A camel procession at the Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk Festival, Essouk, Adagh 2007. (c) Andy Morgan

I wrote this article when the uprising that later plunged Mali into its worst crisis since independence was only weeks old. Most people outside Mali, the Sahara, or the tiny community of international Sahara ‘experts’, were racing to update their understanding of a region that had hitherto been largely ignored. Having been blessed with the opportunity to visit Kidal and the north east of Mali on various occasions as manager of Tinariwen, I felt obliged to weigh in with whatever I knew about the Adagh region of northeastern Mali, its people and its struggles, just to try and provide a little ballast to the breathless ‘semi-blind’ international debate that had suddenly blown up around Mali for the first time in its history.  I hoped that this would be useful especially to anglophone observers, who tended to know even less about the issue that their Francophone counterparts.

Reading through the article now I realise that, like many other interested parties, I was guilty of some naivety at the time. I wasn’t ‘in situ’ (no journalists were), and I underestimated the power and ‘infiltration’ of both AQIM and Iyad ag Ghali’s Ansar Dine.  To be fair, most people did, especially those who had had dealings with the Touareg of northern Mali for years and who couldn’t quite believe that Iyad, a hero of Touareg nationalism, could suddenly be flying the black flag of jihad and claiming that he had no interest in an independent Azawad.  I still hold to my bald statement that “In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle.”  For most people involved, Islamism and Jihad are proxies for deeper desires for security, cultural independence, opportunity, economic gain etc etc.  I say ‘most’, because there are of course plenty of idealists fighting under the jihadi banner in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But I also believe there are also more ‘realists’ involved than we dare to imagine: young men who have seen every path to peace, security and happiness closed to them and feel they only have Islam, the Quran and the kalash left.  

I also detect naivety in my analysis of the MNLA and their preparations for the uprising. Their desire to avoid previous failures was genuine, but they also made some blunt mistakes, not least their short-lived association with Ansar Dine and by extension, with AQIM, during the latter part of March and early 2012.  So if you still have the courage to read on, all I can say is thanks for attention and your forbearance, Andy (July 2014).

“Long live Azawad!” “May Allah Bless Mali!”

Through December and early January, the tone of the exchanges on various Touareg chat forums was expectant, frustrated, even desultory at times. Everybody knew something big was about to happen. They had known for some time already. But when exactly?. The wait was excruciating. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, January 17^th 2012, a new Touareg rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) attacked the town of Menaka in the north east of Mali.

Messages of support and relief poured in from Mali, Niger, Libya, France, Saudi Arabia and the entire Touareg diaspora. “The hour has come. We urge all Azawadians to lend their hand in the fight to liberate our Azawad,” wrote a blogger called Targui Rebel Boy. “Aguel’hoc is free and now we’re going to liberate Tessalit. Vive Azawad!” wrote another surfer. “The flag of Azawad is floating everywhere, even over some towns that have not yet been conquered,” and “Long live Azawad, long live Freedom!” went the patriotic outpouring. One online sympathiser, with an almost Churchillian grasp of the magnitude of the moment, urged everyone to make a note of the date, “for 17^th January 2012 will live for ever in history.”

There was also internet traffic bearing different perspectives and different emotions of course. As the MNLA quickly moved on from Menaka to attack the towns of Tessalit and Aguel’hoc further north, and casualties began to be reported on both sides, some Touareg bloggers questioned the wisdom of taking up arms once more against the central powers in Bamako, the capital of Mali. “War is always ugly,” they claimed. “Dialogue is always better.”

The Malian press meanwhile sharpened its fangs and unleashed a torrent of invective against the Touareg rebels, calling them “armed bandits”, “drug traffickers”, “AQIM collaborators” and “Ghadafi mercenaries.” The news agency, Agence France Press, picked up and relayed these same catchphrases throughout the world, in reports that seemed to rely almost entirely on Malian army sources for their version of what was actually happening 1,200 km away in the far north east of the country. Southern Malian bloggers were even cruder and more violent in their attacks. “A warning to those little wankers from the North…Fun time is over!” read the text accompanying a video of elite Malian army units parading in front of President Amadou Toumani Touré. “Those rebels don’t know about dialogue. They must be killed, killed, killed!” and “May God save Mali from this useless war!” or “Long live the Malian army…may Allah bless Mali!”

The international press lead with the angles of the story that are of greatest concern to the international community; The fallout from Ghadafi’s overthrow and Islamic terrorism in the shape of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The general assumption was that this new uprising was a direct result of the Libyan civil war and of the weaponry and demobbed Ghadafi mercenaries that flooded back down into the Sahel to the lands of their origin in the wake of the dictator’s demise. Another generally accepted viewpoint was that the north east of Mali had become a cauldron of crime, islamic terrorism and insecurity, and that the MNLA were but a symptom of the the furies that plague this deeply dysfunctional corner of the southern Sahara.

Neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM are the prime movers.

In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle. The first rebellion of the nomadic Touareg, (or Kel Tamashek – ‘the Tamashek speaking people’ – as they prefer to be known) against the central government of Mali broke out in 1963 when a young renegade called Alladi Ag Alla attacked two camel-mounted policemen or goumiers in a remote region north of the town of Kidal. Mali had only just won its independence from France, and the Kel Tamashek, detached from world events in their far flung desert home, simply could not understand why their cherished independence and age old nomadic culture had been subsumed into a new state ruled by black Africans living hundreds of miles away who had never proved their right nor their fitness to become the Touareg’s new masters. It was to be six years before Ghadafi grabbed power in Libya in a military coup and 44 years before the Algerian terrorist group, the GSPC, rebranded itself as AQIM and became the north African franchise of a successful global Islamic terror movement.

That first Touareg uprising in 1963 lasted barely a year before it was crushed with unforgettable brutality by the Malian army under the command of the infamous Captain Diby Sillas Diarra, the ‘butcher’ of Kidal. The northeast of Mali then became a no-go area ruled by martial law. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of extreme drought and suffering in the region that saw many thousands of Kel Tamashek flee their homelands and take refuge in the neighbouring countries of Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. They say that the word ‘Touareg’ means something like ‘abandoned by God’ in Arabic, and in those years of drought and exile, this foreign name seemed cruelly apt.

In June 1990, the second great Touareg rebellion broke out when Iyad Ag Ghali, the leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MPLA), attacked a police post in Menaka with a small group of soldiers recently returned from army camps in Libya. The parallels with the outbreak of these latest hostilities are stark. The 1990 uprising ended in an Algerian brokered peace treaty and the National Pact of 1992. The Touareg movement then dissolved into a bitter soup of acrimony and acronyms as the MPLA split along ethnic and tribal fault lines into four different factions. The northeast was given a certain measure of self-determination by the government in Bamako. Rebel leaders and soldiers were ‘re-inserted’ into the Malian army and administration. But the main clauses of the National Pact were never honoured, and Kel Tamashek resentment simmered away for the next fourteen years. On 23^rd May 2006 a new rebel group, the Democratic Alliance of May 23^rd for Change (ADC) attacked Malian army installations in Kidal and Menaka before retreating to a well stocked base in the Tegharghar hills north of Kidal. Algeria once again stepped in to broker a new peace deal and a new treaty, known as the Algiers Accords, which basically restated many of the demands made in the National Pact. These included greater autonomy for the Kidal region, greater recognition of the Tamashek language and culture in the national media and in education, the formation of special security units staffed by local Touareg, economic development in the region, a proper airport for Kidal and a special tax regime for the north to encourage investment. For the next six years the north eastern of Mali grumbled and groaned under an uneasy peace, while the refusenik Touareg war lord Ibrahim Ag Bahanga kept the flame of revolt alive by attacking the army and taking hostages and the implementation of the Algiers Accords stalled, then ground to a halt amid bitter accusations and recriminations on both sides.   On January 17^th of this year, it all kicked off again. For the Kel Tamashek, this is the fourth roll of the dice in a very long struggle for autonomy.

This uprising is different

The mild cynicism of some veteran observers of Saharan politics as they contemplate yet another uprising in the north of Mali can be forgiven. Previous revolts have adhered to a certain pattern of failure that has repeated itself in varying degrees: a group of well connected and disgruntled Kel Tamashek community leaders, usually all veterans of the great 1990 uprising, form a new rebel group with a freshly minted acronym. They attack a Malian army base in Menaka, Kidal or Tinzawaten, kill a few soldiers, then retreat to the hills as soon as reinforcements loom on the horizon and wait there while politicians in Bamako, Tripoli or Algiers work out a way of getting everyone around the negotiating table. Then a deal is thrashed out which comprises the enticing lure of financial incentives for the rebel foot soldiers and ‘jobs for the boys’ in the administration or the army for the rebel leaders. A pact or accord is signed, the rebels go back home and the Malian government proceeds to ignore most of its promises. The frustration mounts again over a number years, and, when the requisite level of tension and dissatisfaction is reached, the whole process repeats itself. Meanwhile, the average Touareg man, woman and child slips deeper into despondency, unemployment, poverty and general despair.

However, there are a number of key reasons why this latest uprising is different from all the others. First and foremost the level of preparation and forethought on the rebel side is unique in Touareg rebel history. In 1990, Iyad ag Ghali and his small troupe reportedly went into battle armed with two old hunting carbines and a length of rope. In 1963 the Touareg arsenal comprised a few old Mauser rifles alongside traditional takouba swords. In 2006 the rebels were better armed, allegedly by Algeria, but the rebel movement wasn’t primed for a long battle. In 2012, the MNLA have assembled one of the most impressive arsenals ever seen in the north of Mali.

Some of the MNLA’s weaponry has come from Libya. Some it was already in Mali. Some of it has been stolen from weapons stores by Touareg and Arab officers and soldiers who have deserted the Malian army. What is now becoming clear however is that the process of assembling this impressive stockpile of weaponry, and bringing together the soldiers and officers that would eventually use it, was part of a carefully preconceived plan that had been several years in the execution. The main man behind that plan was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, Mali’s public enemy number one and the recalcitrant hero of hawkish Touareg everywhere.

Ibrahim Ag Bahanga – The man who had a plan

A veteran of the 1990 rebellion, Ag Bahanga was one of the leaders of the 2006 uprising, alongside Iyad Ag Ghali, Hassan Ag Fagaga and Ahmed Ag Bibi. However, he soon grew disgruntled with the compromises that his fellow rebels in the ADC seemed prepared to make in their negotiations with Mali, and their willingness to hand in their arms before any of the promises made by the Malian government had been delivered. In September 2007, Ag Bahanga formed a new splinter group called the Northern Malian Touareg Alliance for Change (ATNMC). For the next year and half, until he was finally driven off Malian soil by Malian army-backed militias, Ag Bahanga lead a campaign of harassment and terror against the Malian army and security apparatus. It included kidnapping upwards of 80 Malian soldiers and holding them hostage for months, and a number of ambushes and daring raids against army posts, especially the one in Tinzawaten, a village right up against Mali’s border with Algeria, which was Ag Bahanga’s ancestral home and fiefdom.

After his defeat in February 2009 and the disbanding of the ATNMC rebel camps, Ag Bahanga was given refuge in Libya. He then dipped off the media radar screen for almost two years, until his return to Mali in January 2011.   It now appears that far from idly luxuriating in some grace and favour Libyan villa on Ghadafi’s pay roll, Ag Bahanga used his time in Libya to conceive and execute a master plan designed to give the Touareg movement a military capacity that would offer it at least some hope of fighting a successful war against Mali. He began to talk to a group of 1990 rebel veterans who had left Mali in disgust after the signing of the 1992 National Pact and become senior officers in the Libyan army, commanding special elite units set up by Ghadafi to fight his desert wars. Most prominent among them was Colonel Mohammed Ag Najm.

When the first cracks began to appear in the foundations of the Ghadafi dictatorship, shortly after protests began in Benghazi in February 2011, Ag Bahanga and a few close allies set about putting their plan into action. They got to work persuading Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers in the Libyan army to abandon their posts and return to Mali with as much weaponry as possible. By early summer, as the Ghadafi regime started to disintegrate, Ag Bahanga’s plan was already well on the road. Touareg army defectors travelled south west in convoys with large stocks of arms and ammunition, including BM21 and BTR60 ground to ground and ground to air missiles. The Libyan returnees set up camps in Zakak, Tin Assalak and Takalote, all locations in the remote Tegharghar hills not far from Kidal. More arms and more defectors kept arriving and both Mali and the international community started to become increasingly worried.

