In search of monsters: what are they doing in Mali?

This is striking, since la Françafrique has been the object of self-critical pillorying for at least a decade in France and the French were the great detractors of the ‘war on terror’. So, after all the recriminations, are the French still neo-colonial? Or have they finally rallied to the idea that waging war on international terrorists makes sense? Or both? Ten years ago almost to the day, France spoke out in the UN Security Council against the American-led invasion of Iraq. Dominique de Villepin, the eloquent challenger of George W. Bush’s war on terror, has remained perfectly consistent. ‘How has the neoconservative virus been able to infect our minds?’ he asked in an op-ed published soon after Hollande’s decision to intervene in Mali. Conjuring ‘the déjà-vu of the war on terror’, the former minister of foreign affairs urged:

Let us draw lessons from a decade of lost wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya … In Mali, we will fight blindly for lack of clear war objectives. And we will fight alone for lack of a solid Malian counterpart. Their president was ousted last March, their prime minister in December, a divided Malian army has fallen apart; on whom shall we lean?

Within days, the Villepin doctrine drew strength from events on the ground. French forces began operations with aerial bombardments of Islamist strongholds in northern Mali, a desert two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom; one helicopter pilot was killed. So ended the hope of ‘zero dead’ on the French side, the golden figure achieved by the French intervention in Libya in 2011. The situation in Mali, unlike Libya, requires the deployment of ground troops, and French soldiers were duly flown to the capital, Bamako – first 750 of them, then 2500. They were ferried 700 km northeast for their first confrontation and defeated the Islamists in Konna. But on the night of 16 January, a major gas production site at the Algerian-Libyan border, near In Amenas, was taken over by al-Mulathameen (‘the masked brigade’), an Islamist katiba (or ‘fighting unit’) based in Mali which had decided to make a response, and perhaps to signal to rival jihadist groups that it was in the game. When the Algerian army refused to negotiate and instead raided the facility, 29 Islamists and at least 38 hostages were killed, all but one of them foreigners.

In light of the unfolding drama, the question whether a politically beleaguered Hollande considered an attack in Mali his best defence at home becomes much sharper. No incoming French head of state has nosedived in the polls as steeply as Hollande, who in defeating Nicolas Sarkozy eight months ago stressed he’d be a ‘normal’ president – an effective barb against his opponent. As it turned out, normalcy soon came to mean mediocrity. From the bungled introduction of a high-income tax bracket – 75 per cent on those making more than a million euros a year – to the now imperilled legalisation of gay marriage, by way of the controversial banning of homework in primary schools, not much has come together under Hollande. Last October he said clearly that French support for the struggle against Islamists in Mali would not go beyond ‘logistical and financial aid’. ‘I’m adamant about this,’ he told Jeune Afrique. ‘We will not put boots on the ground.’ Why the change of position?

According to a senior military source in Paris, the situation in Mali ‘degenerated at the speed of light’, while a West African intervention force mandated by the UN in December ‘was getting nowhere’. That shouldn’t have come as a surprise: the deadline for its deployment was September 2013, nine months down the road. But hopes of defusing the crisis through negotiation, and by using the West African soldiers not to enforce but to monitor peace, were rapidly dashed. The Malian interim government, put in place after an inconclusive military coup last March, held talks with two Tuareg rebel groups, one secular and secessionist, the other Islamist.[*] Hosting the talks, Burkina Faso attempted to encourage the groups into an alliance against two foreign jihadist organisations active in the north, one West African, the other an al-Qaida affiliate. The talks concluded in a ceasefire agreement on 4 December but within a month the truce fell apart and the Islamist Tuaregs resumed the fight alongside the foreign jihadists. When the jihadists pushed south to seize the airport near Mopti, which would have allowed heavy cargo planes to supply them in their landlocked sanctuary and put them in a position to march on the capital, Paris decided to act. ‘It became an emergency,’ the same French military source explained. ‘According to our intelligence several hundred Islamists had already infiltrated Bamako.’

Of course the UN has ratified France’s deployment in its former colony, post factum, as it now routinely does with all unilateral military actions. And a West African intervention force – or some level of African participation in the UN-endorsed International Mission in Support of Mali – is likely to see the day. On 17 January, one hundred West African soldiers – from Togo and Nigeria – arrived in Bamako and a total of 3300 are now expected to deploy before the start of the rainy season in early March. But no one is fooled by this: if the draconian form of Islamic law enforced over the past ten months in the north of Mali is not extended to Bamako and the populous south of the country, it is because the French president has decided it shouldn’t be.

