CounterVortex

Rein in the enthusiasm
ww4report.com has been quite good/factual/sober on this, but I would caution westerners to rein in their enthusiasm a bit for this “cause”. The fact is there is quite a large lobby in the former colonial power – France – and neighboring nations for “the Touareg cause”. This is not new: it comes from the colonial period and reflects their preference for/romantic attachment to these communities (in theory).

But let me take this opportunity to put some mythology to rest.

The well organized PR campaign for this latest insurgency misses most important points, and many perhaps well meaning westerners have eaten it up. The Touareg (or Kel Tamasheq) were treated by the French much like the United States treated American indians. First they killed as many as possible, then they bought one group off to fight another, then — when safely “pacified” — the French began to romanticize every element of Touareg culture and life. Unlike the Arabs or the Blacks, who the French actually had to deal with (and oppress) on a more regular basis, French society has developed a “noble savage” complex around the Touareg. What they have always most admired are the minority ruling classes of Touareg societies: free warriors who roam the desert, making war, writing poetry, and incidentally living off the enslavement of other Touareg castes and neighboring sedentary communities. That the French perceived Touareg nobility with whiteness didn’t hurt either.

Neighboring communities and many Touareg saw free versus slave in skin color associations, although the number of dark skinned high caste Touaregs show that they view this more in the idea of slave versus free family histories. Still, race, broadly understood, is a huge unspoken contribution both to this conflict, and Europeans tremendous romanticism of the Touareg.

This, like simple geography and demographics, is entirely absent from the propaganda many in the west repeat about this conflict. Touareg form a minority in northern Mali, even if the area is reduced from the rather ludicrous maps drawn in the diaspora. But they do not form anything like a majority in the northern half of Mali. The “Azawad” region now claimed as an ancestral home land, was until the 1990s a term for either the 150 km stretch of desert just north of Tombouctou, or (as “Adawagh”) a seasonal pasture area in Tahoua, Niger, hundreds of kilometers to the east. During the 1990 rebellion, several groups adopted the name as a collective term for the lands of pastoralsit Touareg and Arabs/”Maures” in Mali, but this was usually considered to only be the far north desert, some third of the region which has since late 2011 appeared on a series of foreign created maps. Prior to October 2011 no one had distributed maps of Azawad, and the title was meaningless to most Malians. That some of these maps include area with relatively tiny Touareg populations like Mopti Region, and all include the entire Songhai populated Niger River bend, shows how either how speculative such maps are.

Members of Touareg and Arab/Maure communities in Mali (combined in their census) make up between 8% and 12% of Mali’s population of 15 million, and many live outside these northern areas. The far northeastern Kidal Region (created as an area of self governance for former rebel leaders from the Ifoghas nobility) is the area with the greatest pastoralist population. It has a population of fewer than 90,000, spread over an area the size of France. By contrast the majority black / sedentary northern regions of Tombouctou and Gao also claimed by the Paris based rebel group have populations between 500,000 and 300,000. The majority Songhai city of Gao (abandoned by the army and now being looted by a variety of rebel factions from the north) has a population alone larger than that of Kidal Region. So the notion that this is a “Touareg homeland” is simply untrue. Malians generally see it as an attempt by a small elite to pillage and control the nation they so long fought to build.

The local majority — black — population equate light skinned pastorlists in general (and the upper classes of Touareg society specifically) with the slavery/serfdom many desert side communities experienced until Mali’s independence. The Songhai and other sedentary communities (including formerly bonded Touareg communities) are in fact quite hostile to this “Azawad” project, as are large portions of the Touareg pastoralist communities in the area. This is seen by the one group as an attempt to recapture communal/racial domination, and the other as an attempt by specific noble factions based around Kidal to impose dominance over other Touareg factions. That the MNLA and Ancar-Dine’s leaders are almost entirely drawn from just three of the many tribes in the region speaks to this being an internal power struggle rather than a national liberation movement.

The French government had floated a plan to hive off Saharan areas prior to independence, and this was backed strongly by the leading Touareg noble leaders of the day. This plan, known by the French acronym OCRS, was penned after French officials began prospecting for oil and uranium in the area. Many noble lineage and ethnic nationalist Touareg still remember the failure of this plan with bitterness.

