Mali’s military leader Goita pardons 49 Ivory Coast soldiers

Mali’s military leader has pardoned 49 soldiers from neighbouring Ivory Coast who were arrested in July and accused of being mercenaries, the Malian presidency said in a statement.

The 49 were detained after arriving at Mali’s Bamako airport. Ivory Coast said the soldiers were part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali and were contracted to work for a private company contracted by the UN.

The soldiers’ arrests and charges against them sparked a diplomatic dispute between Mali and Ivory Coast.

Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, the Mali government’s spokesman, said in a statement the pardon granted by Mali’s president, Colonel Assimi Goita, “demonstrates once again his commitment to peace, dialogue, pan-Africanism and the preservation of fraternal and secular relations with regional countries, in particular those between Mali and Ivory Coast”.

Goita seized power in Mali in two coups, first in 2020 and then the following year, when he took control after firing the president and prime minister of the transitional government.

The mass pardoning comes one week after 46 of the Ivorian soldiers were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Three other defendants, all women who were released in September but tried in absentia, had been sentenced to death.

The 49 were convicted of an “attack and conspiracy against the government” and of seeking to undermine state security, public prosecutor Ladji Sara said in a statement at the time. The trial opened in the capital Bamako on December 29 and concluded the following day.

After the Ivorian soldiers were arrested, the UN admitted to some procedural “dysfunctions” in a note addressed to the Malian government and said that “certain measures have not been followed” in their deployment to Mali.