The toppling of the President of Mali by a group of officers demonstrates the failure of an anti-terrorism policy that disregards the population’s main issues. Charlotte Wiedemann, author of the study paper “Viel Militär, weniger Sicherheit” for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, on the chances of a new start after the putsch.
A military putsch right under the noses of 13,000 UN soldiers? That on its own is noteworthy, if not unique. Also on Malian soil are French special forces, European military trainers, US anti-terrorism specialists, security advisers from a range of nations and a host of foreign aid organisations. Right under all these noses, the President was removed from office, the population celebrated or, at the very least, expressed relief, and then it turned out that the soldiers involved in the coup were among the most highly-trained officer in the whole country; some of them had been trained in the West, their leader in the US and Germany.
Other countries supported the President – because he is useful
How do you unpick this complex situation? To begin with, by observing that there seems to be two kinds of reality in Mali; foreign players do not live and act in the same one as most of the natives. From the Malian point of view, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the toppled President, embodied a corrupt political class that had become insupportable; there had been months of rallies calling for him to step down. The phalanx of military and civilian foreign players, however, stood by Keita even when he allowed shots to be fired at the demonstrators and the bodies of the dead littered the streets of the capital city, Bamako.
Why? Because Keita was useful. Because the entire system of so-called aid depends on docile, compliant state leadership – the UN mission Minusma, including the Bundeswehr, countless projects, contracts, foreign salaries. And this system never brings itself into jeopardy. And for this reason, unlike in the case of Iran or Belarus, for instance, even suspected election fraud was unable to threaten the legitimacy of the Malian President in the eyes of the European Union. The US ambassador even went so far as to argue that the opposition’s calls for the head of state’s resignation were anti-constitutional.
The country is calling for a better and a fairer State
What happened in Bamako is first and foremost an ethical and moral disgrace for all overseas parties involved, who learned very quickly that they could not force their interpretation of legitimacy onto Mali. But that is not all; it is now clear just how misguided the ideology structuring the war on terror in Mali (and elsewhere) really is. It is held up as a battle for a territory from which the jihadist enemy must be driven by military means. This war thinks in terms of zones, its angle of vision is that of a drone scanning geographical spaces.
But right at the start of Mali’s most recent crisis in 2012, the State’s failure was the root of all problems; since then, the country has been calling for a better State, for a fair and social one. The ongoing crisis, with its rising death toll, has simply made these calls louder. The population feels “orphaned”, according to a recent statement by Malian intellectuals. An interesting choice of vocabulary, given the countless thousands of foreign godparents purporting to rescue Mali.
Neglecting the need for State has fatal consequences. In central Mali, which currently reports the highest number of victims, an indigenous, rural form of jihadism evolved predominately not out of religious grounds, but as a reaction to abysmal government leadership. Armed shepherds banished the representatives of a State they associated with despotism and materialist greed and replaced corrupt judges with Islamic qadis. Several times, national public meetings demanded negotiations to sound out ways of tempting the people of this region back to the Republic. This, however, never materialised, as France opposed strongly all attempts into this direction.
The work of foreign players must come under scrutiny
For as long as foreign intervention continues to protect the power of the old political elite, any peace process in Mali will inevitably fail, our study paper “Viel Militär, weniger Sicherheit” (available in German and French only) concluded in 2018 – and recent events in Bamako confirmed this. It is therefore incorrect to assume that the fall of the President has ultimately made Mali a “failed State”, despite all the honourable efforts of the West. Instead, as the “International Crisis Group” commented, the last eight years have been an expensive waste of time, because security policy was prized so much more highly than the quality of the governance.
The situation in which a widely detested political class felt protected by foreign players has now come to an abrupt end. And the question as to how a system and its institutions will be legitimised calls for new answers.
”We must review our democracy in such a way that it corresponds to the expectations of the people”, says Ismaël Wagué, spokesperson of the ruling military junta and Deputy Chief of Staff of the Malian Air Force. Unlike the chaotic mutineer NCOs in 2012, the members of the “National Committee for the Salvation of the People” of 2020 are getting to work efficiently yet carefully. Their agenda consists solely of putting the domestic policy house in order, they do not wish to get involved in anything else, they respect all international agreements, not simply concerning the UN mission, but also “Operation Barkhane” of the French special forces.
The anti-French mood, which is apparent in certain younger sections of society in the capital and featured in a number of slogans at the opposition rallies, is not something the officers wish to stoke. The members of the National Committee stand for close ties with the American and French military, but the ranks of the officers include one who was trained in Russia and a Christian. All this sends a message to the outside world. The appeal to the citizens of Mali is that “we need everyone”, and the officers included explicitly the Tuareg stronghold of Kidal and the Srab-controlled region of Taudeni in the far north. Everybody has a place “in the rebuilding of Mali”.
Is this an opportunity for a new beginning? Only if the foreign players do not insist on more of the status quo. What the officers themselves do not wish to do must also come under scrutiny: Minusma’s size and mandate, the anti-terrorism strategy and development aid that is lamentably ineffectual.
This article was first published in German on Boell.de.
