UN reports sharp deterioration in Mali
OTTAWA — In a sobering new report, the head of the United Nations says the security situation in Mali has sharply deteriorated over the past three months while the need for more foreign aid to help provide food and other urgent humanitarian assistance has skyrocketed.
The time period covered by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s assessment coincides with the first three months of Canada’s year-long peacekeeping mission in Mali, though the report notes that the actual number of peacekeepers killed or wounded in attacks had markedly declined.
Guterres nonetheless paints a picture of a Mali at war with itself, particularly in the centre of the country, as various ethnic
groups and extremist groups targeted each other as well as the Malian military, international forces and civilians — leaving hundreds dead and thousands displaced.
The human rights situation was similarly worse due to hundreds of reported extrajudicial killings, disappearances, tortures and rapes across different parts of the country — with the Malian military itself implicated in at least one mass killing.
Making matters even worse were severe floods in some areas and drought in others that, when combined with the fighting, had doubled the number of internally displaced people and left one in four Malians needing humanitarian aid — the largest number in years.
Yet despite the growing need for more emergency aid, and Canadian peacekeepers having helped deliver food to one community by helicopter, Guterres says only one-third of the roughly $400 million needed to help Malians had been provided to the United Nations by the beginning of September.