African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Swaziland
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • #EndSARS
  • Specials
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Swaziland
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • #EndSARS
  • Specials
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
Politics

Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for al-Qaeda – By Richard Dowden

By African Arguments
January 16, 2013
2326
13
Share:

From being a blank spot on the map, the Sahara now looks like a springboard for the advance of militant Islam.

Until recently Mali was famous only for its music and for Timbuktu “” our nickname for nowhere. Suddenly the French are invading this huge, poor, sparsely populated, landlocked African country, much of which is empty desert. Britain is helping them (if we can get our aircraft to fly).

Just a couple of years ago Mali was held up by Western aid donors as a success. It had been relatively democratic since the Malians overthrew a dictatorship in 1992. And despite being poor “” its main earners are gold and cotton “” it functioned better than many of its neighbours. But last March there was a coup and now its Government is ineffective. What went wrong?

First, the Government was not in fact as good as the donors proclaimed. Basking in Western aid and praise, it became complacent, corrupt and did not deliver development, especially in the poor North of the country. Sensing discontent among the population, a young army captain, Amadou Haya Sanogo, seized power last year. Although he was forced to accept a civilian president and prime minister and prepare the country to return to democratic rule, he remains a powerful but unaccountable player.

Second, the North of the country, the Sahara desert, has been home to Salafist rebels pushed out from Algeria in the late 1990s and targeted by militant Islamist movements inspired and funded by Saudi Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalists, preaching jihad against the West.

Like many, my first reaction was that they were welcome to live in the desert. What damage could they do there? But the desert, flat and empty, is also like a sea, in that people can cross with few natural obstacles and no visible state boundaries. It is perfect for smuggling money, drugs, cigarettes, guns and people across vast distances and several borders. Foreigners were, and still are, often kidnapped.

The desert was also home to the Tuareg, tough camel-riding nomads with their distinctive blue turbans, who managed the trans-Sahara trade. Traditionally they were like an aristocracy, keeping themselves apart from the black Africans to the south and frequently enslaving them. But droughts in the 1980s and 1990s destroyed their herds, and many of the young Tuareg went north to join Colonel Gaddafi’s Army.

When he was overthrown in 2011, they grabbed as much weaponry as they could and headed back to Mali, planning to seize the North and declare it an independent country called Azawad. They found well-funded allies in the Islamists and launched their rebellion in January last year, pushing the Malian Army back before taking the entire North of the country and declaring it independent shortly after Captain Sanogo’s coup.

The Tuareg may have had the guns but the Islamists had the money and a strategy. The Islamists also started destroying historic Islamic shrines and, apparently, the ancient libraries of Timbuktu. Well armed and battle-hardened, they then turned on their Tuareg allies and routed them. The Tuareg nationalists have now called off their demand for an independent state but they have made themselves unpopular.

Suddenly from being a blank space on the map, the Sahara from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east is beginning to look like the springboard for a new Islamist offensive by AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and other Islamist groups. Mali borders seven African countries; next-door Niger, an equally fragile state, another five. According to Africa Confidential, a well-respected newsletter, the Islamists are targeting Mauritania next, with its rich fishing grounds and mineral wealth, and then Niger, which has uranium and oil.

But the biggest prize would be the destabilisation of Nigeria to the southeast, shortly to take over from South Africa as Africa’s biggest economy and chief foreign supplier of oil for the US. Nigeria already has its own Islamist insurgency, Boko Haram, which has received weapons and training from AQIM. In 2010 Boko Haram bombed the UN headquarters in the capital, Abuja, in the centre of the country, and has attacked churches and government buildings in northern cities. But it has not yet hit targets in the mainly Christian south.

There are reports that the Islamist groups are fighting among themselves, which may happen if all the attacks are in Muslim areas. Most of this part of Africa was traditionally Sufi Islamic “” tolerant of local practices that are blasphemous to strict Wahhabi Islam. Shrines and tombs of local holy men and saints are now being desecrated and women forced to stay at home and wear the full hijab in public.

In Mali women have traditionally played a substantial role in public affairs and dressed in bright colours, their hair often uncovered. But today they wear black or drab green or brown and are forced to stay at home and are only allowed to meet a man if accompanied by a male relative.

Last week Islamist rebels in Mali began to advance south towards the capital, Bamako, taking the key town of Konna. The French realised that the Malian Army was incapable of stopping them and launched their own counter-attack by air.

Mali was part of their African estate and until recently France has remained engaged with its former territories far more closely than Britain has. Since 2006 the US has taken the lead on opposing Islamic militancy in Africa, establishing military training missions in most countries bordering the Sahara. One of the most alarming outcomes of the Mali episode is that most of the US-trained troops are reported to have either stayed in their barracks or deserted and joined the Islamists. But now the US cannot give direct military support to the Mali government because, under US law, it can only give such aid to democracies.

Can this rebellion be stopped by air attacks? Bombing arms dumps and concentrations of rebels may hinder their advance but AQIM can only be quelled by troops on the ground who have the support of locals. At present the Malian Army is weak and lacks morale. That means the French will probably have to provide the core of a force that includes soldiers from other West African countries. They may get help from Tuareg nationalists but they remain untrusted.

Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, has said the action in Mali would be over “in a matter of weeks”. These are words he may regret.

This piece was previously published in The Times.

Richard Dowden is Director of the Royal African Society

Previous Article

Central African Republic: The collapse of the ...

