The Niger Armed Forces (French: Forces Armées Nigeriennes) (FAN) comprises both the military and national police services of the West African nation of Niger, totaling around 12,000 active personnel and 5,000 reservists. While under civilian political control since 1999, the military has played a major role in Nigerien government, ruling the nation for 21 years of the period from independence in 1960 to the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1999. Military leaders have staged three successful coup d'états, and there have been several more attempted, as recently as 2002. While never engaging in open warfare with foreign nations, the Nigerien Military has participated in international peacekeeping missions and fought two domestic insurgencies. Since 2007 the armed forces have carried out a campaign against ethnic Tuareg based rebels in the north of the country. The FAN has frequently come under international scrutiny for its human rights record.
Read more about Niger Armed Forces: History, Recent Conflicts, Niger Air Force, Police, Foreign Missions, Budget and Foreign Aid
Famous quotes containing the words armed and/or forces:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics writers were to be the servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)