On the afternoon of August 26^th, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga was killed in a car crash not far from his base at Tin Assalak. He had many enemies: the Malian army, the Malian people, other Touareg leaders who resented his uncompromising belligerence, Arab drug traffickers whom he had confronted and robbed on numerous occasions and the secret services of both Algeria and Libya for whom Ag Bahanga was often an intolerable liability. Nonetheless, many who knew Ag Bahanga well and were close to him deny any dark dimension to his death, claiming that he perished when his vehicle somersaulted at speed on one of the desert’s dirt tracks. Others say that his vehicle was shot to pieces by arms smugglers, or drug traffickers or a branch of Al Qaida, possibly all three of these in one.   Whatever happened, his death left a large hole in the bourgeoning revolutionary project, but it wasn’t large enough to stop it.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never good friends nor faithful allies.

Colonel Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers’ abandonment of the Ghadafi cause and the general pilfering of Libyan arms by Touareg from northeastern Mali goes some way to contradicting those who insist that the Touareg have always been ardent Ghadafi loyalists and blind allies in his games of power and terror.   Since the mid 1970s, the relationship between Ghadafi and the Touareg has been one of mutual opportunism rather than shared ideals or common destiny. When the Touareg needed a refuge from poverty, drought and joblessness in the 1970s, oil-rich and underpopulated Libya was one of the countries they turned to. When the nascent Touareg rebel movement needed someone to fund their struggle for self-determination in the 1980s, Ghadafi provided army training, a base, some equipment and financial backing. The fact that he then went on to use ‘his’ Touareg fighters in his wars against Chad and Israel whilst never demonstrating any real desire to make the Touareg revolt actually happen, reveals the Libyan dictator’s true intentions.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Ghadafi uttered many fine words about being a nomad and a spiritual brother of the Touareg, and about how the Sahara should be a borderless region, free to all his native sons and daughters. In truth he played double games with aplomb, funding Touareg dissent with small occasional gifts whilst investing enormous sums of money in the energy, water, industry and tourism infrastructure of Mali as a whole. “Ghadafi never helped us,” a veteran of the 1990 rebellion once said to me. “He never did anything for the north. All the money he spent went to the south. We helped him, not the other way around.” When Ghadafi finally starting loosing the Libyan civil war, the greatest demonstrations of support for his regime didn’t occur in the northern parts of Mali, among the Touareg, as some might have expected. They occurred in the heart of the capital Bamako, where tens of thousands of southern Malians took to the streets to voice their approval of the Libyan dictator and their hatred of the USA, Britain, France and the United Nations.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never really good friends or faithful allies. They were never more than partners in a game of coincidental self-interest. True, there were many Touareg fighting on the Ghadafi side in last year’s Libyan civil war. But they were often obliged or paid to do so. It was matter of expediency rather than belief. Through times of drought and marginalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, and even right up until last year, anything has often seemed preferable to a life of poverty and starvation back in the Malian desert, including a stint the Libyan army. And it must also be remembered that a sizeable number of Touareg also fought for the National Transitional Council (NTC) against Ghadafi. So did many Imazighen or Berbers, a fact that is often forgotten by both western powers and die-hard Arab supremacists in Libya.

In an extraordinarily frank and revealing interview given to the Algerian newspaper El Watan just a few days before his death, Ag Bahanga didn’t mince his words about Ghadafi: “[his fall] is good news for all the Touareg of the region,” he said. “The aims of the colonel [Ghadafi] have always been opposed to our aspirations. All he ever did was try to use the Touareg for his own ends and to the detriment of the community. His departure from Libya opens a new path to a better future and allows us to progress in our political demands… Ghadafi was a barrier to every solution of the Touareg question.”

Brain storming at the Zakak base – The eternal problem of disunity.

With Bahanga gone, the build up of arms and soldiers in the north east of Mali continued. In early October, all the various leaders of a burgeoning new Touareg rebel movement gathered together in the Zakak base for what can only be described as ten days of soul-searching and brain storming. “We discussed the past errors of certain leaders of the movement,” says Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, who was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga’s father-in-law and spokesperson of his ATNMC rebel group. “We talked about where things had gone wrong and tried to agree on a plan and on some common objectives. We created a ruling council, a military état majeur, commanded and coordinated by Mohammed Ag Najm and other senior officers. There are about 40 of them. And we also created a political bureau, which set about analysing and considering all the political aspects including how to raise awareness among the international community, especially the regional powers.”

Past errors boiled down essentially to three areas: weakness of military strategy and material, lack of a strong intellectual and political branch and disunity. Of those three, disunity has always been the biggest problem in previous uprisings. The French conquered the Sahara by fomenting internal divisions within the old Touareg confederations, turning tribal leaders against each other and vassal clans against the nobility. The government of Mali adopted precisely the same strategy after independence in 1960. The first rebellion of 1963 was weakened by the disagreement between Intallah Ag Attaher, the current aged hereditary leader of the Kel Adagh Touareg and his brother Zeid Ag Attaher. Intallah favoured cooperation and cohabitation with Mali. Zeid favoured revolt and was eventually captured and imprisoned by Mali in their infamous jail near the remote salt mines of Taodenni.

In 1990, the MPLA splintered after the signing of the Tamanrasset accords. Iyad Ag Ghali, who belongs to the ruling Ifoghas clan of the Kel Adagh, remained as the head of the MPA, having dropped the word ‘Liberation’ from the name of his movement in order to make it more appealing to moderate Touareg and to the Malians. Many other Ifoghas leaders remained loyal to Iyad and the MPA. The ‘lower class’ Tamashek clans in the region, especially the Imghad, a subordinate ‘vassal’ clan to the Ifoghas, split from Iyad’s group and formed the Revolutionary Army for the Liberation of Azawad (ARLA), which was lead by nobles from the Taghat Mellet and Idnan clans. ARLA also represented some Iklan, or former slaves.   The Popular Liberation Front of Azawad (FPLA) were hardliners, opposed to the idea of making peace with Mali before the rebellion’s primary aims were realised. They were made up mainly of Kel Antessar Touareg from the Timbuktu region and Chamanamas from Menaka. Then there was the Armed Islamic Front of Azawad (FIAA) which was composed mainly of northern Arabs and Moors. It had a more religious character than the other rebel movements and was closely allied to Mauritania and Algeria. All these four movements were represented at one time or another by a kind of umbrella rebel organisation called the Movement of United Fronts of Azawad (MFUA).

Needless to say, all this division and splintering did nothing for the strength of the rebel movement as a whole and it quickly allowed Mali to regain control of events. Things weren’t that much better in 2006, when the ADC eventually split between a faction dominated by Ifoghas Touareg on the one hand and different factions lead by Taghat Mellet, Idnan, Imghad and Chamanamas on the other, all of whom accused the Ifoghas of hogging the limelight in the negotiations and seeking their benefit above all. Ag Bahanga’s schism and his creation of the ATNMC was an outward sign of these internal splits.

These bewildering divisions within the Touareg community pale in terms of the strife and damage caused when compared to the ethnic wars that have been unleashed by Malian policies of divide and rule. The darkest ethnic conflict in the modern history of northern Mali began in 1992 with the formation of the Patriotic Malian Movement Ganday Koy (MPMGK) or just Ganda Koy for short, a Songhoi militia that was backed and funded by the Malian army, and whose main aim seems to have been to foist terror on innocent Touareg and Arab civilians. The Ganda Koy perpetrated several massacres in the Gao and Timbuktu areas in the mid 1990s, the most famous of which was a massacre of around 60 Touareg marabout or holy men from the Kel Essouk clan in a camp near Gao in October 1994.

Is the rebel movement more united this time? The answer is yes. At least, so far. The talks in the Zakak camp allowed various concerns and age old gripes to be aired and a basic consensus to be established around a shared set of goals and an agreed division of roles and responsibilities. The political leader of the MNLA is Bilal Ag Cherif. But while the Ifoghas still hold on to their historical role as the political leaders of the Touareg in north eastern Mali, a great deal of effort has been made to spread the message and raise awareness of the MNLA and its aims among the entire population of the north, in all its various ethnic groups and across all the strata of its society, and bring people from all the different clans and factions under one umbrella. Talking to various Touareg friends in the past few months, the general sense of hope united behind the MNLA was palpable.

Having said that, there are many Touareg, especially Imghad and Kel Antessar, who are staying loyal to Mali. They include numerous Malian army officers and soldiers, as well local mayors, deputies and senior administrators. A whole group of about 300 Touareg fighters who returned from the war in Libya late last summer, lead by Colonel Waki Ag Ossad, an Imghad Touareg, made great play of their fealty to the Malian state. They were received with great fanfare by President Adama Toumani Touré at the Koulouba Palace in Bamako. “We didn’t come back to create a division between communities, and even less to divide the state,” declared Ag Ossad. “The military material that we have brought with us is there to be used by our country, which is Mali. We’ve come to contribute to and maintain peace and security in the north.”

Every rebellion eventually turns into an ethnic war

The MNLA have also made strenuous efforts to present themselves as a revolutionary movement for the liberation of ALL the peoples of Azawad – Touareg, Songhoi, Arab, Peul – and not just a Touareg rebel movement.   Azawad is the name they give to the independent state they are seeking to create, which they say will comprise the three main provinces of Northern Mali: Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu. If an independent Azawad were to exist, it would relieve Mali of more than 50% of its actual surface area. The MNLA also say they have no designs on parts of the Sahara inhabited by the Touareg that exist over the border in Niger, Algeria and Libya. They claim that there are large numbers of Arabs and Songhoi already fighting on their side. It’s true that certain important Arab leaders, such as Baba Ould Sidi Elmoctar, the hereditary chief of the influential Arab Kounta tribe, have already thrown in their lot with MNLA. As I write, there are also reports arriving from the desert that northern Arabs in the towns of Leré, Timbuktu and Goundam who are leaving to join MNLA in the field.

Whether or not MNLA can bind together all the different tribal and ethnic groups in Northern Mali until its aims are achieved is still a moot point. Even before open revolt broke out last Tuesday, there were dark mutterings about a resurgence of Ganda Koy vigilante activity. The founder of the movement, Imam Mohammed n’Tissa Maiga, made his intention to rearm and get his militia ready for the growing threat from Touareg rebels quite plain back in early December. In the past few days, reports from Gao and Timbuktu claim that the Malian army is handing out cash and arms to Songhoi men and urging them to go and attack anyone suspected of sympathy with the MNLA. The spectre of tribal war haunts the north once again. And not only reports, the houses of several prominent Touaregs in the garrison town of Kati near Timbuktu have been burned by angry mobs wielding machetes and as I right, Touareg and Arabs in Bamako, easily distinguishable by their lighter skin, as suffering attacks on their person and their property.

The private militias within the Malian army

Even more dangerous to the MNLA than the Ganda Koy are the ethnically based militias that have been fighting the Touareg alongside the Malian army since 2008.   It was during that year that the Malian high command finally realised the futility of sending raw recruits from the southern savannah regions of the country to fight Ibrahim Ag Bahanga and the ATNMC in the arid deserts of the north.   The Sahara is completely alien to most southern Malians, and soldiers from the south have never had much luck at defeating hardened Touareg fighters in their own environment.   So the Malian generals changed their strategy and invited two senior army officers from north to form and train their own militias. The first is a Touareg called El Hadj Gamou, an imghad, who seems to harbour a visceral disdain for the Ifoghas Touareg who are the historical ‘nobility’ in the Adagh des Ifoghas, the name given to the Kidal region by the French in the late 19^th century. The imghad were a subservient or ‘vassal’ clan in the old days, and many imghad Touareg favoured the more egalitarian society that Mali imposed in the north east after independence. The Touareg rebellion has its own element of internal class warfare.

Gamou is the most senior Malian army officer in the region, a feared and ruthless soldier whom the MNLA have accused of numerous human rights abuses in recent days, including torture. His militia is run like a private army which exacts retribution and submission from both professional and private enemies, by force if necessary. The other main militia fighting with the Malian army is lead by Major Colonel Abderahmane Ould Meydou, the trim and square-jawed northern Arab who has also, like Gamou managed to carve out an fearsome reputation as an able and daring desert soldier. The MNLA announced his death in action with great glee a few days after the outbreak of recent hostilities, only to emit a collective groan when Ould Meydou subsequently appeared on national TV to denounce rumours of his demise, looking fit, relaxed and debonaire.

