel Ismael Wague invited Mali’s civil society and political movements to join them to create conditions for a political transition that would lead to elections.
“Our country is sinking into chaos, anarchy and insecurity mostly due to the fault of the people who are in charge of its destiny,” he said.
A mutiny in 2012 at the same Kati base led to a military coup that toppled then-President Amadou Toumani Toure and hastened the fall of Mali’s north to jihadist militants.
