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ARMY

Four die as French army-chartered plane crashes off Ivory Coast

Four Moldovan nationals were killed on Saturday when a transport plane chartered by the French army crashed off Ivory Coast, firefighters said.

Published: 14 October 2017 13:56 CEST
Updated: 14 October 2017 15:28 CEST
Four die as French army-chartered plane crashes off Ivory Coast
The wreckage of a plane that crashed off Ivory Coast on Saturday. Photo: Sia Kambou/AFP

Another six people were injured in the crash of the Antonov aircraft which had 10 people on board, firefighter Colonel Issa Sakho told local television.

Four French nationals were among the injured, a French military source said, indicating that the plane had been chartered as part of the anti-jihadist Operation Barkhane.

“There were 10 people on board, Moldovans and French people. The four victims who died are Moldovan nationals,” Sakho said.

The plane had taken off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and crash-landed in the sea near Abidjan, breaking in half, he explained.

Local forces were hoping to secure the wreck before it drifted away “so investigators can do their job”, he said.

A French military source said the Antonov was chartered as part of Barkhane, under which France maintains a 4,000-man mission in the region.

The operation aims to shore up fragile Sahel countries against jihadists who have carried out a wave of bloody bombings, shootings and kidnappings.

Cause of crash unclear

The French military base in Abidjan provides logistical support for the operation which is headquartered in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad. French special forces are stationed in Ouagadougou.

Every year, around 100 sorties are flown out of Abidjan airport as part of Barkhane, often by former Soviet army pilots in Ukrainian-made Antonovs.

The planes frequently carry French military personnel and sub-contractors accompanying their cargo.

There was a heavy storm over Abidjan early Saturday, but it was unclear whether the heavy weather was the cause of the accident.

France keeps around 950 military personnel in Ivory Coast as part of the FFCI force based in the biggest French army base on Africa's Atlantic coast. Other bases are in Libreville, Gabon and Dakar, Senegal.

One of their key missions is to extract French or other western civilians in case of trouble in Ivory Coast or neighbouring countries.

Abidjan is strategically well-placed in the region as most French-speaking African countries can be reached by air in under three hours.

NATO

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday he would back Sweden's Nato candidacy if the European Union resumes long-stalled membership talks with Ankara.

Published: 10 July 2023 12:35 CEST
Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th. 

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016. 

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected. 

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard. 

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.” 

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise. 

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

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