The ranks of Ould Meydou’s Arab or ‘Berabiche’ militias were swelled just before the outbreak of hostilities on January 12^th thanks to a deal brokered by the Malian government. In return for the recruitment and training of Arab militiamen, a super-rich northern Arab businessman by the name of Mohamed Ould Aiwanatt was released from prison where he was serving a sentence for the role he played in a major drugs-trafficking operation known as Air Cocaine. This extraordinary episode involved a entire Boeing 727 stuffed full of cocaine that flew into the Sahara from Venezuela and landed in the remote desert north of a village called Tarkint. The cocaine was then unloaded into a convoy of 4×4 vehicles and disappeared eastwards into the desert, probably en route for Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and finally Europe. The mayor of Tarkint, Baba ould Cheickh, a close advisor to the Malian President, was implicated alongside Ould Aiwanatt in this and several other major drugs scandals. Aiwanatt’s release from gaol and the hypocritical behaviour of the Malian government in their so-called war on drugs and insecurity infuriated Touareg opinion, and added more than a strand of straw to the load that eventually broke their back and drove them to war.

Gamou’s and Ould Meydou’s militias were the weapon that eventually allowed Mali to subdue Ag Bahanga’s ATNMC in January 2009. Bamako is no doubt hoping that they can do the same again to the MNLA, even though it presents a challenge of an entirely different order to Ag Bahanga’s underfunded and poorly equipped crew.

All in all, unity and disunity will be among the biggest challenges to the success of the MNLA uprising. It has always been the Touareg movement’s greatest challenge. No wonder so many desert songs by Touareg bands like Tinariwen and Tamikrest lament the lack of unity in Touareg society, and berate Touareg leaders and politicians for succumbing to tribalism and Malian games of divide and rule. Bamako plays its hand subtly and expertly when the need arises. One of the current MNLA representatives in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and senior political figure from Mali’s north east, Nina Walet Intallou explained how it works: “Mali sends someone, some senior figure in the administration, who is a relative of one of the rebels, to have a discrete word with him and bring him back to the road of peace with promises of money, favours and preferment. Then they send a minister to speak to the leaders of his clan and persuade them to follow the path of peace. That’s not negotiation.”

The Sahara’s Facebook generation

Another novelty in this uprising is the presence of a strong and very active ‘intellectual’ wing in the Touareg independence movement. By intellectual, I mean one whose main concern is policy, communication, influence, diplomacy and engagement in geo-political affairs, rather than fighting out in the bush. The lack of such a dimension has been a weakness of Touareg uprisings since the earliest days. Most rebel leaders have felt more comfortable out in the desert leading their troops than pressing the flesh in the corridors of power. When there have been political men of any worth, their work has often been hampered by a mutual mistrust between them and the military leadership. There’s an apocryphal story about Ibrahim Ag Bahanga that illustrates this lack of intellectual capacity in a damning way. During his time as a renegade in the remote Adagh des Ifoghas a few years ago, Ag Bahanga once received an envoy with an important message from the government in Bamako. The envoy handed over the sealed letter and Ag Bahanga proceeded to open it and, holding the missive upside down, pretended to read it thoughtfully. He then told the messenger that he would “think the proposal over” and sent him away.

Ag Bahanga was a man of many talents, but written correspondence and the fine arts of communication weren’t among them. He was in his element at the head of a rebel group out in remoteness of the desert bush, not in the fine gilded halls of ministries in Bamako, Tripoli, Algiers or Paris. It was often left to his father in law and spokesperson, Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed to be Ag Bahanga’s ‘voice’ on the international stage. Ag Sid’Ahmed is now the chief spokesperson of MNLA, and one of the more worldly and politically experienced men at the head of the movement. But even he recognises the need for an active and engaged ‘intellectual’ dimension to the MNLA project, and his co-revolutionaries agreed that this was a great failing in the past.

Cue the National Movement for Azawad or MNA, an organisation that was created by a group of young Touareg students and graduates in late 2010.   These well educated, internet savvy and youthful revolutionaries gathered together in Timbuktu at the end of October of that year and declared their intention to find a political, legal and peaceful route to Azawadi independence. Their discourse was non-tribal, non-ethnic, inclusive, literate and fluent. In their first declaration, issued as a press release, on November 1^st they wrote:   “Today, Azawad has become a zone of conflict fought over by countries and extremist groups who care only for their own interests. As for the Azawadis themselves, they are simply caught between the anvil and the hammer of so called terrorist groups. Azawad is now prone to all manner of regional and international interventions…in which the people of Azawad are given no role at all, except that of a useless spectator, forced to look on while the image of their homeland is ruined and its national riches plundered by governments and multi-national companies….Aware of the pain that our people have suffered for decades, as sons of the nation and defenders of a cultural identity threatened with extinction, who are merely perpetuating the struggle of the ancestors, whilst adhering to universal human values…we announce today the birth of a National Movement of Azawad (MNA).”

At the end of this inaugural meeting, two of the MNA’s leaders, Moussa Ag Acharatoumane and Boubacar Ag Fadil, were imprisoned for treasonous activities damaging to the territorial integrity of the state. They soon became Facebook heroes, a cause célèbre among the youth of the Touareg diaspora. After numerous demonstrations and petitions they were freed. Acharatoumane and his fellow revolutionaries had already set about disseminating the message of revolution among the younger demographic of the northern deserts. Their work resulted in several small demonstrations in Kidal, Menaka and Timbuktu, that occurred around the same time as the launch of the MNA.   These events marked the emergence of the Sahara’s own Facebook generation, one acutely conscious of its role models in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere, and energised by the idea of flexing its own people power.   The MNA soon set up a functioning and well maintained website as well as a very active Facebook forum and an online newspaper called Toumast Press, which features well written and well argued, although admittedly partial, articles about the current situation in the desert.   Apart from anything else, this new generation is less encumbered by the divisions, the compromises and the defeats of the past. They are free of the cynicism that is born out of defeat. Their horizon is straight, clear and blue and nothing less than victory will satisfy them.

As soon as hostilities commenced on January 17^th, a continuous flow of communiqués and updates by Ag Acharatoumane, Ag Sid’Ahmed and other MNLA spokespersons started to be posted up on the web and circulated via online social networks. This energetic PR was in stark contrast to the almost complete lack of communication by the ADC in the first few days of the uprisings in May 2006, a void which allowed all kind of crazy assumptions and claims to be made by the Malian army and circulated without hindrance by the international press. The propaganda war is a great deal more involved this time round, and the two sides are more evenly matched.

The MNLA – a better balanced and muli-faceted movement

With the inclusion of the ‘internet generation’ rebels in the MNA, the MNLA has achieved a better balance than previous rebel movements. “It’s important to define who is who in this movement so that there’s no blurring of boundaries with other agendas and issues,” says MNLA spokesperson Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed. “Mohammed Ag Najm has come back from Libya with officers and men. There are also those who have deserted from the Malian army, more than six senior army officers. There were fighters who were with Ibrahim Ag Bahanga in the ATNMC. And then there was this new elite from the younger Touareg generation, who were very present on the ground and who had done some very good work raising awareness among the population of the Azawad.”

Alongside this new composition of the rank and file, there have been changes in the rebel movement’s leadership, and with that, a change in its all important relationships and ties to Algeria and Libya.   Iyad Ag Ghali is no longer the boss, and the crust of compromise that has adhered to his name ever since the national pact of 1992, his less than crystal ties with the Malian government and Algerian governments and military intelligence services, with Libya and others, has been chipped away and discarded by the new movement.   This is a crucial development. All previous uprisings were successfully manipulated, or ‘defused’ depending on your point of view, by Algeria and Libya. The fact that both countries have also been accused of being the instigators and supporters of these same uprisings demonstrates the mind boggling complexity of southern Saharan politics.

A different relationship with Libya and Algeria

The prospect of Touareg autonomy in northern Mali has never been attractive to either Libya or Algeria. In fact, all the nations in the region have always viewed the idea of independent Azawad with absolute horror. Both Algiers and Tripoli have always known that at the first sign of a truly successful Touareg uprising in Mali, their own Touareg populations in the south would inevitably begin to harbour up some very uncomfortable notions of their own potential autonomy. But the threat doesn’t end there. Ever since the outbreak of hostilities, the various disgruntled Berber populations of Algeria and Libya have been voicing their unbridled support for the MNLA and their delight at the prospect of fellow Berbers (the Kel Tamashek are a branch of the wider Imazighen family) giving a culturally oppressive regime a bloody nose. The most in depth interview accorded to any MNLA representative yet has been the one that spokesperson Mossa Ag Attaher gave to the Berber website www.tamazgha.fr   The messages of support from Berber secessionist organisations such as the Movement for an Autonomous Kabylia (MAK) or World Amazigh Congress (CMA) have been effusive.

Ghadafi is no longer around to muddy the waters on behalf of Libya, and the NTC have too many problems of their own to take a very active part in what’s happening in northern Mali. That leaves Algeria. When the MNLA tried to capture the northern town of Tessalit on January 20^th, they learned that there were a number of Algerian army trainers and special ops personnel in the nearby Malian army camp at Amachache. The MNLA commander gave them 24 hours to leave, but rather than obeying, the Algerians proceeded to send more soldiers to Amachache and resupply the base. Far from instigating this rebellion, or supporting it, or even manoeuvring into their usual position as peace brokers, it seems that Algeria has thrown it’s lot in with the Malian government against the rebels. The truth is that Algeria has been excluded from the action this time round and so it has decided to play hard and show its true colours by supporting Mali in an attempt to make sure that an independent Azawad never sees the light of day.

“Since 1963, the attitude of Algeria has always been that if Mali gives autonomy to the Touareg of Azawad, they’ll also have problems with their Touareg,” agrees Nina Walet Intallou. “In reality, they’ve always wanted to take over this region. They see it as part of Algeria. When you think that there was the Algerian consulate in Gao that would give Algerian nationality to anyone who asked for it, from Kidal or anywhere, that’s proof. But it isn’t Algeria or Libya that will intervene this time round. From now on, we will only address our problems to the United Nations and the European Community.”

The fact that Algeria has been excluded from the party is possibly linked to the recent fall from grace of Iyad Ag Ghali. “When we created the MNLA there were many of us who said that Ibrahim Ag Bahanga had been too manipulated by Iyad,” a senior MNLA political figure explained to me. “The condition that people gave before putting their confidence in Ag Bahanga and his people was that he detach himself from Iyad, because of all the mistakes that Iyad made in the past. Iyad was totally in favour of the Tamanrasset accords [of 1991] but once they were signed, he never spoke about them again. He never opened his mouth to denounce what happened afterwards, even though he was supposed to be the leader of the entire Touareg movement. In creating the MNLA, we wanted new people in charge, who had serious objectives, and not people who would drag us between Mali and Algeria.”

The sidelining of Iyad Ag Ghali and his islamist vision

The story goes that Iyad Ag Ghali came to the meetings at the Zakak base in October, and put himself forward as a candidate for the post of Secretary General of the MNLA. However, his candidacy was rejected, due to his past silences and obscure dealings with the governments of Mali and Algeria. Instead, the post was filled by Bilal Ag Acherif, a cousin of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. There was an overwhelming sense that this time round the movement needed fresh thinking at the top, independent of Algerian, Malian or Libyan meddling and that all the half measures of the past, the broken treaties brokered by one or other of the regional powers, the compromises and the stalling had to stop. This time, it was full independence or nothing.

After being turned down the MNLA leadership at Zakak, Iyad Ag Ghali also presented himself to an important meeting of the leaders of the Ifoghas clan, to which he belongs, in Abeibara north of Kidal. There he proposed that he become the political head of the clan and be allowed to pursue an Islamist vision of an independent Azawad. Once again his candidature was rejected, and instead Alghabass Ag Intallah as chosen as the new political leader of the Ifoghas, in place of his ageing and infirm father, the amenokal or leader of the Ifoghas, Intallah Ag Attaher, who almost fifty years ago threw his lot in with Mali and opposed the rebellion lead by his brother Zeid.