Next Article

Northern Nigeria: The Conflict Within – By ...

mm

African Arguments

13 comments

  1. Further reading: riding the wave | beyondbrics 16 January, 2013 at 10:58

    […] affect the region? Al Jazeera Why did Brazil underperform its peers in 2012? Policy, Economonitor Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for Al-Qaeda, African Arguments Posted in Global | Permalink Share Share this […]

  2. French intervention in Mali – views from blogosphere | Africa at LSE 16 January, 2013 at 15:24

    […] Arguments – Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for Al-Qaeda – In a piece that originally appeared in The Times, Richard Dowden analyses what went wrong […]

  3. Mali conflict: watch the spillover | beyondbrics 16 January, 2013 at 16:37

    […] are obvious targets for militants moving across the region’s highly porous desert borders. As Richard Dowden, executive director of the Royal African Society, writes: Suddenly from being a blank space on the map, the Sahara from Senegal in the west to Somalia in […]

  4. Today, Mali; Tomorrow, Nigeria for Al-Qaida | TheJusticeTeam 18 January, 2013 at 04:14

    […] Dowden, writing for the U.K.’s Times newspaper, examines “what went wrong” in Mali and what it means for the rest of […]

  5. Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for al-Qaeda – Richard Dowden | Africa – News and Analysis 18 January, 2013 at 15:51

    […] Dowden is Director of the Royal African Society  AA Share this:StumbleUponTumblrPinterestDiggLinkedInGoogle +1MoreTwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the […]

  6. Monte McMurchy 19 January, 2013 at 19:50

    This most recent Malian internal conflictual strife manifesting in insurgency illustrates the absolute need if not essential requirement for strong developed national institutional pillars of governance designed to represent and respond to local national citizen need as well as being able to offer prescriptive grounded leadership in the advancement of the country’s social condition to the benefit of all citizens. International assistance donors ought to be made to understand and appreciate the absolute primary ontological fundamentality in that good governance democratic grafting is a very very very long term process type oriented endeavour—much akin to “eating soup with a knife” as abstracting good governance institutional values from an external source based value system is both messy and labour intellectually intensive with no guarantee as to measured success which must not be considered in terms of western type values.

  7. Mali | Pearltrees 21 January, 2013 at 15:16

    […] West Africa < Africa – History / Political Economy Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for al-Qaeda – By Richard Dowden <b>From being a blank spot on the map, the Sahara now looks like a springboard for the […]

  8. Marguerite Garling 21 January, 2013 at 15:44

    As usual a good background article from African Arguments. However, I for one am always surprised to hear the Sahara referred to as an empty space. Anyone who has been there will know that people appear out of nowhere whenever you stop for a few minutes. Apart from the Tamashek(aka Touareg) nomads in southern Algeria and northern Mali, both vast region share indigenous Arab Choua and Arabo-Berber peoples, while the historic cities of Gao and Toumbouctou have a majority Songhai population, along with their former Bella slaves. Households may include Songhai, Bella and Tamashek relatives under the same roof. Like many Sahel countries, Mali is split between “southerners” and “northerners”, which may help explain the pusillanimity of the Malian army when faced with the initial MNLA insurgency in the north. Now the challenge will be how to defend “le Mali utile” (to paraphrase colonial usage) and patrol huge, but not eompty, areas of desert.

  9. Afragenesis Network News - Mali: West Joins ‘War on Terror’ Again 4 February, 2013 at 19:04

    […] Mali fell to the islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north of […]

  10. Mali: West Joins ‘War on Terror’ Again | Rivers State News 5 February, 2013 at 06:11

    […] Mali fell to the islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north of […]

  11. Mali – dragging the west back in to the War on Terror | Africa – News and Analysis 5 February, 2013 at 07:42

    […] is the desire to prevent serious contagion in West Africa. If Mali fell to the islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north of the […]

  12. Mali: Dragging the West Back in to the War On Terror | Risk Management | Ocean Protection Services 5 February, 2013 at 07:52

    […] Mali fell to the islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north of the […]

  13. Mali: Dragging The West Back In To The War On Terror | Somali Nation :: English Language 6 February, 2013 at 04:53

    […] is the desire to prevent serious contagion in West Africa. If Mali fell to the islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north of […]

Leave a reply Cancel reply

  • Politics

    Economic Growth in South Africa: has the ANC got it wrong? – By Moeletsi Mbeki and Refiloe Morwe

  • Protests in Sudan have been ongoing for weeks. Credit: DIGITALAIN.
    PoliticsSudanTop story

    Sudan: A genuine, peaceful people’s revolution in the making

  • Politics

    “How Genocides End” (4: Darfur)

The Africa Insiders Newsletter

Get the free edition of our exclusive look at this week’s most important developments on the continent.

Please wait...

Thank you for signing up!

  • 77283
    Followers

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Most read

  • africa elections 2021

    Africa Elections 2021: All the upcoming votes

  • In Aksum, Tigrayan region of Ethiopia. Credit: Rod Waddington.

    As a Tigrayan, my bond with Ethiopia feels beyond repair

  • The police block opposition presidential candidate Bobi Wine in December 2020 during the Uganda presidential election campaign. Credit: HEBobiwine.

    Uganda: How donors can go beyond “strongly-worded statements”

  • ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule (third from left) at at the 40th commemoration of Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu. Credit: : GCIS. south africa corruption

    Down but not out: Corruption in South Africa and the arrest of ANC’s no. 2

  • Tunisians mark Martyrs' Day in Tunis on 9 April 2013 to demand justice for victims of the 2011 revolution. Credit: Magharebia.

    The Tunisian Revolution’s young dreams are unfulfilled but unforgotten

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu