Deposed Niger president faces dire conditions under house arrest

Mohamed Bazoum.

Niger's deposed president is running out of food and under increasingly dire conditions two weeks after he was ousted in a military coup and put under house arrest, an adviser has said.

President Mohamed Bazoum, the West African nation's democratically elected leader, has been held at the presidential palace in Niamey with his wife and son since the military coup on July 26.

The family is living without electricity and only has rice and canned goods left to eat, the adviser said on Wednesday.

Bazoum remains in good health for now and will never resign, according to the adviser, who wasn't authorised to discuss the sensitive situation with the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

This week, Niger's new military junta took steps to entrench itself in power and rejected international efforts to mediate.

On Wednesday, it accused former colonizer France of trying to destabilise the country, violate its closed airspace and discredit the junta leaders. France's foreign and defense ministries in a joint statement called the allegations unfounded.

On Monday, the junta named a new prime minister, civilian economist Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine. He is a former economy and finance minister who left office after a previous coup in 2010 toppled the government at the time. Zeine later worked at the African Development Bank.

“The establishment of a government is significant and signals, at least to the population, that they have a plan in place, with support from across the government,” said Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department official who specialized in African affairs and is now director of Strategic Stabilization Advisors, a risk advisory group.

The junta also refused to admit meditation teams from the United Nations, the African Union, and the West African regional bloc ECOWAS, citing “evident reasons of security in this atmosphere of menace,” according to a letter seen by The Associated Press.

ECOWAS had threatened to use military force if the junta did not reinstate Bazoum by Sunday, a deadline that the junta ignored and which passed without action from ECOWAS. The bloc is expected to meet again on Thursday to discuss the situation.

The coup comes as a blow to many countries in the West, which saw Niger as one of the last democratic partners in the region they could work with to beat back the extremist threat. It's also an important supplier of uranium.

Sanctions spark concern for Nigeriens

Niger’s partners have threatened to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance if it does not return to constitutional rule.

Harsh economic and travel sanctions imposed by ECOWAS since the coup have caused food prices to rise by up to 5 percent, according to traders. Erkmann Tchibozo, a shop owner from neighboring Benin who works in Niger’s capital, Niamey, said it’s been hard to get anything into the country to stock his shop near the airport.

If it continues like this, the situation is going to become very difficult, he said.

The junta shut Niger's airspace this week and temporarily suspended authorisation for diplomatic flights from friendly and partner countries, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, both of which are run by military regimes, have sided with the junta and warned that an intervention in Niger would be “tantamount to a declaration of war” against them.

In a joint letter Tuesday to the UN, the two countries appealed for the organisation to “prevent by all means at its disposal, armed action against a sovereign state".

Source: TRT