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Mali: Warnings against Escalation
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Jul 31, 2012 (120731)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"The reason West Africans and others make the Afghan
comparison [for Mali] is to sound the alarm over an emerging
Islamist safe haven in the Sahara that could be used as a
launching pad for international attacks. ... The Saharan
debacle is serious stuff, no doubt, and it has implications
well beyond the boundaries of the countries that share the
desert. But here's one Mali-Afghanistan comparison that does
work: It represents a golden opportunity for outsiders to
turn a nasty mess into a complete disaster." - Gregory Mann
Despite the return of Interim President Dioncounda Traore to
Mali over the weekend and his announcement of a policy of
reconciliation and negotiation, the prospects for near-term
stability in Mali are not good. In the North, extreme
Islamists have ousted the principal Tuareg separatist group
from control, only months after it declared independence for
the region. While the extremists have alienated both local
and international opinion by actions such as the destruction
of local Islamic shrines, they currently hold the balance of
military power in the North. In the capital Bamako, coup
leaders who took power in March share de facto power with an
interim civilian government formed under pressure from West
African leaders. Analyst Gregory Mann compares the
complexity of the situation to two intersecting games of
three-dimensional chess.
With 232,806 refugees, most in Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and
Niger, and 166,811 internally displaced (see UNCHR reports
at link below), the humanitarian situation in Mali is acute,
affected not only by conflict but also by drought and, most
recently, by a plague of locusts. (See Mali Situation
Updates from UNHCR, latest dated July 24, 2012, at
http://tinyurl.com/d842taf). More assistance is urgently
needed, with only 42% of the estimated USD 214 million
required for the humanitarian response having been raised
(http://allafrica.com/stories/201207270113.html). But,
however necessary it is, such assistance cannot address the
multiple roots of crisis.
And, as bad as the current situation is, most observers
agree that it could get worse if regional and global antiterrorist
fears lead to ill-considered intervention. But the
actors in the international community, both those in
neighboring countries and those outside the continent,
disagree at what should be done, even though they agree in
condemning both the coup and the revolt in the North.
Coordination among the various external players and
sensitivity to the complex and changing internal situation
in Mali are more the exception than the rule.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains two recent well-informed
analyses which both provide background to recent events and
caution against escalation. One is the executive summary of
a report released on July 18 by the International Crisis
Group (ICG), and the other the most recent article in a
series of commentaries by Gregory Mann. A fuller analysis of
events this year and their background, the most detailed I
have seen to date, is only available in French, the full
version of the ICG report, at http://tinyurl.com/cmgyqzz
Additional lucid commentaries by Gregory Mann include:
Gregory Mann, "The Mess in Mali," Foreign Policy, April 5,
2012 http://tinyurl.com/c9v4al3
Gregory Mann, "Mali: Democracy, The Coup And The AntiGlobalization
Left - Right Questions, Wrong Answers?,"
African Arguments, April 18, 2012 http://tinyurl.com/c8mqynl
Gregory Mann, "Mali's Rebels and their Fans - Suffering and
Smiling," Africa is a Country blog, May 30, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/bnm8fcm
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins and additional background
links on Mali, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/mali.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Mali: Avoiding Escalation
Africa Report No. 18918 Jul 2012
Dakar/Brussels, 18 July 2012
Executive Summary and Recommendations
The full report is available in French at
http://www.crisisgroup.org / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/cmgyqzz
In a little more than two months, Mali's political regime
has been demolished. An armed rebellion launched on 17
January 2012 expelled the army from the north while a coup
deposed President Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT) on 22 March.
These two episodes ushered Mali into an unprecedented crisis
that also threatens regional political stability and
security. An external armed intervention would nevertheless
involve considerable risks. The international community must
support dialogue between the armed and unarmed actors in the
north and south to favour a political solution to the
crisis. The Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) must readjust its mediation efforts to avoid
aggravating the already deep fault lines in Malian society.
Strengthening the credibility of the transitional
institutions to restore the state and the security forces is
an absolute priority. Finally, coordinated regional security
measures must be taken to prevent originally foreign groups
from turning northern Mali into a new front in the war on
terror.
In Bamako, the capital, the transitional framework agreed by
ECOWAS and the junta, composed of junior officers led by
Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, has failed to establish
undisputed political arrangements. The junta has rallied
grassroots support by capitalising on the anger of a
significant minority of the population towards ATT's
government, with which it associates the interim president,
Dioncounda Traoré, former head of the National Assembly.
