Deposed Niger Prime Minister Hopes Talks Can End Coup

(Patria) - The deposed Prime Minister of Niger has expressed hope that last week's military coup could be reversed through diplomatic means, he told Reuters ahead of a deadline set by regional powers for the reestablishment of the elected government.

Niger's takeover, the seventh in West and Central Africa in three years, has shaken the western Sahel region, one of the world's poorest, which has strategic importance. Chiefs of defence from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have drawn up a plan for military action if coup leaders do not reinstate the elected president Mohamed Bazoum, who is currently held by the army in his residence in Niamey, by Sunday.

Their promise has raised the spectre of further conflict in a region already battling a deadly Islamist insurgency that has killed thousands and forced millions to flee.

Still, as the deadline approached, Bazoum's prime minister Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou believed a last-minute intervention was possible, he said in an interview in Paris. "We still have hope," Mahamadou, who was in Rome when the coup happened, said.

"We expect President Bazoum to be released, reinstated, and all the institutions that have allegedly been dissolved to be fully restored," he added.

France said on Saturday it would support efforts to overturn the coup, without specifying whether its support would include military assistance for an ECOWAS intervention.

However, coup leader General Abdourahamane Tiani, who received some of his military training in France, said the junta would not back down.

Meanwhile, ECOWAS's options, ranging from a land invasion to aiding a domestic counter-coup, risk fuelling insecurity.

Mahamadou said he was in contact with Bazoum but questioned how the deposed president, who had been residing in the palace unhindered two weeks ago, was being treated.

"He is doing well as a political prisoner, confined, without water, without electricity," he said, adding that an ECOWAS intervention might be the only way to change that.

"The security of the president is a matter that is in the hands of ECOWAS," he said.
ECOWAS has taken a hard line on the coup. With its wealth of uranium and oil and its key role in the war with militants, Niger is important to the US, China, Europe and Russia.

Under the intervention plan, the decision on when and where to strike will be taken by the heads of state, Abdel-Fatau Musah, ECOWAS commissioner for political affairs, peace and security, said. He gave no timeline for an intervention, nor did he say what the plan would entail.

"All the elements that will go into any eventual intervention have been worked out here, including the resources needed, how and when we will deploy the forces," he said at the end of a three-day meeting in Nigeria's capital Abuja on Friday.

ECOWAS may face resistance. Niger's neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso, where military juntas have also taken power in recent years, have said they will support Niger in case of military intervention. Mahamadou dismissed the threat from Niger's neighbours, whose ill-equipped armies are struggling to contain their own violent Islamist insurgencies.

"To go into Niger, they have to pass through the jihadist groups that they have failed to defeat. So, for us, it is an empty threat," he said.