SL Army contingent invited for UN Peacekeeping in Mali

Under fire by UNHRC locally; maintaining world peace overseas

A battalion of officers and men from the Sri Lanka Army have been invited to join the United Nations Peacekeeping Force for operations in the northern areas of the West African nation of Mali.

A batch of 500 troops will leave first and the rest will fly thereafter, accord- ing to Defence and Foreign Ministry sources.Mali with a land area of more than 1.2 million square kilometres is the eighth largest country in the African continent.

A senior Foreign Ministry source told the Sunday Times the Government of Mali has sought a Sri Lankan peacekeeping contingent as against troops from Pakistan or Bangladesh. This, he has said, was because of the Sri Lanka Army’s successful military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), one of the world’s deadliest terrorist organisations at the time. The request has been made specifically to the UN Department of Peacekeeping and was conveyed to the Sri Lanka Government.

There are five main Islamist groups in Mali – Ansar Dine, Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa ( MUJAO), al- Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Signed-in-Blood Battalion and the Islamic Movement for Azawad ( IMA). They have different objectives. Ansar Dine wants to impose Islamic law across Mali and its full name in Arabic is Harakat Ansar al-Dine. In contrast

The North African wing of al Qaeda is rooted in the Algerian civil war of the early 1990s but now wants to assume a more international Islamist agenda.

The preference to call upon the Sri Lanka Army to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Mali comes in the wake of another UN agency, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva calling for an investigation into the conduct of the Sri Lanka Army and the then Government of Sri Lanka on the manner in which they defeated the LTTE.

Sri Lankan troops first served with the UN’s ‘blue-helmets’ in 1960 in Congo, and later in Haiti ( 2004), Lebanon ( 2010) and more recently in South Sudan. They are currently in seven peacekeeping missions overseas. A total of 12,210 Army and Police personnel have served with the UN over the years. Five men have died while serving with the UN Peacekeeping Forces.

The Sri Lanka Army has been an integral part of the UN Peace Keeping Force even during the LTTE led military campaign for a separate state.