Traoré was physically attacked, and could have been killed,
by supporters of the coup leaders in the presidential palace
on 21 May 2012. Flown to France for treatment, he had still
not returned to Bamako in mid-July. The destruction of the
military apparatus and the weakness of the transitional
authorities, notably the government of Prime Minister Cheick
Modibo Diarra, which is soon to be reshuffled, impede the
Malian forces' ability to restore territorial integrity in
the short term without the risk of serious collapse.
In the north, the Tuareg group that launched the rebellion,
the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad
(Mouvement national de libération de l'Azawad, MNLA) has
been outflanked by an armed Islamist group, Ansar Dine
(Ançar Eddine), led by Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg chief
initially sidelined during the discussions that led to the
creation of the MNLA. By taking control of the north, Ansar
Dine has established a modus vivendi, if not a pact, with a
range of armed actors, including former regime-backed Arab
and Tuareg militias and, in particular, al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The latter is responsible for
kidnapping and killing many Westerners in Mali, Niger and
Mauritania, attacks against the armies of the region and
involved in criminal transborder trafficking. Northern Mali
could easily become a safe haven for jihadi fighters of all
origins.
Considered for twenty years a model of democratic progress
in sub-Saharan Africa, Mali is now on the brink of sheer
dissolution. The prospects of a negotiated solution to the
crisis are receding with the consolidation of hardline
Islamist power in the north and a continued political,
institutional and security vacuum in Bamako. Although ECOWAS
initially sent out positive signals, the credibility of its
diplomatic action was seriously compromised by a lack of
transparency in the attempts at mediation led by Burkina
Faso, which was criticised bitterly in the Malian capital
and beyond. Pressure is mounting in favour of an armed
external intervention as specific security and political
interests of foreign actors - neighbouring states and others
- prevail over those of the Malian population in both the
north and south.
It would be wise to ignore calls for war and continue with
existing initiatives to promote a political settlement of
the conflict without, however, neglecting security issues.
ECOWAS countries willing to send troops do not appear to
fully grasp the complex social situation in northern Mali,
and underestimate the high risk of inter-tribal settling of
scores that would result from external military
intervention. Such an intervention would turn Mali into a
new front of the war on terror at the expense of
longstanding political demands in the north and rule out any
chance of peaceful coexistence between the different
communities. Finally, it would expose West Africa to
reprisals in the form of terrorist actions it is not
equipped to respond to. AQIM's logistical links with
southern Libya and northern Nigeria (through Niger) make it
perfectly feasible for it to carry out terrorist operations
far from its Malian bases.
This series of events in Mali is the result of a weak
political system despite democratic practices, disillusion
from the lack of economic and social development in the
north and south, government laxity in state management and
the unprecedented external shock of the Libyan crisis. The
relations between the centre of power in Bamako and its
periphery under the ATT government rested on a loose network
of personal, clientelistic, even mafia-style alliances with
regional elites with reversible loyalties rather than on
robust democratic institutions. This low-cost governance of
the north was able to contain the actions of the opposition,
including armed groups, given their limited military
ambitions and capacities. It disintegrated when faced with a
rebellion the Libyan crisis had swiftly transformed into a
well-armed group and the opportunism of Islamist groups that
have in recent years accumulated plenty of arms using
profits from lucrative trans-Saharan trafficking of illicit
merchandises and Western hostages.
The perpetuation of a battle for power in Bamako, during a
transition period whose end is impossible to predict, and
the confused overlapping of armed groups in the north mean
the future is very uncertain. A solution to the crisis
depends, first, on how to restore Mali's territorial
integrity and, second, on whether the jihadi movements
manage to consolidate their position of strength in the
north. The decisions of Mali's neighbours (Algeria, Niger,
Mauritania and Burkina Faso), regional organisations
(ECOWAS, African Union) and Western and multilateral actors
(France, U.S., UN, European Union) will also have some
influence. It is urgent and necessary to restore the
political, institutional and security foundations of the
central state prior to working towards the north's
reintegration into the republic. It is also essential to
increase humanitarian aid to the civilian population in the
Sahel-Sahara region, which was already threatened with a
food crisis, and quickly resume foreign aid to prevent an
economic collapse.
Recommendations
To ensure security and strengthen the legitimacy of
transitional institutions and the state
To the Interim President and the Current Prime Minister:
1. Consolidate the legitimacy of the transitional
authorities by urgently forming a genuine government of
national unity after broad consultations with the main
political parties and civil society organisations.
2. Ensure the effective establishment of the Special Force
composed of gendarmes and police officers dedicated to the
protection of transitional institutions representatives and
request, if necessary, the deployment of a small external
armed contingent to support the force.
3. Guarantee proceedings of the judicial investigation into
the assault on 21 May 2012 against the interim president,
and if progress stalls, request international assistance to
help identify and punish those who were directly and
indirectly responsible for this assault.
