On April 25, the Security Council approved a UN “peacekeeping” force of 12,600 for Mali. They asked the UN Secretary General to appoint a Special Representative for Mali, and called on member states to provide troops, police, and the necessary equipment. It also authorized the secretary general to approve cooperation between the UN mission in Mali and the UN missions in Liberia and Ivory Coast for the temporary sharing of logistical and administrative support. Read more »

The Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF) has done Africa watchers and policy makers an important service by publishing David J. Francis’s analysis of the Mali crisis with his suggestions as to the way forward. Titled “The Regional Impact of the Armed Conflict and French Intervention in Mali,” Francis teases out for the educated non-specialist the highly complicated Malian narrative, identifying key players, groups and events. The study is especially strong on the French domestic political dimensions of President Hollande’s military intervention, and what the likely consequences may be. Read more »

You read this right. The British media, citing French sources, is having a field day with the report that the camel given to French president Francois Hollande during his February 2013 visit to Mali, has been eaten by its care-takers. According to the French media, the minister of defense broke the news to Hollande. Embarrassed, a Malian official said, “as soon as we heard of this, we quickly replaced it with a bigger and better-looking camel,” according to Reuters. Read more »

French former president Nicolas Sarkozy criticized the French intervention in Mali in a March 6 magazine interview. He is quoted as saying, “the rule is never to go into a country that has no government,” and, “What are we doing there if we’re not just supporting putschists and trying to control a territory four times larger than France with four thousand men?” Read more »

Kidnapping is not a part of the repertoire of the radical, diffuse Islamist group called Boko Haram. Some of its alleged spokesmen have denounced the practice. However, kidnapping is common in the Sahel and ransoms are an important source of revenue for the rival criminal networks also involved with smuggling, some of which have links to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM has regularly claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of foreigners. Kidnapping is also a well-established tactic of the criminal groups in the western part of the oil-rich Niger Delta. As in the Sahel, Delta kidnappings are mercenary, with little political content. Most of the Delta kidnappings are of Nigerians, not foreigners–though it tends to be the periodic high-profile foreign kidnappings that make international headlines. In the Sahel, the huge ransoms paid by governments or corporations ensure that most of the victims are foreigners. Read more »

It’s hard to get the details on the logistical arrangements, or numbers, of the ECOWAS force in Mali. The majority of Nigeria’s promised 1,200 troops are reportedly deployed to a military base in Niger, or still stationed in Bamako. However, the Nigerian media organization Premium Times reports that the Nigerian troops actually in Mali are suffering from inadequate provisions, especially food. Citing a “defense source,” Premium Times  reports that Nigerian soldiers are resorting to, in effect, shaking down their Malian hosts under the guise of making “courtesy calls.” Apparently, they ask for–and receive–food, in one case a cow and fifty bags of rice from a prefect. The story is roundly denied by a Nigerian defense spokesman who is quoted, “we have provided the contingent with enough food and funds to last them for the initial three months. Is Nigeria not bigger than that?” Read more »

Throughout the Mali crisis, the role of racism in shaping the conflict has not received much emphasis, at least in U.S. commentary. Yet, it plays an important role on the ground.

Mali is on the dividing line between north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.  It has a small but traditionally cohesive population of Tuaregs and Arabs (approximately 10 percent of Mali’s total population) who regard themselves as “white.” They regard other Malians as “black.” Tuaregs and Arabs participated in the trans-Saharan slave trade, sometimes selling and enslaving “blacks” when they could. Tuaregs and Arabs move freely across the borders of Mali, Algeria, and Mauritania. During the colonial and post-colonial periods, the Malian government in Bamako kept antipathy between “whites” and “blacks” relatively under control. Read more »

The confluence of a radical Islamist push toward the south in Mali, the consequent French intervention, a raid on a natural gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria, and Secretary Clinton’s congressional testimony on Benghazi on January 23, are generating the largely unexamined view that the war on terrorism with an al-Qaeda focus is underway in the Sahel-Sahara region of West Africa. The attack on In Amenas and the resulting tragic loss of life has particularly focused international attention. Read more »

What a difference a fortnight can make.

On January 7, 2013, the eve of the Islamist feint south, the Jonathan government announced that it was reducing its troop pledge for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Mali intervention force that was to be deployed in September 2013. Nigeria would contribute 450 troops, not 600. It also signaled that it would be unable to bear the lion’s share of the costs, as it had in previous ECOWAS interventions in African states to restore or maintain security. But, in the aftermath of the French intervention, the Jonathan government reversed its course to significantly increase that contribution. On January 17, the Nigerian Senate approved deployment of 1,200 troops. Some Nigerian troops have been on the ground in Mali for a few days already, according to the Abuja government. Read more »

Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s group Al Mulathameen (translated by the New York Times as “The Brigade of the Masked Ones”) kidnapped more than forty international workers from the Algerian natural gas field, ln Amenas, which lies along the middle of Algeria’s eastern border with Libya. The attack was ostensibly in retaliation for French intervention in Mali, and specifically, the Algerian government’s decision to allow French military planes through their air space en route to Mali.  And that seems to be the assumption of much of the Western press commentary. Read more »