MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th July, 2020) Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the president of the Western African state of Mali, on Thursday promised that the country's constitutional court will be reorganized in response to growing protests calling for his resignation.
The anti-government rallies have been underway for weeks over escalating jihadist and inter-communal violence, as well as controversial spring legislative elections. A few hours before the president's speech, the opposition called for a new demonstration to demand his departure on Friday.
"In the coming hours and days, the Constitutional Court will be reformed and put into operation as soon as possible," Keita said in his midnight address to the nation, as quoted by the Maliweb news website.
Calls to reorganize the court follow other demands by the opposition, which also called for parliament to be resolved. The tensions continue to increase amid the coronavirus-related restrictions and March-April parliamentary elections, which were won by Keita's party but marred with violence, allegations of poll fraud and the kidnapping of opposition leader Soumaila Cisse.
The country's constitutional court partially overturned the election results in April. This move triggered protests in several cities. In mid-June, ECOWAS, a bloc of West African countries, called on Mali to rerun some of its contested local elections.
Another grievance of Keita's opponents is the ongoing violence involving Islamic extremists, with which the authorities have been struggling since 2012. In 2013, the year when Keita came to power, France intervened militarily to support the Malian forces for a year-long operation to oust the Islamists from the country's north, where the violence initially started.
Despite some significant achievements of the operation, the violence has only deepened, sweeping into central Mali, neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger and inflaming ethnic killings. Opposition leaders say the incumbent president, who was reelected for a second five-year term in 2018, has failed to get the country out of economic and security crises.