The Ifoghas confederation was formed by French colonial rule, attaching to them tributary tribes from other Touareg tribes who had resisted colonial rule in other areas. These tributary groups are lumped into the catch all title Imghad. Their leaders formed the majority of government forces in Kidal, until support from the Army collapsed with the coup. Imghad groups make up something like half the Touareg in Kidal region.

Malians did not miss that this new revolt has its politcal headquarters in Paris, or that the French foreign ministry admitted that it held high level meetings in its offices with MNLA leaders in the month prior to the rebels first attacks on Malian towns. The French government , about to face elections, have several nationals held hostage by Algerian jihadist somewhere in the remote border regions where Mali, Algeria, and Mauritania meet. France has long accused Mali of not doing enough to get them back, while Mali claims that the tens of millions of Euros European governments paid to hostage takers in the Sahara have created a big business among the smuggling community, resident in this remote area. Further, the 1990s and 2006 rebellion put in place agreements whereby new constituencies would be created for certain Touareg politicians in the north, and that all Touareg staff, locally commanded, and Malian funded military units would provide security.

So many Malians suspect the initial rebellion was a confluence of interests between on faction of local Touareg notables and the French, in which once the rebellion took place, French forces would be allowed access to track down their hostages, and in return the French would mediate the next peace process (read: division of spoils). Note also that this part of Mali is the theater of competition over as yet unproven oil, manganese, gold, and perhaps uranium deposits. France and most other world or regional powers have a pressing interest in who will be in charge of this region in the coming years. Local notables and politicians are vying for a slice of these coming deals, just as a presidential election that was scheduled for 29 April might have caused a renegotiation of the networks of influence that snake through Malian government at all levels. Or even the loss of office so carefully negotiated. Again, many of these office holders have been claimed by the MNLA as their supporters.

One thing I often hear from westerners is that this is a popular national struggle that has been driven to violence and unrelenting oppression. They likely do not know that there have been exactly two marches/rallies held by the MNLA and it’s predecessor the MNA in the year prior to their first attacks. The largest, in Kidal, brought out a crowd the MNA itself numbered at 300, while opponents claimed it was much smaller. As folks are no doubt now aware, the Malian state had little direct control in the north. Most political and security force leaders were themselves leaders in the 1990 and 2006 rebellion. Many are now claimed by the MNLA as supporters. So who exactly was suppressing their political struggle to such a degree that they were left with no choice but to begin shooting up other peoples towns?

The political leadership of the MNLA were almost entirely relatives of the late Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, a 1990s rebel who defected from the army unit he was given a job in as part of the peace process in the late 90s. Since 1999 he carried out attacks on truck traffic and army posts, and joined the 2006 rebellion, only to break from it when they signed peace agreements. He and his supporters have long carried out a lucrative smuggling operation in the far east of Kidal region, from a commune specifically created by the government to give him his own fiefdom (in exchange for peace). Ag Bahanga was killed in August 2011 returning from fighting for Gaddafi in Libya. At the time his father in law (now lead spokesman for the MNLA) said he died in a late night road accident.

As with previous rebellions there has been no attempt to peruse goals through politics, or even call for the northern population to decide on these questions: no mention of referendums came from the MNLA press supporters until two months after their first armed attacks.

No, this is neither a popular struggle, a national struggle, nor a progressive struggle.

It is a small intra-ethnic conflict which local elites use to extort wealth for an already incredibly poor and often hopelessly corrupt Malian government. A series of unlucky circumstances have meant that what was planned as a short demonstrative but of political pressure has gotten away from those who started it.

With over a million people already suffering food shortages this year, rural Malians are trying to stretch grains and forage to last until the rains that will come in May or June. Two hundred thousand Malians have been made homeless by the fighting so far. Bandit, criminal, and Algerian led jihadist armed groups, numbering less than a few thousand, have taken advantage of the chaos to control large sections of the north. The MNLA, despite its press releases, is outnumbered by even these small groups, and seems more and more likely to begin turning on one another, as its constituent commanders fall into disagreement. Other ethnic groups and communities have formed their own militias to protect their homes, and wholesale communal violence seems unavoidable at this time.

To the middle class MNLA propagandists of Europa and America I say: if you want to be a rebel, do it in your own damn country, where you at least understand what’s going on. It may be sexy and romantic for westerns to view it as a noble struggle of right versus might. But you don’t have to pay any of the costs the Malian people are paying right now.