Editorial: Mali-ce aforethought

Another year, another coup in Africa. This past week it was Mali’s turn to see rebel troops running through the streets of the capital and taking over the presidential palace.

With its population of 15 million, landlocked Mali is Africa’s third-largest gold producer after South Africa and Ghana, so the world’s gold miners and investors perked up their ears to find out more about this surprising development.

The coup unfolded on March 21, when lower-ranking army leaders — furious with President Amadou Toumani Touré and his government’s allegedly inept handling of the armed, ethnic Tuareg rebellion in Mali’s northern third — mutinied and swiftly took control of the capital Bamako, including major installations such as the presidential palace, airport and state media. The Associated Press reported that the palace and government offices were looted by the mutineers.

The coup leader, headed by Captain Amadou Sanogo, quickly formed the Comité national pour le redressement de la démocratie et la restauration de l’État (CNRDR), which dissolved Mali’s constitution and institutions. 

The CNRDR later unveiled a new constitution that provides for the coming to power of a transitional committee composed of 26 members of security forces and 15 civilians. The BBC reports that much of the new constitution resembles the old one, including guarantees of freedom of speech, thought and movement. Presumably, a national election due to be held April 29 will be postponed. Touré was not eligible to run again, and by all accounts was eager to retire after a decade in power.

At presstime, the airport in Bamako has reopened, and the country’s international borders are no longer sealed. Gold mines in the country such as Randgold Resources’ Loulo, Gounkoto and Morila mines are reportedly running more or less at pre-coup levels.

The country’s streets are said to be relatively quiet and in Bamako on March 28, several thousand people rallied in support of the coup leadership and against foreign interference.

The exact whereabouts of the deposed Touré remain unknown, but he phoned the French radio station RFI on March 28 to tell them, “I am free and in my country.”

International groups such as the 16-member Economic Community of West African States, the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations have all reflexively condemned the coup and suspended aid programs, as have the U.S. and Canadian governments.

The Canadian government closed its embassy in Mali on March 22, and two days later suspended aid programs that involve direct payments to the Malian government. As a model of African democracy and a prime destination for Canadian resource companies, Mali has been one of Canada’s largest recipients of foreign aid, taking in some $110 million from 2010–2011 in programs ranging from maternal health to textbook distribution.

This is all a bitter pill to swallow for ordinary ground troops of the Malian Defense Forces (MDF), who have been thrown into a meat grinder in the potentially oil- and uranium-rich northern third of Mali’s territory since January, largely as a result of NATO supporting last year’s overthrow of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Through war’s iron-clad law of unintended consequences, Gaddafi’s fallen regime has put much more deadly weaponry into the hands of Tuareg fighters who had actively supported Gaddafi’s forces in Libya’s civil war and have now come home, intent on carving out a Tuareg homeland from several countries in the middle of the Sahara under the banner of the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA).

The MNLA has in the past distanced itself from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which has been in a state of low-level war against U.S., French and allied special forces in the Saharan countries for several years now. However, some military and civilian voices in Mali say the two insurgent groups have grown increasingly close, and that an openly salafist Tuareg group called the Ancar Dine (Defenders of Islam) is active in the current fighting in Mali’s north.

The particular trigger of this latest coup looks to be the stunning fall of the northeastern garrison town of Tessalit and its airstrip to Tuareg secessionist forces in the first week of March, even after the U.S. Air Force had airlifted supplies to the MDF troops trapped in the besieged town in mid-February. The MDF had retaken Tessalit in early February from Tuareg forces that had first seized the town a few days earlier.

There’s plenty of debate in diplomatic circles on the validity and intentions of the Tuareg secessionist movement, but also widespread agreement that the fighting is far from over in the resource-rich Sahara.