At the end of the great rebellion of the 1990s, Ag Ghali became increasingly religious and ‘spiritual’ in his outlook, growing a huge and venerable beard in the process. He was attracted to the teachings of Pakistani preachers belonging to the huge worldwide Muslim proselytising organisation, the Tablighi Jama’at, who were present in Kidal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tablighi Jama’at is over years eighty old, has over 20 million members world wide, and does not preach violent jihadism.   In fact, if anything, its approach is largely pacifist and spiritual. Ag Ghali and other Touareg seemed moved by the urgent call of these foreign preachers for a return to the core values of Islam, and Ag Ghali even travelled to Tablighi Jama’at’s headquarters in Raiwind, Pakistan, to learn more. He later spent time studying at the mosque in St Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris.   Many, if not most of Iyad Ag Ghali’s fellow Malian Touaregs however either steered clear of Tablighi Jama’at or took a vague or merely temporary interest in them before finally deciding that they preferred to stick with the more tolerant and ‘Berber’ form of Islam which Touareg have long been known to espouse. The Pakistani preachers ended up getting into trouble with the authorities in Kidal and Gao, becoming mixed up with local politics and electioneering, and finally being politely but firmly asked to leave the region.

Ag Ghali however continued on his religiously inspired path, whilst still holding down the jobs of rebel in chief and general high level fixer. He played a central role in the negotiations for the release of 32 Swiss, German and Dutch hostages from the grip of a GSPC katiba lead by the shady Algerian emir Aderrazak ‘Le Para’ in 2003. This first close contact with the terrorist group that would eventually become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has left a penumbra of doubt and suspicion around Iyad’s name that has spawned all kinds of theories, of varying degrees of implausibility, about enduring connections and even collaboration between Iyad and Islamic terrorists or Iyad and the Algerian secret services, the DRS. None of these theories has ever been proven beyond doubt. However, when Iyad was sent to be a consular advisor at the Malian consul in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2007, following the 2006 uprising which he essentially lead, he reportedly got himself into deep water by associating with proscribed extremist figures or groups. He was eventually expelled from the country and flown to Paris, before returning to Kidal.

Iyad’s talk of the benefits of sharia law for the Touareg nation went down badly at the Abeibara meeting. One female delegate told him that he had a long road to travel before his fundamentalist dreams of a sharia state became true, as he would first have to climb over the bodies of all the dead women of Azawad, not to mention those of the dead men. His ideas were simply unacceptable. Iyad then declared that if that was the decision of the assembled Ifoghas leaders, then he would go off and form his own movement. This he promptly did, calling his new organisation Ansar Eddine. He declaired its main aim would be to install sharia law in the Adagh and rehabilitate the primacy of the ulema, the council of religious elders.

Iyad Ag Ghali, Ansar Eddine and Mali-AQIM collusion theory.

Iyad’s creation of Ansar Eddine and his reported ties with a certain Abou Abdelkarim aka ‘Le Targui’, one of the minor AQIM leaders operating in the southern desert, have opened the flood gates to national and international speculation about the possible links between the Touareg rebel movement and Islamic terrorists, a link that the Malian government is all to keen to stoke and publicise in order to discredit the movement. As his name indicates, Abdelkarim le Targui is supposedly a Touareg, a native of the Tinzawaten region and the erstwhile preacher at the mosque in In Khalil, a remote and fairly lawless border town in the far north east of Mali. He is reportedly a subordinate of the thuggish emir Abou Zeid, and leader of his own small katiba called ‘Al Ansar’ which was responsible for kidnapping the septuagenarian French humanitarian worker Michel Germaneau in 2010.   According to an announcement by Abdelmalik Droukdel, until recently the supreme leader of AQIM, which was posted up on the AQIM website, Abdelkarim Le Targui was also responsible for murdering Germaneau in cold blood as well as negotiation major drug deals on behalf of AQIM with the representatives of a Colombian drugs cartel in Guinée Bissau. Not the kind of person you should be associating with if you want to present yourself as a legitimate political organisation.

Iyad’s association with Abdelkarim Le Targui is vague and conjectural. Some Touareg even argue that far from being a true targui, Abdelkarim is an Algerian Arab, like all the other AQIM leaders in the southern desert.   Nonetheless this link, together with the perceived religious extremism of Iyad and his Ansar Eddine movement, has spawned a smear campaign in Bamako which aims to convince the world that the MNLA are in cahoots with AQIM.   The AFP reporter in Bamako even claimed that Abou Zeid took part in a recent MNLA attack on the army in the village of Aguel’hoc north of Kidal. Nothing is more poisonous to the international image of the Touareg cause than this taint of fundamentalism and AQIM, not even the Ghadafi links.

There are several reasons why that taint is wholly unjustified. The first is that since the inception of the MNA and MNLA movements, one of their loudest, most cherished and oft repeated aims is to rid their homeland of AQIM, an organisation which they consider to be one of Mali’s most effective weapons in its fight against their cause. “AQIM was parachuted in and installed in our territory by the Malian government,” declares Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, with total conviction. “It was the initiative of certain drugs barons, who are advisors to the President, in the shadows of the Koulouba Palace [The Presidential palace in Bamako]. They brought them into the Timbuktu region and then to Kidal. In return for the release of the 32 hostages in 2003, a pact of non-aggression was signed between Bamako and Al Qaeda, who then progressively occupied this territory. Those contacts became permanent and it’s clear that since then all the operations lead by the terrorist groups have originated in Mali, and the terrorist have always fallen back to Mali. It’s their safe haven. Everyone knows that the terrorists are in communication with military leaders, and that politicians from Bamako meet the terrorist emirs quite regularly.”

Far fetched? Maybe. Like Professor Jeremy Keenan’s controversial theory that AQIM are a creation of the Algerian DRS, the Mali-AQIM collusion theory remains conjectural. But the circumstantial evidence that links a cabal of Malian army and secret service operatives, usually Arabs from the north of the country close to the upper echelons of Mali’s political and military hierarchy, to the huge drug smuggling operations that have blighted the stability of the northern deserts in recent years and to AQIM is very strong. It’s hardly a secret anymore that a consensus exists among US, French and Algerian diplomats in the region that Mali has been long on words but short on action in its dealings with AQIM since 2006. The frustration with Mali’s lack of firm resolve and decisive action in this regard, despite the millions of dollars in aid that it has received from the US and France specifically for the purpose of fighting terrorists on its soil, has been growing exponentially in the embassies and foreign ministries of the world powers. Apart from one clash with AQIM in the desert north of Timbuktu back in 2006, there have hardly been any confirmed reports of the Malian army doing any damage to AQIM at all. In fact, the most determined opposition that AQIM has encountered during its five year campaign of terror in Mali has been at the hands of the ADC, the Touareg rebel movement launched in 2006, who skirmished with the terrorists several times between 2006 and 2009, with lives lost on both sides. And now that the entire might of the Malian army has been thrown against the Touareg uprising with such devastating force, including fighter jets, tanks, armoured vehicles, missiles of every stamp and thousands of troops, its little wonder that Touaregs, diplomats, analysits and commentators are feeling a tad cynical about Mali’s repeated assertions in recent years that they’ve never had the military wherewithal to deal with the AQIM threat.

A senior Malian politician once had the temerity to declare in a private meeting at the US Embassy in Bamako that the presence of AQIM in the north east of the country was a good thing, as long as it meant that the Touareg rebel movement wasted its resources and time trying to combat it. At another meeting, the new Algerian ambassador informed his US counterpart that he suspected collusion between Mali and the terrorists. He cited the then recent case of a joint Algerian-Malian operation to attack an AQIM base that had failed because the AQIM katiba in question had been tipped off in advance. All these frankly startling revelations are contained in the US Embassy cables leaked by Wikileaks. In fact, there is no better way to understand what really went on in the northern deserts of Mali between 2006 and early 2010 than to read those US Embassy cables. The level of intel, of analysis and research contained in them is often of the highest order.   And yes, they do reveal that the US Embassy has also suspected Mali of at best tolerating and at worst colluding with AQIM at one time or another.

If the implantation of AQIM on Touareg soil was part of a deliberate Malian strategy, then it has been extraordinarily effective. The main campaign of AQIM kidnapping and extortion began in March 2008 (interestingly there had been a five year hiatus since the 2003 hostage incident), just when relations between Mali, the ADC and Ag Bahanga were reaching their nadir. Since that time AQIM has knocked the Touareg rebellion squarely off the front page, both national and internationally. Until January 17^th last that is. The presence of AQIM in Mali put the country in the front line of the USA’s global war on terror, giving it kudos and a receptive ear in Washington whilst justifying the huge amounts of money, training and equipment that America lavished on Mali in the context of its Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Programme (TSCTP) and Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). It has also emptied the north of foreign journalists, foreign observers, foreign NGO workers, foreign tourists and foreigners in general, whose presence could have been inconvenient for certain shady army or secret service (DGSE) operations, especially those linked with the drug trade.   Most of all, AQIM have simply throttled the region and deprived its Touareg population of any hope of building a viable future and developing a strong economy. In short, AQIM has crippled Touareg society in Mali’s north east. No wonder MNLA have vowed to rid their land of Al Qaeda.

And yet Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar Eddine movement continues to sow the seeds of doubt and Mali’s propaganda machine continues to milk any possible connection between the MNLA, Iyad and AQIM for all its worth. Apparently Iyad tried to sell his plan for an Islamic inspired movement to the Ifoghas meeting in Abeibara by promising that his political approach would be no different to that of the moderate Islamic parties that have come to power following the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. There also happens to be another Islamic organisation in Mali with the name Ansar Dine. It has a vast following amongst southern Malians, who flock to football stadiums in their thousands to hear the preachings of the movement’s leader, Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara. Ansar Dine preaches tolerance, democracy and social morality inspired by faith in the teachings of The Prophet. It is also an ardent critic of government corruption and incompetence. Perhaps Iyad sees his movement as a Tamashek off shoot of the bigger Ansar Dine. Who knows. “What’s very important is that all the religious leaders of the Adagh des Iforas have categorically rejected this foreign Salafist culture that has been planted in their midst,” Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed declares with emphasis. “I know that Iyad is an important person in the region and I know that he’s involved in religious matters. But I can not believe that he would completely abandon the tolerance that is part of our Touareg culture. Not for one second. Maybe Iyad and others realise that AQIM has a hold on some of our young people, and they’re trying to present a different message about Islam that might possibly win back all those that the Salafists have co-opted into their ranks.”

Why rebel?

Two questions remain to be answered. Why rebel now? And why rebel at all? The latter question often perplexes curious outsiders. What, they wonder, do the Touareg people have against Mali, a country which, on the face of it, seems relatively friendly, peaceful and tolerant. It is after all one of the better functioning and more stable democracies in Africa. It is renowned for its culture, its ancient sites of religious devotion and learning, and for its musicians, who are better known outside Africa than any of its political leaders.   Mali has many fans throughout the world, justifiably so. What makes the Touareg so determined to wreak tear this country apart and wreak havoc on its population?

“Our inclusion in the country was a mistake,” is Nina Walet Intallou’s blunt answer to that question. “In the beginning, just before the end of colonisation, a letter was written by some desert leaders to General De Gaulle pleading with him to let the Touareg and other ethnicities create their own state in the middle of the Sahara. Only four tribal chiefs signed it, but there was never really any proper explanation given by the French to the Touareg, telling them “Listen, we’re going to leave you and your homeland will just be sliced up into four or five parts and given to different countries [Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso]. You will be given to Mali.” We had never been colonised by Mali before. It was something quite brutal and at the time there weren’t any intellectuals who could measure the consequences of it all. The leaders didn’t realise that the south of Mali would come and occupy their territory. They thought that they would remain masters of their own country in an independent Africa. When they saw the people of the south who came and said,”Now, you’re under our authority,” they were completely perplexed.”

That’s the original sin, that duplicitous betrayal of the Touareg and their ‘colonisation’ by Mali at independence. It has been entrenched and deepened by war, oppression, drought, corruption, exile, marginalisation and a painful chain of cause and effect, tit for tat, hurt and vengeance, ever since. But in the end, it all boils down to that original ‘mistake’. All attempts to convince the Touareg as a whole that they are and should remain proud citizens of Mali have, by and large, failed. Not for all, but for most. Apart from religion, the cultural and social bonds that tie the Touareg to Malians from the south are just too weak to make the idea of belonging this nation called Mali acceptable in the northern deserts. And it’s the same vice versa. To most southern Malians, the Sahara is another place and a generally fearful one at that. For a southern soldier from Sikasso or Kati, being sent up north to patrol the open desert is akin to a Muscovite being sent to Siberia in the 19^th century.   It’s another world.

