On the sidelines of the closing of the Élysée Summit for Peace and Security in Africa, President François Hollande hardened France’s position on Mali, calling for the disarmament of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and for its inclusion in a political dialogue with Bamako. The French head of state’s statement came in response to the communiqué of 29 November in which the vice-president of the Tuareg independence organisation ended the ceasefire negotiated a few months earlier under the Ouagadougou agreements. While the compromise reached at the time had managed to sidestep the thorny issue of the MNLA’s disarmament by ensuring that the legislative elections of 24 November could take place, the resumption of tensions marks the end of an apparently democratic interlude meant to prepare the ground for a way out of the crisis – an interlude based on fragile agreements which did allow the presidential elections of July 2013 to be held, but which in no way changed the position of Bamako and its foreign allies towards Tuareg demands.
The attitude of the international community, led by France and the European Union[1], in effect echoes the threatening tone of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) towards a Tuareg protest more than half a century old. In April 2012, following the proclamation of the independence of Azawad, the territory of the Tuareg populations of northern Mali, an ECOWAS communiqué reaffirmed that “Mali is ‘one and indivisible’ and that it will use all means, including the use of force, to ensure the territorial integrity of the country.”[2] A threat aimed, admittedly, at the many groups affiliated with or dissident fromAl-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) present in the region, but also at geographically and politically isolated populations that the government in Bamako and its European allies struggle to include in their democratic project. The government’s treatment of the Azawad autonomist cause, including in its secular version as expressed within the ranks of the MNLA, still represents today one of the main obstacles to the country’s democratic emancipation.
Founded in October 2011 through the merger of two movements previously involved in actions against the Malian government, the MNLA’s demands are part of the long history of the Tuareg populations’ struggles against centralising states. According to more or less mythologised accounts, these struggles began between the end of the 19th century and Mali’s independence. When the borders drawn by the colonial administration incorporated the nomads into states as Malian, Nigerien, Algerian or Libyan citizens in the 1960s, the Tuareg populations of northern Mali took up arms in the Kidal region. Severely repressed by Malian forces, these “Tuareg rebellions” crystallised the tensions between these communities and the new state. For the Tuareg, accustomed to a form of self-government compatible with their nomadic way of life, the feeling of being “recolonised” by civil servants from the south of the country fuelled resentment towards an administration deaf to their demands and accused of the worst abuses[3]. For the newly independent socialist regime of Modibo Keïta (1960–1968), the Tuareg, opportunistic and disloyal, threatened territorial integrity by claiming an imaginary and illegitimate country[4].
Against a background of economic frustration and intercommunal tensions, passions flared in the following decades. The spark set northern Mali ablaze several times, as the tensions spread throughout the country: in 1990 with the insurrection of the Popular Movement of Azawad , in 1994 during the war between the patriotic movement Ganda Koy and the Arab Islamic Front of Azawad and in 2006 with the uprising of the 23 May Democratic Alliance for Change[5]. To these events can be added the activities of Tuareg organisations in northern Niger. And while the peace agreements reached at the end of each crisis dangled development programmes and greater autonomy before northern Mali with a view to restoring peace, none of these initiatives was applied durably or could prevent the gradual marginalisation of the nomads[6].
So when, in January 2012, the MNLA launched a new insurrection, the spectre of the recent history of Tuareg demands resurfaced in the light of the Sahelian and North African geopolitical context. Many observers regarded the collapse of the Libyan dictatorship as the keystone of the region’s instability. The return of heavily armed Tuareg fighters who had served alongside Muammar Gaddafi and the porousness of the borders turned the territory of northern Mali, already hard to control, into a platform for trafficking of every kind[7]. Plunged into a deep political crisis after the military coup of March 2012 – caused in part by Bamako’s chronic inability to find a way out of the separatist threats – the Malian state was unable to curb the establishment of armed groups linked to AQIM’s activities in the region, groups that readily recruited among Tuareg fighters who had cut their teeth in the separatist unrest of the 1990s. This was notably the case of the group Ansar Dine, led by a Tuareg and a short-lived ally of the MNLA in the capture of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.
After the foreign military intervention to dislodge these groups from the main towns of northern Mali, the presidential election of 2013 restored a semblance of substance to an exhausted Malian state. As the fighting took on the character of a confused guerrilla war against AQIM’s offshoots and various Tuareg separatist groups, the MNLA chose, in the agreements signed in Ouagadougou in June 2013, to adopt a more conciliatory position after turning against its allies of convenience inAnsar Dine, in order to ensure that the presidential elections could be held[8]. No doubt the military offensive led in particular by French troops brought the MNLA closer to Bamako, which remains an essential condition for a way out of the crisis. Yet a single demonstration against the Malian prime minister’s visit to the Tuareg stronghold of Kidal was enough to show that the Ouagadougou agreements had not long concealed the deadlock in negotiations, which stumble over the status of Azawad. For a disorganised and partly discredited MNLA, the democratic smokescreen of recent months has not been enough to hide the realities of political exclusion, especially as the line taken by Paris and Bamako tends towards intransigence. It remains to be seen how a state that claims to be democratic, and the foreign backers it relies on, can continue to invoke national unity and territorial integrity while neglecting a Tuareg question they have avoided since the country’s independence – a question currently marked by its territorial component, but also reflected in a case of unequal economic development between North and South, reminiscent of the parameters (North/South disparities, radicalised armed groups…) of the tensions shaking northern Nigeria at the same time.
Nassim Kiamouche for the Cordoba Foundation of Geneva
[1] La communauté internationale rejette l’indépendance du Nord Mali in le Monde, 6 April 2012 [online] Le Monde (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 27 November 2013).
[2] ECOWAS press release [online], ECOWAS (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 27 November 2013).
[3] Lettre Ouverte du Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad au Peuple Malien, official MNLA website [online], MNLA (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 28 November 2013).
[4] Mali : les Touaregs, un peuple dans la tourmente in L’Express, 25 January 2013 [online] L’Express (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 28 November 2013).
[5] BOILLEY Pierre, les Touaregs entre contraintes géographiques et constructions politiques.
[6] KRINGS Thomas, Marginalization and Revolt among the Tuareg in Mali and Niger in GeoJournal, Vol. 36, No. 1, 1995, pp. 58–60.
[7] La nouvelle géopolitique post-Kadhafi explique les problèmes actuels au Mali in Le Monde, 12 March 2012 [online], Le Monde (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 27 November 2013)
[8] Mali: les grandes lignes de l’accord signé à Ouagadougou, RFI, 19 June 2013 [online], RFI (external website, opens in a new tab) (accessed 28 November 2013)
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