To the Malian Defence and Security Forces:
4. Guarantee the security and free exercise of their duties
to the prime minister, members of the government and the
National Assembly and other state officials.
5. Put an end to arbitrary arrests of civilian and military
individuals and the settling of scores within the army.
6. Restructure and restore discipline in the armed forces,
under the authority of the government and the official
hierarchy of the different corps.
To Members of the Former Junta and to Leaders of the Civil
Society Organisations that support them:
7. Stop the manipulation of public opinion by divisive
discourses that expose transitional institutions
representatives and politicians in general to violence.
To Mali's Bilateral and Multilateral Partners:
8. Contribute to the reorganisation of the Malian armed
forces and provide necessary support to the effective
establishment of a force to protect the transitional
institutions.
9. Help maintain the Malian economy through a rapid
resumption of foreign aid as soon as a national unity
government is formed; and answer the urgent humanitarian
needs of the civilian populations severely affected by the
crisis, whether internally displaced persons or Malian
refugees in neighbouring countries.
To encourage a political settlement of the conflict in the
north and neutralise the terrorist threat
To the Malian Government:
10. Refrain from launching a military offensive to regain
control of the north before creating the conditions for
negotiation with non-terrorist armed actors and community
representatives, including those the violence forced out of
the country.
11. Seek the effective support of neighbouring countries,
particularly Algeria, for a strategy to regain sovereignty
over the north and neutralise the terrorist armed groups
that threaten regional security.
To the Leaders of the National Movement for the Liberation
of Azawad and Ansar Dine:
12. Formulate publicly clear agendas and commit to:
- respecting human rights and the principles of democratic
and pluralist governance, especially with regard to
religion, in the areas under their control;
- guaranteeing security and equal access of the population
to basic public services and facilitating the access of
humanitarian organisations to the population;
- helping to establish the facts regarding the atrocities
at Aguelhoc as well as all other atrocities perpetrated
during the military conquest of the north;
- combatting the criminal trafficking activities that
thrive in the territory they control;
- joining immediately the fight against AQIM and its armed
offshoots; and
- exploring with the Malian government how to reach a
rapprochement to avoid a lasting partition of the country
and an internecine war.
To the Governments of Algeria, Mali, Niger and Mauritania:
13. Revive regional cooperation in the fight against
terrorism and transborder crime and open up participation to
Nigeria and the Arab Maghreb Union, notably Libya, Morocco
and Tunisia.
To the Algerian Government:
14. End the ambiguity about how serious a threat it
believes armed groups in northern Mali are for regional
security and show clear support for the restoration, even
gradual, of Mali's sovereignty over its entire territory.
To the Economic Community of West African States, the
African Union and the UN:
15. Continue to provide humanitarian support to the
civilian populations who are the direct victims of the
crisis in the three northern regions as well as to displaced
people and refugees.
16. Adopt a joint strategy, together with the Malian
authorities, that combines the establishment of a formal
framework for negotiations with the armed groups in the
north, restoration of the Malian armed forces and the
mobilisation of as many resources as possible, including
military, to neutralise AQIM and other criminal groups in
northern Mali.
To the UN Security Council:
17. Support attempts to reach a comprehensive solution to
the crisis within the framework of Resolution 2056 of 5 July
2012 by:
- providing the Secretary-General's special representative
in West Africa with the necessary means to use his good
offices to support ECOWAS mediation;
- adopting targeted sanctions against all those who are
identified as hampering normal operation of the transitional
institutions in Bamako and attempts at resolving the crisis
in the north, and against all those responsible for serious
human rights and international humanitarian law violations
in the north and south;
- establishing an independent group of experts to
investigate the origin of the financial and material
resources of the armed groups in northern Mali, as well as
their arms supply lines, and collate information allowing
the identification of Malian and foreign persons who should
face targeted sanctions; and
- requesting the creation of an independent UN commission
of inquiry into the human rights and international
humanitarian law violations committed throughout Malian
territory since the beginning of the armed rebellion in
January 2012, which should report to the Security Council as
quickly as possible.
To Mali's Bilateral and Multilateral Partners, particularly
the European Union, France and the U.S.:
18. Provide political and financial support to Malian
political and social initiatives that seek to resolve the
crisis by uniting all communities, in the north and the
south, through promotion of respect for the republic's
fundamental principles and society's traditional religious
tolerance.
19. Support efforts to reconstitute the defence and
security forces, with a view to strengthening their
cohesion, discipline and effectiveness so they can ensure
security in the south, constitute a credible threat of last
resort to protect the populations trapped in the north and
be capable of participating, if necessary, in regional
actions against terrorist groups.