Nonetheless there are Touaregs, a large number in fact, and even more Arabs and Songhoi, who do see their future within the current borders of the Malian state. Those people have in a sense made their peace with the idea that Mali is one nation that can include all its diverse peoples. They argue that development is more important than nationalism or ethnic separatism. Mali has always emphasized the idea of inclusivity, of a state that would treat all its citizens, black, white, Muslim, animist, northern, southern, with equanimity. It sees the Touareg propensity to rebel as an act of downright ingratitude, emphasising the special treatment the north east has received in terms of investment and political freedom, compared to other parts of the country, ever since 1992. The north may be poor, but Mali as a whole is poor, so what are the Touareg complaining about.

Most Malians in the south resent the idea of their country being split in two. They point out that the ‘white’ Touareg and Arabs aren’t the only ethnicities in the north. There are also Songhoi, Peul, Bozo, who are black like them.   Why should they be forced to secede and become part of this Azawad? It’s a pertinent question, that the intellectual wing of the MNLA are trying hard to answer with their claims that Azawad will be for ALL the people of the north, not only the Touareg.   And of course, most Malians realise that under those northern deserts there are immense deposits of oil, uranium, gold and phosphates that could one day make their nation rich. They are loathed to give up on that enticing prospect.

Nonetheless, the Touareg who are fighting the Malian army have no doubt in their minds that theirs is a just cause, that their land and freedom and dignity were taken from them by subterfuge in 1960 and that they have been duped ever since into accepting their unhappy state. No longer. The father of the military leader of MNLA, Mohammed Ag Najm, was killed by the Malian army during the first ever uprising in 1963. Make no mistake, this is not a storm in a tea cup involving a few disgruntled returnees from the Libyan war, or a few irate drug dealers and traffickers settling scores, it’s battle driven by dreams of a better future, although tainted in a small way, no doubt, as is the way of the world, by other motivations like vengeance and gain. Whether those dreams are justified or not is debatable, but they are real.

Why rebel now?

In December, before the outbreak of hostilities, a revealing essay entitled ‘Azawad, it’s now or never’ appeared on the Toumast Press website. Written by Ahmeyede Ag Ilkamassene, it outlined the apparently favourable geo-political climate for the Azawad cause that existed at the end of 2011, citing the independence of South Sudan and Eritrea as examples of mistakes made at the time of decolonisation that had been rectified and which therefore proved that the idea of an independent Azawad wasn’t just pie in the sky. It pointed out that the structures that had dominated global politics since the second world war were changing, that new powers like China, Russia, Brazil and India were coming to the fore and that these powers were more open to the idea of the post-colonial settlement in African being dismantled and rebuilt.

Ag Ilkamassene also proudly stated that, this time, the Touareg revolutionaries were prepared for battle. They would not be hampered by the syndrome of the rusty canon that refused to fire on French forces during the capture of Agadez in 1916, thereby ensuring the defeat of an uprising lead by the first great Touareg independence fighter, Kaocene Ag Gedda. This time the dreams of Kaocene, Zeid Ag Attaher and Mohammed Ali Ag Attaher could come true.   Another inspiration was the Arab spring, which had been closely followed throughout the southern Sahara. “For the first time in the history of humanity,” writes Ag Ilkamessene, “revolutions are occurring simultaneously at all four points of the compass.”

The essay defined a zeitgeist that, claimed Ag Ilkamessene, was propitious for the decisive move. Then there were the local realities on the ground in Northern Mali, the opportunities not to be missed, such as the arrival of the Libyan contingent with their arms. The MNLA also cite the fact that the Malian government had been progressively rebuilding and reequipping its military infrastructure in the north east since early autumn 2011, using money that was supposed to be spent on economic and social development in the region, or fighting Al Qaida. Add to that the recruiting of Arabs for Ould Meydou’s militias, and the rumours that the Ganda Koy were getting ready to re-arm, and that feeling of ‘It’s now or never’ became overwhelming.

Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed puts the outbreak of war down to the repeated refusal of the Malian government to negotiate seriously with the MNLA, or even to give it any official recognition. ”We called on the the government of Bamako to take the difficult situation in the region seriously on several occasions,” he says. “Bamako’s response was simply that the situation didn’t exist. They thought any problems were under control or if not, they could be solved by trickery. We told them to be careful, because the problem exists and it’s serious. There’s permanent insecurity in the region, and terrorism too. We can’t live with that.”

In late November, Bamako sent a delegation of National Assembly deputies to the desert north of Kidal to go and meet with the Touareg soldiers who had returned from Libya. The Malian newspaper L’Essor recently published a fascinating eye-witness account of these meetings out in the open bush, which ultimately ended in failure. The delegation of eminent senior northerners found it hard to listen to the demands and discourse of the relatively young secretary general of the MNLA, Bilal Ag Cherif. Age is very highly respected and deferred to in Touareg society. But apparently not this time. “You speak in the name of Azawad when you don’t even know what it is,” retorted an angry deputy after Ag Cherif had spoken. “We deputies have been elected and we are natives of this region. You’re demanding something in the name of the inhabitants of the north without having any mandate from them. Where is your legitimacy?”

Then, on January 7^th, Bamako sent Mohammed Ag Erlaf, a former Touareg rebel and a senior bureaucrat in the Malian administration, who for the past few years has been managing a huge project called The Special Programme for Peace, Security and the Development of Northern Mali (PSPSDN), to talk to the MNLA leadership. He outlined a set of promises that sounded uncannily like those Mali had already made in 1992 and 2006. They included a special offer aimed directly at Iyad Ag Ghali to create a new post of cadi, or Muslim judge, for each administrative region of the north, and of an imam for every major mosque. The Touareg rebel leadership were tired of such approaches and they resented way in which Ag Erlaf tried to separate one leader from another by promising each special favours. It smacked, once again, of that old divide and rule policy.

So that was that. The time for talking had come to an end. The dice were cast. Ag Najm and his troops set off for Menaka.

Postscript – The dirty war

Today, as I write, the rebellion has entered its second week. The MNLA have attacked the towns of Lere and Niafunké in the west of Mali, reaching further beyond MNLA’s northeastern heartlands than any other rebel movement since 1990. Instead of attacking a town and then immediately disappearing off to the hills, the MNLA are trying to hold on to their gains, and extend their reach, thereby over-stretching the under-paid and often demoralised Malian troops to their limit. News from the desert is scanty, and objective verifiable news is almost non-existant. However, as predicted, it does seem that the MNLA are giving the Malian army the kind of challenge that the north of Mali hasn’t seen in twenty years, if ever. Nevertheless, it’s hard to conceive how this mitigated military success will ever translate into the birth of an independent Azawad. The pressures against that ever happening, both from within Mali and, more importantly, from all the nation states of West Africa and Maghreb, and the global powers, is just too strong. But MNLA believe it can be done. Only time will tell.

What’s certain, and what was also predictable, is that this conflict is also fast degenerating into a dirty ethnic war, pitting Bamana, Manding, Songhai and Peul against Touareg and Arab. There are reports of burning and looting and machete attacks on northerners living in the south. Unconfirmed, as always, but the direction of events seems clear. Whatever happens, the loser will inevitably be that unity, that fraternal bond between peoples and cultures, that Malians have cherished for so long.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in Think Africa Press – Feb 2012

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On February 9th last, the MNLA and the Ganda Izo held a joint press conference in Ouagadougou and issued a joint statement announcing a future collaboration between the two movements. The two groups also expressed strong support for Burkina Faso’s mediation in northern Mali and denounced any attempts by Algiers to regain the position of peace-maker par excellence that it once considered its prerogative.

Anybody who knows the historic role of the Ganda Izo and its predecessor Ganda Koy in the rebellions of northern Mali will find this news fairly astonishing.  The Ganda Koy was created as a Songhoi ‘civil protection’, aka ‘vigilante’, group after the National Pact was signed between the Touareg rebellion and the Malian government in 1992.  Its public purpose was to protect Songhoi civilians from attacks by armed Touareg rebel groups. Its darker purpose was to sow fear amongst Touareg civilians and drag northern Mali into an ethnic civil war.  To put it bluntly, the Ganda Koy was created to fight the Touareg and their rebellion tooth and nail. Now it’s successor is shaking hands with the MNLA. What can this mean?

The most surprising part of Fasozine’s report of the news conference is the reference to a statement made by the Ganda Izo leader Seydou Cissé that it was mistake for the Ganda Izo not to have followed the MNLA from the start. On the face of it, this seems quite incredible. If there was ever one group in northern Mali, apart form the Malian state and its army, that was guaranteed to show implacable opposition to the Touareg revolution, it was the Ganda Izo. Now they’re expressing regret that they didn’t sign up to that revolution from day one.

The statement actually tallies with a realisation that came to me during a recent trip to Bamako, where I spoke with many Songhoi people who were still living in the capital because they feared it was too unsafe to return to their homes in the north. I got the impression that many Songhoi have long shared some of gripes that the Touareg have with the central government in Bamako. The Songhoi I met spoke to me about their frustration with government corruption in Bamako, with the lack of real decentralization and local management of northern affairs, the lack of job opportunities, the lack of any higher education in the north, cultural and linguistic discrimination by central government and a host of other issues.

Take away the demand for an independent state in the north, and you’re left with two people, the Touareg and the Songhoi who have shared the same territory for centuries, most of it  in relative peace and symbiotic harmony, at least until the early 1990s, and who agree with each other more than they disagree.

All of which leads me to believe that the MNLA squandered a golden opportunity to create a common front with the Songhoi before they launched their uprising in January 2012.  Granted, there were, and still are, a few token Songhoi in the MNLA hierarchy, most notably vice President Mohammed Djiré Maiga, himself and ex-Ganda Koy militant. But the fact remains that the movement did not give itself the time to establish strong links with Songhoi leaders and civil society before declaring war on the Malian government. Their head-strong impatience was perhaps understandable in the circumstances: the MNLA had control over more weaponry than ever before and the Malian army was re-militarizing the north. But it was ill-judged.  The MNLA’s inability to control looting and attacks on civilians by some of its fighters when they took control of the Songhoi-dominated city of Gao in late March 2012 was another massive blunder.  If they had ensured the security of the population, they might also have earned their trust and support.  As it happened, those terrifying weeks of chaos in early April 2012 drove many young Songhoi men into the waiting arms of the Islamist militia, the MUJAO, with its seductive offers of security and cash.  I get the feeling that many Songhoi intellectuals and leaders were sickened by that flirtation with Islamist extremism and violent jihad, and are now keen to clarify and broadcast their true aspirations: not sharia law or, god forbid, an independent state of Azawad dominated by Touareg clans, but rather a better deal for the north and all its peoples.

The MNLA and the Ganda Izo might disagree on the issue of independence, but it’s clear that there is much they can agree on. The Fasozine article reports that the two parties expressed convergence on a range of opinions and stances, “notably the defence of the interests of the ‘people of Azawad’, the implementation of a joint plan of action, the holding in the near future of a special congress of all the movements of Azawad with the aim of establishing a coordination between them, the agreement of the Ganda Izo to take part in such a congress, the reaffirmation by both parties of their attachment to the peace process in line with the Ouagadougou Accords and the agreement by the Ganda Izo to recognise its place in the ‘legitimate’ combat of the ‘people of Azawad’.”

Call me a hopeless dreamer, but this could possibly be the beginnings of a real trans-ethnic front in the north, one that has long been alluded to on paper, but never come to pass in reality.  Hopefully it’ll be a political rather than a military front, one that might achieve real muscle in Bamako and help bring about a better settlement for all the people of northern Mali.

Andy Morgan.

(c) 2014. All rights reserved.

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Touareg boy watching Camel Race, Tin Essako, Jan 2001

A few years ago, on a beautifully calm Saharan evening, I was drinking tea with an old Touareg musician in a garden near Tessalit in the far north east of Mali, a place that has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The musician’s work was gaining popularity throughout Europe and North America, so I asked him if he would ever be tempted to leave northern Mali and emigrate to the west.

“The desert is my home,” he answered. “I’ve never been attracted by the idea of emigrating. It’s here that I belong. You have to live simply in the desert. It’s the only way. And simplicity is freedom.”

Disunity has crippled the Touareg cause ever since the French colonial army defeated the mighty Kel Ahaggar at the battle of Tit in 1902. But freedom is the one idea that binds the heart of every Touareg together. Indeed, the aspiration to be free is so central to the Touareg identity, that their own word for a true Touareg of noble mind and heart is amashagh, which simply means ‘free man’.

