A group of elite Malian paratroopers has been sentenced to confinement for "insubordination", the army said on Friday, as one of the soldiers complained they had been victims of a miscarriage of justice.

Army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Souleymane Maiga said the soldiers -- known as Red Berets -- had been practising "trade unionism", which is forbidden in Mali's deeply-divided military.

"This is a case of intolerable insubordination. A soldier should not talk to the press -- the law says so. Also, they were expressing viewpoints which could demoralise the troops," Maiga told AFP.

Lieutenant-Colonel Seydou Moussa Diallo told AFP by telephone that he was one of five soldiers arrested on Thursday and that he had been taken to a base in the northeast to complete the sentence while the others will serve their time at a camp in the west.

"We have two months of military confinement. Our crime is to have called for the implementation of the peace plan agreed by all to restore peace among the Red Berets and Green Berets. It is a total injustice," he said.

The Red Berets are loyal to Mali's former democratic president, Amadou Toumani Toure, who was deposed in a March 2012 coup, while the Green Berets were broadly pro-junta.

Toure was overthrown by a military junta headed by Captain Amadou Sanogo, who quickly accepted an ECOWAS-negotiated deal to hand back power to civilians but his Green Beret soldiers never really stepped back and continued to make arrests, targeting former allies of Toure.

In May last year the Red Berets who had remained loyal to Toure attempted a failed counter-coup and tried to seize the airport, national broadcaster and a military barracks that has become the headquarters of the ex-junta.

They were disbanded after the failure of the counter-coup and a number of them went missing after being detained by security forces.

"None of the commitments made by the army to resolve the problem has been met -- neither the payment of bonuses, nor the release of our still-detained comrades or to clarify the fate of 23 Red Berets missing," Diallo said.

After further violence in February, Malian Prime Minister Diango Cissoko held discussions with all parties involved in the crisis in the Malian armed forces, which led to the decision to restructure the Red Berets and restore calm.