Evacuating French and European nationals from the ends of the world is not easy and it is very expensive. However, “many crises over which NATO is not competent and on which France, often, carries out operations alone”, have been made, recalled this Friday morning during an interview on France 2the French Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu
Also, a European “rapid reaction force”, mentioned Thursday by Emmanuel Macron, intended for operations such as evacuations of nationals from countries in crisis, could see the light of day next year, the French Minister of the Armed Forces announced this Friday .
“A burden that must be shared”
“This is a key subject and one on which I hope we can achieve results next year, being very responsive and very rapid,” declared Sébastien Lecornu, recalling as an example the evacuation of nationals from Sudan last year. pass. “We launched an operation in Khartoum, we took out 1,080 nationalities, 1,000 people, 200 French or (…) 250 from memory, in which we set up a major airlift with A400Ms, with boats. It turns out that it was France (…) practically alone,” he explained.
It is natural that this burden, which “has price, value”, is shared, he said. “You have missions which are militarized, but which NATO does not have to know about for many reasons, and about which we say today “let’s do it in Europe”, and that for us is pragmatism,” he added. This rapid reaction force, “to provide security for European nationals, Portuguese, Italian, German and French citizens, we must be able to set it up very quickly,” he insisted.