What does this freedom consist of? At its core lie a proud autonomy and self-reliance, to which interference or coercion, especially by a foreign power, are abhorrent. With that goes the freedom to move about the vastness of that ancestral desert without hindrance. Hence the deep wounds created by the new frontiers that sliced through Touareg lands in the early 1960s. Then there’s the freedom to manage the desert’s unique environment and natural resources according to local needs and customs; the freedom to be a nomad and to be left alone to live quietly in that blessed, or cursed, state of isolation which only a great empty wilderness like the Sahara desert allows.

There are also freedoms that most humans aspire to and which the Touareg share: freedom from taxes that yield no tangible benefit; freedom from corruption and abuse of power; the freedom to preserve and promote your own language and culture; the freedom to achieve personal advancement and happiness in whatever state you happen to be part of; the freedom to worship according to personal conviction and cultural tradition; the freedom to be open and hospitable to outsiders; the freedom to seek peace and prosperity.

There’s also the desire to live a life free from fear and violence, whether perpetrated by the state, by foreigners or by your neighbours. Good relations with the other ethnic groups that share the desert space – Arab, Peul, Songhoy, Arma, Toubou and others – are essential to the Touareg concept of freedom, because without peace of mind there can be no freedom. Strange as it may seem, until June1990 and the outbreak of the second great Touareg rebellion, good relations between the Touareg and their neighbours were the norm, not the exception. You have to back many decades before that conflict to find a case of open war between Touareg and Arab, or Touareg and Songhoi in the deserts of northern Mali, or Azawad, call it what you will.

I believe that the simplest way of formulating what is often referred to as ‘The Touareg Question’ is this: To what extent can the Touareg aspiration to freedom find fulfilment in the modern world? Indeed, can it exist at all in the context of the post-colonial multi-ethnic nation state?

If an answer to that question exists, then it requires some blue-sky thinking, especially now when many of the old formulas that have been applied since independence seem so bankrupt.

Let’s start with nationhood. Personally, I don’t believe that an independent state of Azawad is a possibility; not now and not for decades, even possibly centuries. Neither the social cohesion, the economic foundation nor the global support exist for such a state to succeed. And quite apart from that, Algeria would never let it happen.

Take away the issue of independence, however, and you’ll find that the aspirations of the average Touareg are basically the same as those of the average non-Touareg citizen of Mali, Algeria or Niger. Namely: less corruption, better schools and clinics, better transport infrastructure, fairer taxes and duties, more job opportunities and, in the case of other minorities, greater cultural recognition.

In some ways, the independence issue skews the argument in an unhelpful way. The rebellion of 1990 was fought not for independence but for greater investment in the north and advancement for northern Touareg and Arabs in the state of Mali and its institutions; in other words, it was fought in order to belong to Mali in a more meaningful way rather than to become more separate. Before 1990, these aspirations were shared by most northerners, whatever their ethnicity or skin colour. It was only fear and polarization brought about by conflict that broke down this empathy of aspiration and turned tribe against tribe.

Governments in the region need to concentrate on the aspirations that unite people rather than those that separate them. But alas, creating job opportunities, developing health and education and promoting minority cultures are often harder for a weak and corrupt government to achieve than maintaining control by turning ethnic groups against each other and keeping populations in a permanent state of fear. But find jobs for the youth, build schools and clinics and show respect for local culture and the desire for independence will wane.

In Mali, even the most enlightened policies in the north have little chance of success unless there’s a concerted effort to reorganise the country’s failed governmental structure. Rather than continue to parrot the mantra of ‘Mali, un et indivisible’ and blindly adopt the French Jacobin concept of a rigidly centralised state, why not look at the länder of Germany, the parliaments of Wales and Scotland, local government in Catalonia or even, dare I say it, Quebec and the federal system in Canada. Mali needs to find a new machinery of tribal, regional and national government, in which appropriate powers of decision-making, especially those relating to taxation, security, education and investment are devolved to structures that work like independent cogs in a larger machine. No easy task, I know, but there are plenty of examples around world that can serve as stimuli for blue-sky thinking in this regard.

The cultural aspirations of the Touareg, indeed of all desert peoples, need to be met. The desire to weaken cultural differences and promote a kind of pan-Manding hegemony in Mali, a pan-Haoussa hegemony in Niger or a pan-Arab hegemony in Algeria and Libya is both backward and doomed. Reorganise the state TV companies so that TV programmes, especially news and current affairs, in local desert languages like Tamashek, Fulbe, Hassaniya and Songhoy are broadcast regularly. Allow local traditions of music and theatre equal access to the state-run airwaves. Use education to promote local language and culture.  Make every Malian, Nigerien, Algerian or Libyan feel that whatever language he or she speaks, it will never be a hindrance to their aspirations.

The doors of advancement up the ladder of state institutions, especially the army, must be fully opened to minorities like the Touareg. That might be a big ask in Mali, given the acute levels of suspicion and distrust of Touareg and Arabs that now exists in the south of the country. But such equality of opportunity is essential if Touareg and other desert minorities are to become peaceful citizens within larger multi-ethnic nations.

What about the frontiers? If we must accept that they’re not going to change or disappear, then they must be made less divisive and problematic for desert people. The late Colonel Muammar Khadafy might have been a power-hungry despot, but his dreams of creating a borderless Sahara, and issuing nomads with special ‘nomad’ passports were, in my view, visionary.

I myself dream of the day when the states of north Africa and the Sahel realise that it would be in their best interests to a create a free economic zone, based loosely on the model of the EU, that spans the entire Sahara from Lake Chad to the Atlantic. Only then will those absurdly arbitrary national borders cease to make a criminal out of an old grandmother who picks up 3 sacks of couscous in Tamanrasset, because they’re cheaper there than at home, and brings them back to Kidal or Agadez without paying the ridiculously high import duties demanded by the state.  As for drug and people smuggling, perhaps the answer to those problems lie in Europe rather than Africa.

The Sahara is a regional space and its problems require regional solutions.  In that respect, it’s the supra-national bodies that include countries from both the Maghreb and the Sahel that are key to future peace and prosperity in the region; bodies such as The Community of Sahel-Saharan States or CEN-SAD – another Khadafy invention – or the regional military committee known as CEMOC. Both are sadly quite toothless at the moment. But long-term, the importance of bodies such as these to the Touareg and other desert peoples will far outweigh that of ECOWAS or the African Union.

Meanwhile, Touareg society needs a revolution of its own. The conflict of 2012-13 has shown up the incompetence and geo-political naiveté of many Touareg leaders, especially those drawn from poorly educated and self-serving hereditary elites. Touareg society needs to become more mobile, more open to the promotion of genuine talent, more ready to learn about and engage with the rest of the world.

You’ll have noticed perhaps that I haven’t mentioned Islamist terrorism or Al Qaida once during this orgy of blue-sky thinking. That’s because neither are the cause of the Sahara’s ills but rather their symptoms. The religious tendencies of just a few ambitious Touareg leaders have managed to tarnish the image of an entire people in the eyes of the world. This is a tragedy which most Touareg I know are not prepared to easily forgive.

A young Touareg drives a 4×4 for Ansar ud-Dine, or hitches a ride as a cook, a guide or a foot soldier with a cell of jihadists or drug smugglers not out of a sense of conviction but rather a thirst for opportunity. The same thirst drove young Touareg men to find work in the French nuclear installations of In Ekker and Takormiasse in the 1960s or to travel clandestino to Libya and join Khadafy’s Islamic Regiment in the 1980s.

Touareg youth haven’t just been ‘radicalised’ by Al Qaida. They’ve been radicalised for generations by lack of opportunity and freedom. And opportunity works like an auction. The highest bidder usually wins. The nations of the Sahara need to bid high, not just in a financial sense, but in a social and political one, to keep their youth on track. That’s all there is to it.

The most prevalent state of mind I encounter when talking to Touareg friends and acquaintances is bafflement. How did it all come to this? What’s happening to our once peaceful desert home? Mali, Al Qaida, Algeria, France, America, China, they’re stronger than we are, that’s what they say. “It’s as if we’ve just woken up,” was how my musician friend from Tessalit once put it to me.

The world has to help the Touareg wake up and adapt their instinct for freedom to the realities of the modern world. It can be done. The Touareg question does have an answer. But it will require plenty of courage, investment and political skill. It’ll also need a season of deep reflection in those blues Saharan skies.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

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So stark and brash was the nature of this visit that many see in it a major attempt to realign power relations in North Africa and the Sahel. Morocco’s ostensible aim is to finesse the role of privileged’ partner to Mali in the region from its old rival, Algeria. With Algeria in considerable disarray at the moment, due to the ill-health of President Bouteflika and the immense uncertainty about who should succeed him, this is an opportune moment for Morocco to step up to the plate. Its ancient ties with northern Mali, especially with the various Arab communities of Timbuktu, Djenné and Arawan, no doubt confers historic legitimacy to this move in the eyes of many at home in Morocco.

The first concrete result of the visit is an agreement from Morocco to help train 500 new Malian imams. “We share the Maliki madhab (school of religious law) with Mali, so there’s a perfect cohesion between us in the matter of training imams and in that of religious practice too, which is of a moderate Sunni Islam,” Morocco’s ambassador to Mali, Hassan Naciri, told Mali’s state TV station ORTM. “For us, it’s also important to train these imams according to the principles of moderation and tolerance in Islam.”

The Maliki madhab is still the most popular rite in North and West Africa. Generally, it is considered a lot more tolerant and respectful of people’s differences than the Hanbali school that has taken hold of many parts of the Middle East and which the Salafiyya, who are making inroads into countries such as Mali and Morocco, hold dear.

Mohammed VI fears radical Salafism and Wahabism as much as any hereditary ‘traditional’ ruler in the Maghreb, maybe more. In fact, extremist groups in Morocco recently issued death threats against the king.  The creeping influence of radical Sunni beliefs throughout the Sahel, aided and abetted by the petro-dollars of the Middle East, has also been a great cause for concern to Mali’s secular political elite.  So this move could be seen as a concerted counter-attack against religious radicalism and influence of firebrand Salafi preachers in North and West Africa.

The wider scope of Morocco’s intentions in Mali remains to be seen however. They see, if not common cause, at least a strong empathetic parallel between their struggle against the Polisario in the Western Sahara and Mali’s struggle against Touareg separatists in the north of the country. There were also many reports during the Malian civil war of 2012 of links between jihadi armed groups in northern Mali and disaffected youth in southern Morocco and the Western Sahara. The two countries no doubt see advantages in sharing know-how, intelligence and resources to fight separatism.

The issue of drug smuggling also binds the two countries together, whether they like it or not. Much of the big-time hashish trade that transits through northern Mali is connected to the Moroccan underworld, and there is some evidence of Moroccan involvement in the more lucrative cocaine trade as well.

Morocco might also see the election of a new President in Mali as an opportunity to reassert their influence in the north of the country. Many in the old nationalist Istiqlal party still harbour dreams of a ‘Greater Morocco’, whose influence, if not borders, would encompass all those lands conquered by the great 15th century Sultan Ahmed al-Mansour, which include large tracts of what is now northern Mali.  Those dreams may be fanciful, but closer and more vigorous ties with Mali will be at the very least expected to bring new business and resource-extraction opportunities.

Mohammed VI’s Bamako trip is an attempt to reassert Moroccan hegemony in the region at Algeria’s expense, to establish common cause with the new Malian President in terms of fighting separatism, drug smuggling and religious extremism, to ease pressure on the Western Sahara and generally flex the economic muscle of an increasingly confident Morocco.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

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Two aspects of the Ouagadougou Accords really leap out. The first is that one of the two Touareg signatories was Alghabass Ag Intalla, son of the traditional chief of the Ifoghas clan, Intalla Ag Attaher. The other signatory was Bilal Ag Cherif, General Secretary of the MNLA.

Alghabass ag Intalla sided with Iyad Ag Ghali and his Ansar ud-Dine militia during the occupation of northern Mali by armed Islamist groups last year, and then went on to form the Mouvement Islamique de L’Azawad (MIA). The choices he made betrayed a serious lack of judgement and a scant grasp of both geopolitics and local realpolitik. The impression given was that Alghabass, despite all his hereditary standing and influence, allowed himself to become a mere pawn in Iyad’s games of power and devilish alliance.  Furthermore, his split from Iyad and Ansar ud-Dine soon after France launched operation Serval to rid the north of the Islamist militias seemed merely opportunistic.

