France and several European nations have urged Mali to allow newly arrived Danish special forces to remain in the Sahel country, but its transitional government insisted on an immediate withdrawal.
Task Force Takuba brings together special forces from European countries to advise Malian troops and assist them in combat, with roughly 90 Danes joining earlier this month.
The junta on Monday asked Denmark to "immediately" withdraw its contingent, alleging the troops had been deployed without their consent, a position rejected by the Danish government a day later.
A statement from nations involved in the French-led Task Force Takuba on Wednesday defended the deployment, saying the partners were acting "within a robust legal framework agreed upon by Mali's sovereign government, including a formal invitation from the Malian authorities to international partners".
The European countries called on Mali to "quickly remedy this situation at a critical time, when solidarity is required more than ever."
Diplomatic discussion
Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said his nation's forces were in Mali "on a clear basis" and his government was seeking to clarify the issue.
"There is currently a difficult diplomatic discussion with the transitional government," he added.
Mali's junta, which came to power in a 2020 coup, responded late Wednesday it had read Kofod's "inappropriate" comments with "surprise and consternation".
Task Force Takuba is the fruit of lengthy French efforts to coax European allies into shouldering some of the burden of fighting jihadists in Mali, the nexus of a nearly decade-old insurgency in the Sahel.
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Paris has engaged in "in-depth consultations" with its European partners participating in the special forces group, French Defence Minister Florence Parly said Tuesday, stressing that "the junta is multiplying its provocations".
In an interview broadcast on state TV on Wednesday night, junta spokesman Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga said that Parly should heed the 19th-century French poet Alfred de Vigny's verses on the "greatness of silence".
The spokesman was making an apparent reference to Vigny's poem La Mort du Loup (The Death of the Wolf), which contains the line: "Only silence is great; all the rest is weakness."
"When people desperately try to isolate Mali by manipulating sub-regional organisations, one ends up asking who is doing the provoking," Maiga continued, referring to the Ecowas sanctions.
(with AFP)
