French Defense Minister Florence Parly visited Mali on Thursday and defended an air strike by France in the African country earlier this year that UN investigators say killed 19 civilians attending a wedding party.
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The Chief of Defense’s visit, which had been planned for a long time but was not made public for security reasons, came two days after the UN mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, released a report on the air strike on 3 January.
The report said the strike affected a wedding celebration for more than 100 people in the town of Bounti and killed three suspected members of an al-Qaeda-linked group and 19 civilians, mostly local villagers. France rejected the results, while the top UN officials were responsible for the report.
When Parly visited the Malian capital Bamako, Parly reiterated that the French military was following a “rigorous targeting process” in accordance with international law.
“There were no women or children among the victims, and these strikes were intended to neutralize terrorist elements,” she said. “There is a difference between the facts and what is stated in this UN report.”
Seven international and local aid groups called on Thursday for an independent investigation into the attack and compensation for the victims and their families.
“Anti-terrorism operations cannot be conducted to the detriment of international humanitarian law,” Oxfam France, Action Against Hunger and five other groups said in a joint statement. They called the January air strike “disproportionate to the resulting military gain.”
In Paris, Defense Ministry spokeswoman Herve Grandjean told reporters that the UN report did not identify witnesses and contained “no concrete material evidence” that civilians were being targeted.
“Let us not be naive. The war we are involved in is also an information war, and our enemy is aware of this and is undoubtedly taking advantage of all the debates, he said.
The French Minister of Defense was accompanied in Mali on Thursday by the Estonian and Czech Ministers of Defense in an attempt to emphasize the European Union’s forces in training and other security efforts for the Sahel region in Africa.
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