As heir apparent to the leadership of the Ifoghas, no doubt Alghabass faced some touch choices during the rebellion, some of which were no doubt governed by factors that outsiders will find difficult to fully understand.  Nonetheless, I have a growing feeling that Alghabass isn’t really the ideal person to lead the Ifoghas and the other Touareg clans in the Adagh out of their current predicament and into a more peaceful and productive future. When I interviewed him by phone back in January, just after he’d formed the MIA, Alghabass seemed vague and lackadaisical in his grasp of the immense challenges he and his people faced and the strategies required to overcome them.

I was also under the impression that Alghabass’ standing within his community had already been diminished considerably by his lack of good judgement. But once the son of a lord, always the son of a lord, I suppose. Alghabass is back in the hot seat, leading his people. Am I the only one to find this a tad depressing?

The other striking aspect of the accords is the fundamental principles upon which, according to Le Monde, they rest: “The two camps confirm their adherence to the national unity and territorial integrity of Mali and a respect of human rights and the secular nature of the State. They recognise the ‘necessity to promote a genuine national reconciliation as the basis of a lasting peace in Mali.’ They also commit themselves to ‘fighting against terrorism'”

Fighting against terrorism is the easy part. The MNLA have always vowed their commitment to it, although their opportunistic alliance with an Ansar ud-Dine that was funded in turn by AQIM and MUJAO in February and March of last year has lead to understandable doubts about the sincerity of their claims. Nonetheless, the assistance they’ve been giving French army during their campaign against recalcitrant mujahedeen in the Tegharghar mountains and their various clashes with barely disguised mutations of MUJAO and AQIM in places like In Khalid and Ber prove that the will to fight terrorism and extremism is there.

Alghabass will have a harder time proving his commitment to this principle. Until recently he belonged to an Islamist militia that was in part funded by AQIM. When I asked him about this very point recently, he was vagueness personified, claiming that you can never know where money comes from.  Nonetheless, I do believe that Alghabass is a moderate Islamist who has never wholeheartedly bought into the more hardline and Machiavellian notions of Iyad or his lieutenant Cheick Ag Aoussa.  It seems trivial to say this, but I’ve never seen a photo of Alghabass sporting the obligatory outsized beard of the committed radical Salafist. Maybe it’s his blue blood that has given him a special dispensation.

National reconciliation is also an easy principle for all parties to accept. Mali needs it like never before. The level of ethnic tension and hatred in the country as a whole and in the north in particular is likely to remain at dangerous levels for some time to come and will only be eased by some intense and applied community-building and cohesion strategies.  I would personally urge the foreign powers to throw every effort, every ounce of know-how and every penny they can muster into this process. The future viability of the Malian state depends on it.

The real sticking point in this statement of principles has to be that of adherence to the national unity and territorial integrity of Mali.  It wasn’t that long ago that Bilal ag Acherif was hammering out the “Independence or Die!” slogans. When I met Mohammed Djiré, the vice-president of the MNLA in Ouagadougou back in February, he was adamant that a return to the pre-rebellion frontiers of Mali was not an option for him or his MNLA troops. He claimed that relationships had putrefied to the extent that the old cohabitation was no longer viable. And yet, Bilal, Djiré, Alghabass et al now seem ready to sign up to Mali, un et indivisible!

My hunch that a great deal of pressure, or some handsome inducements, or both, have been applied by third parties – Burkina Faso, African Union, France? – to bring the MNLA leadership round to this position. One of those inducements could be a firm promise by Mali, supported and ‘witnessed’ by France, to implement a road map towards regional autonomy.  Despite Bilal’s slogans, it’s been clear for a while that most of the more realistic minds in the upper echelons of Touareg society have accepted that an independent Azawad will have to remain a dream for a long time yet. An independent state becomes de facto only once it has been recognised by other states and neither the international community, nor, more importantly, Algeria, will be ready to recognize an independent Azawad for the foreseeable future. Both Iyad ag Ghali and Alghabass ag Intalla have spoken about establishing an autonomous region in northern Mali along the lines of the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq.  Has Mali secretly agreed to consider this option?  Only time will tell.

It’s fairly easy to imagine the pressure might have been bought to bear on the MNLA and HCUA in Ouagadougou. France, the USA and the interim government in Bamako are all desperate to see the Presidential elections take place on July 28th, with voting in every corner of the Malian territory. They want to see the pesky coup-leader Colonel Amadou Haya Sanogo ‘confined to barracks’ and a credible democratically-elected government installed, one that the Americans can throw money and aid at without breaking its own laws.  In order to achieve this, the Kidal region, which has been effectively ruled by the MNLA with the backing of the French army since February, had to be bought back into the fold.

I can imagine that France had stern words with the MNLA.  Reject these accords and we’ll pull out, clearing the way for the Malian army and its revenge lust to sweep into Kidal with no holds barred. The skirmishes between the Malian army and the MNLA that happened a few weeks ago on the main road from Gao to Kidal, near the village of Anefis, in which the MNLA lost at least fifteen lives, were a dire warning of what might happen if the Malians and the MNLA meet in open battle in the dusty streets of Kidal.  These accords promise a gradual and controlled deployment of Malian troops to Kidal and all regions north.  Even so, a tense standoff is likely for a while.  Nonetheless, the MNLA had little choice but to accept.

Their reward is the hope of survival, at least as a political movement.  But how will these accords go down with the MNLA rank and file?  Not very well, is my guess.  Palpable apprehension of self-serving leaders selling out has existed amongst the lower ranks of the MNLA for while now. These fears are fed by the memory of Iyad Ag Ghali’s deal with the Malian government in January 1991, which splintered the rebel movement into an alphabet soup of warring militias and factions.  At best, many MNLA fighters will see these accords as a tactical move to buy time and breathing space, rather than a solid foundation on which future peace and happiness can be built.  And perhaps the leaders, in their hearts of hearts, share the same view.

It was unlikely however that these Accords would have acceptable in Bamako without an adherence on the part of the Touareg delegation to Mali, un et indivisible.  Both the interim government and popular opinion are far from ready to contemplate any hint of independence or indeed, any kind of major concession to the MNLA, whose image in the south is very similar to that of the IRA in 1970s Britain…in other words, close to that of the devil incarnate.  Nonetheless, as on the Touareg side, a certain realism has been seeping into the minds of some senior politicians in Bamako, no doubt aided by a certain ‘gentle’ pressure from France, the US, the EU etc. This developing awareness of the stark realities on the ground is prompting some of those politicians to consider a form of devolution / regional autonomy as the price that has to be paid for long term peace. Others however remain in step with the total intransigence of mass opinion. The youth wing of SADI (Solidarité Africaine pour la Démocracie et l’Independence) has denounced the accords as a heinous plot to carve up Mali, aided and abetted by France.  The Procurer-General of the Court of Appeal in Bamako, Daniel Tessougué, has declared that if the politicians sign these accords, they will have to answer to history.

The fact that some of the most vociferous opposition voices in Bamako belong to Presidential candidates and members of their parties doesn’t bode well for the future of these Accords however. If the candidate who wins the elections at the end of July is one who chooses to base his or her political strategy on the popular mood in the streets, the Accords will not be worth the paper they’re written on and will probably suffer the same fate as the National Pact that was signed in 1992, also with a great deal of opposition in Bamako, and then promptly ignored.  If this happens, then another rebellion, in five, ten or twenty years time, is almost inevitable.

Nonetheless, for reasons already stated, Azawad must remain a dream.  It’ll be interesting to see how Algeria will react to the Ouagadougou Accords.  With their President critically ill in a Paris hospital, and the south of their country undergoing serious social upheaval, Algiers will no doubt be relieved to see peace come back to northern Mali, temporarily at least. However, the fact that these accords were signed in Ouagadougou and not Algiers or Tamanrasset, as most previous accords have been, will no doubt rankle.

Northern Mali needs peace. It needs the space to begin work on the really important challenges that lie ahead; economic development, health and education, national reconciliation and fighting crime.  If the Ouagadougou Accords provide that space, they will be hailed as a historic victory for good sense and compromise.  If they prove to have been rushed through too quickly, and fail to carry the various constituencies in Mali with them, then they’ll end up as nothing more than another failed opportunity to begin solving the fundamental problems of Mali and the Sahel region.

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Festival in the Desert 2001, Tin Essako, north eastern Mali . (c) 2001 Andy Morgan

France’s MIGs and attack helicopters met little resistance when they swooped into the skies over northern Mali last Friday to halt the southwards advance of Islamist militias near Mopti, the country’s second largest city. Mercifully for the French, there was no sign of the surface to air missiles that the Salafist mujahedeen were reported to have stolen from Ghadafy’s arsenals in Libya at the end of the 2011 civil war. Nonetheless, whereas achieving air superiority in Mali was always going to be a walkover, winning a ground war and restoring peace and unity to the beleaguered West African nation presents an altogether more complex challenge.

The French government claim that they are merely softening up the territory in preparation for a military intervention lead by the Malian army and a coalition of ECOWAS forces. What they have failed to mention is that the Malian army hasn’t won a military encounter against Touareg rebels in the north of the country since the early 1960s, at least not without the help of local pro-government Touareg and Arab militias who know the terrain. Unfortunately, these militias won’t be on hand to help the Malian invasion this time round, not in the short term at least.

The north of Mali is as alien to the average soldier from southern Mali as the Alaskan tundra is to a citizen of Massachusetts or Vermont. That sense of alienation will be felt even more keenly by troops from Nigeria, Senegal, Benin and Ivory Coast, who are more used to jungle and savannah bush warfare, when they finally roll onto the vast treeless plains of the southern Sahara.

This is the land where the local Touareg or Arab in his souped up turbo 4×4 Landcruiser is king. Iyad Ag Ghali, the Touareg leader of the Salafist Ansar ud-Dine militia, is a master of the kind of super-fast hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that suits both the desert conditions and the sheer size of territory in question, which is roughly equal to that of Spain. His mujahedeen showed their verve last Sunday by capturing the small town of Diabaly, due north of Mopti, with a lightening strike that originated over the border in Mauretania. The ability to crisscross borders with little hindrance is another important aspect of the Islamists’ Houdini-esque style of combat.

Even if the Malian and ECOWAS troops manage to march in and recapture most of the major cities in the north, they’re likely to find that their enemy has become strangely invisible. All those foreign jihadists from Libya, Mauretania, Morocco, Algeria and even as far afield as France, Pakistan and the Middle East will slip away and return home. The local youth who have been fighting for one or other of the Islamist katibat or cells will simply stash their Kalashnikovs and don the ‘uniform’ of the local inhabitants; a civilian robe and a turban that covers the head and face, leaving only the eyes exposed.

A junior army officer from Lagos, Cotonou or even Bamako will find it very hard to tell the Islamist mujahid apart from the innocent native city-dweller or nomad. No doubt local informants will tender their services to the African coalition and no doubt summary executions and brutality against both the guilty and the innocent will ensue. Feelings of revenge against ‘white’ northerners – Touareg and Arab mainly – that have been brewing in the hearts of southern blacks and the darker skinned northerners will spill over into racial and ethnic violence. Vigilante groups, such as the feared militia of the black Songhoi people, the Ganda Izo, will rage into action with their machetes and petrol cans. Human rights organisations will have to work overtime.

The secular Touareg nationalist movement, the MNLA, are currently playing the good guys and offering to help the international community rid northern Mali of their bitter Islamist adversaries. This offer however is conditional on the autonomy, if not complete independence of the northern two thirds of the country, a condition which Mali is unlikely to accept. Moreover, the struggle between the MNLA and the Touareg-dominated Islamist Ansar ud-Dine militia will be a fratricidal one, pitting Touareg against Touareg, often within the same family or clan. It is unlikely to do much good to the social fabric of the region.

Meanwhile the Algerian and Mauritanian leaders of the Islamist groups who currently control the north of the country will simply vanish into the desert, possibly to live and fight another day. The Touareg, discredited by an association with Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and other jihadist groups that only a small handful of their leaders ever really sought or wanted, will be back where they were before the great rebellion of the early 1990s; a marginalised, harassed and vilified people living under military occupation and watching their nomadic lifestyle and culture slowly disappear.