In the days when France was a staunchly Gaullist country, observers tended to explain whatever internationally jarring decisions were taken in Paris in terms of delusions of grandeur. They were not always wrong. But they rarely commented on the ‘Franco-African state’ (a term coined by the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon), which then existed in all but name as a result of the slow-motion decolonisation orchestrated by Paris and African elites. In France, most people viewed the African ‘protectorate’ as a safeguard for their nation’s ranking in a world now regrettably dominated by Anglo-Saxons. Other Western countries, given the broader Cold War rivalry, were happy to outsource Francophone Africa, then the least important part of a continent of minor strategic importance, to a willing if occasionally overzealous ‘gendarme’. Depending on what counts as military intervention, France changed the course of history by force in sub-Saharan Africa about thirty times between 1945 and 1990. It monopolised nearly two-thirds of the trade with Francophone Africa while its worldwide market share stood at 7 per cent. Former Belgian colonies included, Paris claimed to speak for as many as twenty African states, which in turn voted for France en bloc at the UN.

Since the end of the Cold War, the prerequisites for a ‘Franco-African state’ – a bipolar world order capable of overriding the commercial interests of other Western powers; the absence of democracy and hence of elite competition in Africa; manageable demographics for a mid-level power like France etc – have diminished or disappeared entirely. Yet observers still tend to explain what Paris does, or fails to do, in sub-Saharan Africa as an effect of la Françafrique. Old habits die hard even in unfavourable circumstances, and the French have needed time to come to terms with many inconvenient truths. This may account for the fact that la Françafrique is such a lively anachronism in their public debates. But if France’s decision to intervene in Mali had anything to do with la Françafrique, at least some of the following conditions would be met: Hollande would enjoy a cosy relationship with the ‘big man’ in power in Bamako, who would have secretly funded the French Socialist Party; thousands of French expats would be making

From the London Review of Books

a good living in the former colony; Mali’s mineral or agricultural resources would be firmly in the hands of French companies; and the country’s diplomacy would follow the French lead as unerringly as a sunflower follows the daystar.

All this is far from being the case. First, there hasn’t been a big man with deep pockets in Bamako since 1991, when a democratic uprising swept away the regime of General Moussa Traoré, himself rather suspicious of the French. Second, the vast majority of the six thousand foreign passport holders who have remained in Mali despite the coup d’état are dual nationals, Franco-Malians for the most part. Third, what natural resources exist – mainly cotton and gold – are not in French hands. Mali’s budget, nearly half of it funded by foreign donors, is roughly that of a European town of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, while Mali has a population of 16 million. The country’s diplomatic positions have been as fiercely independent as possible in a part of the world where everyone knows that ‘the hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.’
Last December in the back room of a small office near the Champs-Elysées, I met the man who is arguably to blame for the debacle in Mali. Bilal Ag Cherif, the leader of the National Liberation Movement of Azawad (MNLA), has been seeking independence for a territory he and his fellow Tuaregs call Azawad, or ‘the land of transhumance’, named after a seasonal riverbed between Mali and Niger. His own story is one of transhumance, too. After years spent in Libya, possibly – he wouldn’t say – as a fighter in Gaddafi’s Islamic Legion, he fled home when the Brother Leader was overthrown. Bringing with him experienced combatants and tons of sophisticated ordnance, the booty of his exile, he rekindled the Tuareg revolt in Mali’s north that had never entirely died away since the early 1960s. He struck up an alliance with another Tuareg movement, Ansar Dine, ‘defenders of the faith’. They in turn made common cause with two foreign jihadist groups. Together, they chased the Malian army from the north. Blaming ‘the politicians’ for this defeat, a group of army officers led by Captain Amadou Sanogo staged a coup on 22 March, but failed to win recognition from neighbouring states. Since then a civilian interim administration has been in place pending fresh elections, but these are impossible to organise in a divided state at war.
Defeat turned the tide in the south, victory in the north. No sooner had the MNLA proclaimed Azawad’s ‘independence’ on 6 April than a wave of international jihadists arrived to join their comrades. Some came from Mauritania and the north of Nigeria to fill the ranks of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a regional organisation that aims to transcend racial divisions between Arabs, Berbers and Black Africans in a holy war. Others came from hot spots of international jihadism such as Iraq or Afghanistan to join al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algerian Salafist group which in 2007 became bin Laden’s regional branch. As Ansar Dine chose militant Islamism rather than the common Tuareg cause, Ag Cherif’s MNLA found itself isolated. Soon it was pushed back deep into the desert.