Mali gives French envoy 72 hours to leave country

Mali’s government yesterday gave the French ambassador 72 hours to leave the country over “outrageous” comments by the French authorities about its transitional government, it said in a statement read on national television.

French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Friday that Mali’s ruling junta was “out of control” amid escalating tensions between the West African state and its European partners over military cooperation and elections.

He also called the junta illegitimate. French defence minister Florence Parly said on Saturday French troops would not stay in Mali if the price were too high.

“The French ambassador to Bamako was summoned and notified of a decision by the government inviting him to leave the national territory within 72 hours following hostile and outrageous comments by the French foreign affairs minister recently,” the government statement said

Meanwhile, a military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has sentenced 51 people to death, several in absentia, in a mass trial over the 2017 murder of two United Nations experts in a troubled central region.

Capital punishment is frequently pronounced in murder cases in DRC, but is routinely commuted to life imprisonment since the country declared a moratorium on executions in 2003.

Dozens of people have been on trial for more than four years over the killings that shook diplomats and the aid community, although key questions about the episode remain unanswered.

Zaida Catalan, a Swede, and Michael Sharp, an American, were investigating violence between government forces and an armed group in the central Kasai region in March 2017 when they were stopped along the road by armed men, marched into a field and killed.

Their bodies were found in a village on March 28, 2017, 16 days after they went missing. Congolese officials have blamed the killings on the Kamuina Nsapu armed group.

Unrest in the Kasai region had broken out in 2016, triggered by the killing of a local traditional chief.

About 3 400 people were killed, and tens of thousands of people fled their homes, before the conflict fizzled out in mid-2017.–Al Jazeera.