20. Provide intelligence support to the armed forces of
Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria to help
them locate terrorist groups and their arms caches.
Africanistan? Not Exactly: The dangers of international
intervention in Mali.
By Gregory Mann | July 24, 2012
Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.org / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/bub4nhh
Gregory Mann is a professor of history at Columbia
University, specializing in the history of francophone
Africa, and of Mali in particular.
While the Islamist rebels and their terrorist allies who
currently control much of northern Mali have been making
themselves internationally famous -- most recently by
flogging other Muslims for straying from their version of
the sharia law and destroying tombs in ancient Timbuktu --
diplomatic rumbling about outside intervention in the
crippled West African nation has been getting louder by the
day.
France's new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius,
recently predicted that "there will probably be the use of
force" to bring northern Mali back under control while
African Union (AU) leaders are increasingly suggesting that
intervention might be inevitable. ECOWAS -- the West African
community made up of most of Mali's neighbors -- has already
drawn up a rough plan for military intervention, which the
United States supports, at least in principle. By all
appearances, they are waiting for a green light from the
Malian government in Bamako and from the United Nations,
which both are reluctant to give and which won't likely come
during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It is always hard
to know what exactly is going on in a region of the world
that generates more rumors and conspiracy theories than the
Texas school book depository, but now more than ever false
analogies and shallow analyses seem to be driving the
debate.
Everyone is agreed on one thing: The mess in Mali is
stagnating. At the beginning of the year, Tuareg rebels in
the Sahara took up arms against the central government,
which refused to put up much of a fight. In March, angry
soldiers chased President Amadou Toumani Touré from power,
but the coup leaders soon faced a wall of opposition from
Mali's politicians, neighbors, and foreign partners. They
quickly ceded power to civilians, at least officially, but
after a near-fatal attack on interim President Dioncounda
Traore in March, the new government has been unable to
impose its authority.
Meanwhile in the north, a loose alliance of Tuareg
separatists and Islamist fighters chased what remained of
the Malian army from two-thirds of the national territory,
but soon fell out and turned on each other. All this
fighting has produced hundreds of thousands of refugees and
has left well-armed Islamists in control of the major cities
of the northern and eastern regions of this vast, arid
country. Now the country faces a plague of locusts, which
will add a biblical undertone to a crushing humanitarian
crisis.
The meme of the month in diplomatic circles is that Mali is
well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan. Lately,
the president of neighboring Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, his
Beninois counterpart Boni Yayi (who also chairs the AU), and
other West African and foreign diplomats have echoed each
other in playing the "Africanistan" card. But how well does
that analogy actually hold up?
Drugs, guns, pseudo-Islamic vigilantism: It's true that all
those ingredients are present in northern Mali, and that
they make for a toxic mix. It's also true that there are
direct links between northern Mali and Southwest Asia,
albeit thin ones: Tuareg Islamist leader Iyad ag-Ghali,
leader of the Ansar Dine group controlling Timbuktu,
contracted his Salafism in the late 1990s, when Pakistani
"missionaries" were regular visitors in northern Mali. It
made him an exception then, even if his particular brand of
Islamism has become more common in the years since. Still,
Islam as practiced in northern and southern Mali alike
mostly remains a deep-rooted, accommodating and tolerant
tradition. And Tuaregs -- a minority in both north and south
-- generally maintain more equitable gender relations than
other groups in the region.
Ag-Ghali, on the other hand, has attempted to impose a crude
vigilante version of sharia that -- judging by courageous
street protests in Gao and Kidal, and by the hundreds of
thousands of people who have fled it -- has little popular
support in northern Mali. Some outside observers have
compared Ansar Dine's attacks on the Timbuktu shrines to the
Taliban's 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. But
those were Buddhas without Buddhists, and the loudest
protests came from the international community, not Afghans
themselves. The mosques, mausoleums, and rare Arabic
manuscripts of Timbuktu, on the other hand, represent a
tradition that the city's residents are proud of and which
many recognize as an important resource, drawing state
support, international assistance, and -- in better days --
a vibrant tourism industry.
