After two months of “extreme tension” and many weeks spent locked to his embassy in Niamey before being expelled from the country, France’s senior envoy to Niger says he is “tired.”
Ambassador Sylvain Ittรฉ, who is already back in Paris, said on Thursday night that the Niger coup was a “enormous mess” in which “there are only losers.”
“This putsch is first and foremost a Nigerien affair, between a president who had decided to fight corruption and a certain number of generals who didn’t want this fight against corruption to go all the way,” he added.
Nigerien companies delivering supplies to the embassy were “dissuaded, even threatened” by the new power, and eventually stopped coming, said Mr Ittรฉ.
“We had to take out the rubbish without our junta friends noticing,” he said. “It was a question of getting food and water in, again using ingenuity.”
The ambassador also commented on the demonstration that targeted the French embassy on 30 July, a few days after the coup:
“The attack lasted over two-and-a-half hours. That day, we were collectively in danger and we came very, very close to a tragedy, because there were more than 6,000 people who were there to fight, who were there to break into the embassy.”
