Iyad ag Ghali, through glasses darkly
BY THE end of this month an array of Western and African governments
and regional bodies is supposed, according to a resolution passed
unanimously last month in the UN Security Council, to have drawn up a
detailed military plan to save the northern chunk of Mali from a clutch
of Islamist rebel groups with ties to al-Qaeda. At the same time,
tentative negotiations are already afoot to prise away one of the rebel
outfits from its alliance with al-Qaeda. Even if that can be achieved, a
full-blown counter-insurgency campaign is still likely, though it will
probably not start in earnest for several months, despite the French
defence minster’s initial rash assertion that it must begin within
weeks.
The basic UN plan is for African leadership and manpower to combine
with Western muscle and know-how to swat the rebels. It has been mooted
that a force of 3,000-plus soldiers from Mali’s lousy and demoralised
army plus another 3,000 or so from the other 14 countries in the
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional club
that is expected to lead the fray, will be backed by a contingent of a
few hundred Western specialists, mainly from France and the United
States, to provide intelligence, logistics, aerial firepower and
surveillance (including drones), and perhaps small contingents of
special forces. ECOWAS is ill-equipped to beat the jihadists on its own.
The UN may need to beg for troops from elsewhere. Few expect an assault
to begin before next year, despite the UN’s demands for urgency.
No one is confident of the outcome. The three main towns now in the
hands of the Islamists—Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu—will probably be
recaptured in due course. But whether the rebels can be completely
expunged from the Sahara desert’s vast and rugged swathe of northern
Mali is much less certain. It is not even clear that Mali’s own
government will hold together. The international enterprise being
cheered on by the UN is fraught with danger. Yet all the leading
governments in America, Europe and Africa agree that drastic measures
must be taken as soon as sensibly possible.
With France, Mali’s former colonial power, in the vanguard, the UN
has been prodded into action by two main factors. First, the plight of
Malians in the north of the country has worsened, as the Islamists
impose a ruthless version of
sharia law,
including stoning for adultery, amputation of hands for theft, a ban on
football, television and music, and the desecration of revered shrines
now deemed idolatrous.
Second, it is feared that if the Islamists and al-Qaeda entrench
themselves, the area will become a haven for terrorists plotting to
spread their deadly wares as far afield as Europe and America, much as
has previously happened in parts of Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
The weakness of Mali’s own regime has helped the jihadists take over
the country’s northern slice. A military coup in March was sparked by
the army’s impatience with the civilian regime’s botched efforts to
suppress an insurgency that has been rumbling off and on for many years
by the disaffected Tuareg people (akin to the Berbers of north Africa)
who make up a tenth of Mali’s 15m-plus population but who predominate in
the north.
The fall of Muammar Qaddafi last year in Libya helped rekindle the
rebellion, because many of the Tuareg who served his regime fled
south-west to their remote Saharan fastnesses in Algeria, Niger and
Mali, taking with them a mass of weapons. The strife in Mali has long
had an ethnic rub, since the lighter-skinned Tuareg say that their black
compatriots, who run Mali from Bamako, its capital in the south, treat
them as second-class citizens.
Within weeks of the coup in March and the ensuing paralysis of
government in Bamako, the northern rebels, spearheaded by a Tuareg
separatist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad
(MNLA), swept into the northern towns as the government forces fled. But
in no time the separatists had themselves been outflanked by three
vehemently Islamist movements: the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in
West Africa, known by its French acronym, MUJAO, whose stronghold is
Gao; Ansar Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”), led mainly by Tuareg
fighters, in particular Iyad ag Ghali, whose stronghold is around Kidal;
and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a franchise of Osama bin
Laden’s outfit, led by assorted Arab and other jihadists, with Algerian
dissidents to the fore.
On November 6th a delegation from Ansar Dine was in Burkina Faso,
where the president, Blaise Compaoré, is heading negotiations on behalf
of ECOWAS. Ansar Dine has apparently stated its willingness to open
peace talks and allow humanitarian supplies to be brought into northern
Mali, by implication loosening its ties with al-Qaeda. Another Ansar
Dine delegation has been in Algeria, by far the beefiest country in
Mali’s vicinity. America and France have gone out of their way to
persuade Algeria to sign up to the UN’s emerging counter-insurgency
plan.
A vital piece in the diplomatic jigsaw is Ansar Dine’s enigmatic
leader, Iyad ag Ghali (pictured above). A Tuareg native of Kidal in his
50s, he has a long and controversial record as both power broker and
troublemaker in northern Mali. He has variously led rebellions and
arranged the release of Western hostages; a bunch of French ones are
still in rebel hands across the Sahara. Mr ag Ghali may also be wary of
the Arab jihadists’ influence on the largely Tuareg rebels. Hence Mr
Compaoré may think he can be wooed away from MUJAO and al-Qaeda.
But some say Mr ag Ghali’s influence is waning—and that his defection
from the jihadist front would not make much difference. He founded
Ansar Dine only, it is said, after failing to win the leadership of the
Tuaregs’ MNLA, which is relatively secular. He may also have been
embittered by his failure to win the chieftaincy of the Kidal Tuareg
tribal confederacy. And despite Ansar Dine’s brutal application of
sharia law,
doubt has been cast on Mr ag Ghali’s own piety. His current Salafist
bent may date from a recent stint as a Malian diplomat in Saudi Arabia.
But before that he was said to enjoy a whisky, a charge his people deny.
Cables published by WikiLeaks say he once walked into the American
embassy in Bamako and asked for help to fight against al-Qaeda in the
north. “They talk about the Islamic side,” says Timbuktu’s mayor, Hallé
Ousmane, of Ansar Dine. “I think it is just a cover.” The group, he
says, “wants territory in the desert to hide hostages and traffic in
opium.”
The biggest lever in northern Mali may indeed be money. Some Western
governments have paid large ransoms for hostages. And drug smuggling is a
lucrative source of funds for the Islamists. “The Islamists get richer,
while the local people get poorer,” says Adama Diarra, a Malian
journalist. The UN says the Islamists draw young men into their ranks by
offering dollops of cash. A resident of Timbuktu surmises that Ansar
Dine has cosied up to al- Qaeda because it needed the money. “[Ansar
Dine] has financial problems, so now it asks AQIM for financial
resources,” said a resident of Timbuktu.
But whatever the sincerity of Mr ag Ghali and his comrades and the
possibility of persuading them to come onside, it is clear that al-Qaeda
itself has a growing presence in northern Mali—and that it can be
contained only by a carefully designed military and political strategy.
That cannot happen overnight.
economist.com
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