If anything makes Mali like Afghanistan, it's the drug
trade, which Ag-Ghali and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
(AQIM) control. Over the last several years, Mali, like
Guinea Bissau and Guinea, has become a major node in the
smuggling networks that bring Latin American cocaine to
Europe. But the similarities here too are pretty
superficial. The drugs are not produced in Mali; they only
transit through it. As French political scientist JeanFran
çois Bayart has argued, that makes Mali a lot more like
Mexico than Afghanistan. The drug trade does not have a
positive impact on the life of the average person in
northern Mali, who has no access to its benefits. To the
contrary, it brings gangsters, ad hoc airstrips, and the
burnt-out fuselages of abandoned Boeings. The growth of drug
smuggling -- and hostage-taking, another big business -also
makes it harder for many northerners to earn a living:
no tourism, no development projects, and presumably no
possibility of smuggling cigarettes, cars, and people as
easily as one could do before the rebellion. But above all,
unlike Afghanistan, Mali has no poppy farmers, and thus the
drug lords have no popular support.
Of course, the reason West Africans and others make the
Afghan comparison is to sound the alarm over an emerging
Islamist safe haven in the Sahara that could be used as a
launching pad for international attacks. Neighboring
countries have already suffered from terrorist attacks --
and AQIM has made clear that France is its primary target.
The Saharan debacle is serious stuff, no doubt, and it has
implications well beyond the boundaries of the countries
that share the desert. But here's one Mali-Afghanistan
comparison that does work: It represents a golden
opportunity for outsiders to turn a nasty mess into a
complete disaster.
We might do better to think about what Mali actually is than
to think about what it might be like. We might also want to
think about the interventions that have already occurred in
the region, and what they wrought, before championing new
ones. External forces went a long way toward creating the
current mess in the Sahara. By pushing well-armed Tuareg
fighters -- including high-ranking officers in Muammar alQaddafi'
s army -- out of Libya, NATO's 2011 bombing campaign
accelerated a brewing rebellion in the north, one that began
in January before being hijacked by Islamists over the last
few months.
Although Tuareg separatism has deep local roots, outside
meddling also helped catalyze this year's rebellion.
American insistence over the last several years that the
Malian military re-establish a presence in the Sahara fit
the logic of U.S. counterterrorism programs, but it went
against the spirit of the 2006 Algiers accords between
Bamako and an earlier generation of Tuareg rebels. Those
accords had mandated a diminished presence of state security
forces in the desert, and the violation of them became one
of the MNLA's signature grievances. Other outside
interventions may have been more direct. Many in Mali and
elsewhere believe that in the midst of a tough re-election
campaign, French President Nicolas Sarkozy at least tacitly
supported the MNLA in the hope that they could win the
release of French hostages held by AQIM in the desert.
Evidence for this is mostly circumstantial, and if that was
the plan, it didn't work out so well. Still, it might help
explain why, after Sarkozy's defeat, MNLA spokesmen went out
of their way to thank him for his support and understanding.
Soon after Sarkozy left office, the MNLA was broke. Its
fighters began to drift towards Ag-Ghali, and soon the
secular nationalists were shaking hands with the Islamist
Ansar Dine and talking about imposing sharia in the north.
That accord had the lifespan of an ice cream cone in August
-- the MNLA's diplomatic wing realized what a disaster it
would be for the group's image, and people in Kidal wouldn't
stand for it -- but it was telling nonetheless. The
takeaway? The MNLA is hardly a horse you can bet on.
In spite of this history of unstable allegiances, some
analysts persist in thinking that a proxy war in the desert
-- in which outside powers like the U.S. would support the
separatist MNLA against the Islamist Ansar Dine -- is a good
idea. This is so foolish it makes the head spin. Tuareg
separatists -- like the Islamists, or like the neighboring
states of Algeria, Mauritania, and Niger -- will always be
fighting their own war, not that of the Americans or anyone
else.
The proxy war is like a bank shot in a game of pool played
with snowballs. It won't work in the Sahara or anywhere
else, and surely even the most gung-ho American
interventionists do not want to be holding the bag when
Tuareg fighters switch sides again to shake hand with the
Islamists or otherwise refuse to play Washington's game. And
now that France, under François Hollande, is no longer
playing the role of the pyromaniac fireman in Mali, there is
no reason for the United States to audition for it.
So what is to be done? Ultimately, Malians themselves will
have to take the lead in resolving a crisis that has
endangered their neighbors. Outside actors can only help all
sides seek an honorable way to make the Malian north safe
again, partly by working to get Bamako to accept the
assistance of its neighbors. At the moment, foreign military
intervention, whether it comes from ECOWAS or elsewhere,
will be viewed as an invasion in both the south and the
north. That has to change, which means that politics has to
come first. A political solution will be harder to achieve
than a military one, but you get what you pay for. The first
step towards it will be finding legitimate and sensible
interlocutors (sitting Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra
is a possibility) while sidelining the hotheaded, the
foolish, and the cynical whether they are in Mali, Niger ...
or Washington.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic
publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on
African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and
international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by
William Minter.
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