The question that France and international community need to answer is not how they can bomb Islamist columns and arms dumps without killing too many civilians, or how they can best support the Malian army and ECOWAS in their bid to retake the north, but how they can help to bring about a stable, functioning and harmonious Malian Republic to which all its people, northerners and southerners, feel they belong.

The joy expressed at the arrival of French fighter jets and paratroopers by most Malians in the south of the country and by a large tranche of the bruised and battered people of the north, who have been groaning under a doctrinaire Salafist regime since last April, is completely understandable. And perhaps the Islamist advance southwards towards Mopti had to be stopped in its tracks, threatening as it did the most strategic airport in the centre of the country and even the capital city Bamako further south. But if sanctioning a Malian army lead invasion of the north means returning Mali to the status-quo ante that existed before the Touareg uprising in January 2012, then it’s simply not a credible long term option. The Touareg ‘question’, the endemic corruption, the collusion between Mali’s security apparatus and shady northern criminal and Islamist elements, the lack of democratic accountability, the breakdown of law and order, all of these issues were alive and rampant back in 2011 and they’re still far from being resolved.

Like a massive dose of chemotherapy administered to a patient with advancing cancer, France’s intervention in Mali will serve to halt and stabilise the situation. But negative side effects are inevitable, and a complete cure seems as far away as ever.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

First published on The Guardian’s website, January 15th 2013.

The post What next for Mali? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

A panorama of Kidal in north eastern Mali. (c) Andy Morgan 2001

The MNLA and MIA have taken control of Kidal and welcomed in the French army. Chadian troops, who are less welcome thanks to bitter memories of the conflict between Touareg fighting for Ghadafi and the Chadian army in the Aouzou strip three decades ago, are also in Kidal. Following a reported meeting between the MNLA top brass and the Chadian government a few weeks ago, this move was probably carefully premeditated.  It’s also clear that the MNLA made some kind of deal with the French in the days, or even weeks, leading up to the arrival of French helicopters and transport planes on Kidal’s makeshift beaten-earth runway last Wednesday. What seems spontaneous in northern Mali often proves to have strategic and well-planned roots.

As far as the Touareg leadership in Kidal is concerned, the most important aspect of the French arrival in Kidal is that they didn’t bring the Malian army with them. This intelligent decision benefits all parties.  First it avoids the prospect of the Malian army running riot in the heart of ‘enemy territory’ and no doubt suffering considerable casualties at the hands of the MNLA / MIA coaltion, who are still heavily armed. Secondly, it gives the French time to pursue the remnants of the Islamist coalition who are apparently still hiding out in the remote Tegharghar mountains north of the town, although I suspect that most of the foreign jihadists have already vanished from the region altogether.  Thirdly, it gives France and the international coalition behind it the chance to say that the mission in northern, or rather its first phase, has been successfully completed.  It also gives the region some breathing space to contemplate the must harder challenges that lie ahead.

Meanwhile, the remaining jihadists in northern Mali have already switched from occupation to insurgency mode. Holding the cities is not longer part of their strategy.  They will now resort to a mix of classic guerrilla and terror tactics to pursue their holy war. Defeating them will be akin to exorcising ghosts or bad spirits. It will be as asymmetrical as warfare can possibly get.

The recent resurgence in the fortunes of the MNLA begs many questions.  Either the secular Touareg nationalist movement found the backing from somewhere to take Kidal before trying to negotiate some kind of collaboration with the French and thus avoid seeing their town, which has been the epicentre of Touareg rebellions in Mali since 1962, handed back to the Malian army and placed under a martial law far worse than the one imposed on it between 1964 and 1990.  Or Alghabass Ag Intalla, the heir to the chiefdom of the local Ifoghas ‘nobility’, and his new Islamic Movement of Azawad (MIA) let the MNLA back into the town because they see a partnership with the MNLA as the best way of saving their own skins and avoiding execution / arrest / the ICC and the terrible vengeance of the Malian army.  Last week’s demonstration in the town in favor of the MNLA and against a Malian army occupation, with all the summary brutality against Touareg and Arabs that the local population fear it will bring, is clear proof that the secular nationalist are on the rise again.

The MNLA / MIA will use their hold on Kidal to strengthen the case that they have been putting  to France and the international community for the past three months and more, namely that they should be accepted as natural partners in the continued struggle to rid northern Mali of violence Salafi extremism and foreign jihadists, a struggle which is likely to last months if not years.  Such a partnership between western powers and the MNLA is likely to be entirely unacceptable to the Malian government and most of the Malian people.  However, France might well use its accumulated kudos and leverage to impose such a solution on Mali, whilst forcing the MNLA to accept autonomy rather than independence. After all, in present circumstances, France can pretty much dictate terms in Bamako. Possibly even in Kidal for that matter.

What’s certain is the the Malian army is entirely incapable of pursuing the fight against a protracted Islamist guerrilla insurgency in the north on their own, or indeed, with the help of ECOWAS forces from countries such as Nigeria or Ivory Coast.  So unless France envisages extending their military intervention from the original to months or years, a most unappealing prospect no doubt, they’ll need to build coalitions with other local anti-Islamist groups who have at least some chance of success.  Who will those groups be?  The MNLA?  MIA?  The Chadian army?  Algeria?  Local ethnic militias lead by tainted strong me like Alhaji Ag Gamou or Abderrahmane Ould Meydou?  From France and Mali’s point of the view, the list of candidates is unappetizing to say the least.

Whatever the scenario, the Rubik’s cube like complexity of Mali’s problems, especially in the north, presents one of the greatest conflict resolution challenges in recent African history. Success relies on solving a short list of pressing problems, each of which look like a challenge fit for gods not men.

First, Captain Sanogo and his felow putchistas in Bamako must be thrown out (and in jail preferrably) and control of the country handed back to an interim government with some kind of legitimacy.  The army must then be put under the firm control of that government.

Then the north must be stabilized and secured.  As I’ve already said, this cannot be done by the Malian army and ECOWAS forces.  Other partners will need to be involved.

Then a long lasting relationship between the remote desert regions in the north and Bamako must be defined and negotiated.  Federalism?  Autonomy?  Devolution?  The status quo ante?   In order to define and negotiate this relationship, a legitimate and representative forum must be created in the north, in which all the people’s of the north have both a stake and trust.  Such an assembly cannot be dominated by one ethnicity, especially not the Touareg. Anybody who knows the history of northern Mali will know that this challenge in itself is truly gargantuan.

Once the future form of the Malian nation is agreed upon, elections must be help to bring the political process back onto legitimate foundations.  Meanwhile war criminals on all sides must be identified, arrested and tried.  A process of truth and reconciliation must be implemented.

Then the most destructive of the smuggling rackets, the ones that have helped to fund insurgency and destabilize the entire southern Sahara – arms, people, cigarettes, hashish, cocaine and stolen cars – will need to be dealt with.  This will involve weeding out all the corrupt politicians, officials and military / security personal in Mali, Algeria and other countries, who have benefited from this system for decades, and continue to do so.  In short, it will involve recalibrating the entire Saharan economy away from lucrative but illegal trades and back to more or less benign but legal ones – tourism, mineral wealth, and the important and exporting of legal goods.  This will take years and a huge amount of investment.

And meanwhile the social, political and economic fabric of northern Mali must be repaired and rebuilt.  Touareg, Arab, Songhoi, Fulani and others must learn to live together again.  Smashed and looted hospitals, banks, schools and shops must be put back together again.  Nomadic herds must be restocked. Society must be nurtured back to health and prosperity.  Once again this will take enormous  amounts of time and money.

So before François Hollande and the  Malian President Dioncounda Traore contemplate staging a Bush-on-the-deck-of-the-USS-Abraham-Lincoln-mission-accomplished “We beat ’em boys” moment, I’d like to see them give a hint of how they propose to tackle all these challenges.  Most intelligent observers agree that it’s far too early to hold Presidential elections next June.  The Malian people need to decide precisely what the future shape of their country might be before they immerse themselves in the divisive games of African democracy and vote for the people who will try to make that future work.  Mali’s utterly discredited political class, its more than 150 continually bickering political parties and its head-in-the-sand insistence that if only everything could go back to the way it was in December 2011, then all would be fine, prove that a lasting solution to the northern question is as far away as it has ever been.

All in all, I’m getting a horrible feeling that the often painful history of western intervention in the complex affairs of Africa, southern Asia and the Middle East is about to repeat itself.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

First published by Aljazeera English Online – January 2013.

The post Northern Mali – Options, what options??!! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Touareg boy watching Camel Race, Tin Essako, Jan 2001

What do the Touareg want? Well, find me a person called ‘the Touareg’ and maybe he or she will tell us. You might as well find ‘the English’ or ‘the Japanese’ and ask them what they want while you’re at it.

A nation or people rarely if ever think as one. In the case of the Touareg, difference and disharmony is exacerbated by their vast desert habitat and dispersed nomadic lifestyle, both of which tend to foster an allegiance to blood and tribe that is stronger than their attachment to nation or ideology and militate against collective thought or action.

It can be argued that the very notion of a people called ‘The Touareg’ is an invention of 19^th century explorers and anthropologists, who adopted this supra-tribal and alien, i.e. Arab, collective noun to group together the Amazigh or Berber speaking nomadic tribes of the southern Sahara. Before ‘Touareg’ there were only different clans loosely affiliated by their language and cultural habits; Taitoq, Kel Ghela, Kel Ajjer, Kel Gress, Kel Fadey, Kel Ferwan, Ifoghas, Taghat Mellet, Iwellemeden, Chamanamas, Kel Antessar, Daoussahak…the list is long.

And all these clans were further sub-divided into sub-clans and sub-sub-clans. Within one of the six large confederations – the Kel Ahaggar, Kel Ajjer, Kel Aïr, Kel Adagh, Iwellemeden and Kel Taddemakkat – clans and sub-clans were organized into a complex hierarchy of nobles, vassals, warriors, artisans, marabout and slaves. This intricate social structure, which is well nigh-impossible for an outsider to grasp instinctively, underpins modern Touareg politics, despite the considerable erosion of the old clan system in the past century or so.

This historical backdrop, coupled with the fact that the Touareg share their living space with other ethnicities like the Arabs, Fulani and Songhoi, all of whom have their own layered clan structure, makes the Sahara one of the most complex places on earth for an outsider to understand.

Today, the Touareg are a made up of individuals with residual tribal allegiances, different levels of wealth and social position, different attitudes to religion, life and the world beyond their horizon.

Amongst the Touareg of northern Mali, you will find every shade of opinion from diehard nationalist through moderate Islamist, convinced Salafist and heartfelt loyalist – loyalist to the Republic of Mali that is. Some of the secular cadres and footsoldiers of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) still cling to their nationalist dream of complete independence from Mali. Others realize that forces beyond their control won’t them to realize this ultimate goal, and are pragmatically realigning the aims and objectives with a autonomy within the current borders of Mali, or some kind of federal solution.

The leaders of what remains of the hardline Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine trust that Allah and his unbending law will put their world to rights, whilst maintaining links with out-an-out mafia-terrorist organisations such as Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) or the West African Movement for Oneness and Jihad (MUJAO). The ‘moderate’ Islamic Movement of Azawad (MIA), either for ideological or opportunistic reasons, most likely both, has severed all ties with Ansar ud-Dine, and is pursuing a more conciliatory line which nonetheless shares most of the MNLA’s autonomous ambitions. Loyalists like the Touareg militia leader Alhaji Ag Gamou, who has re-entered the fray in northern Mali after languishing for ten months in exile in Niger, keep faith with the Republic of Mali and its promise of advancement for Touareg social groups that were once firmly at the bottom of the tribal pile.

Disharmony and enmity between different Touareg groups and individuals has always existed. At independence in 1960, Mali, Algeria and Niger effectively co-opted the French strategy of divide and rule to deal with their Touareg populations, favoring and advancing ‘friendly’ tribal chiefs whilst curtailing the power of hostile ones. When seething tensions in the north east of Mali burst into open rebellion in 1963, the two sons of the amenokal or chief of the noble Ifoghas clan who ruled in northeastern Mali, were on opposite sides of the argument. Intallah Ag Attaher favoured making peace with the Malians and finding an accommodation within the new socialist republic, whilst his brother Zeyd Ag Attaher sided with the rebels and paid for it by spending over a decade in one of the remotest prisons on earth, up near the salt mines of Taodenni in the far north of Mali.

Perhaps, at this stage, it’s worth giving a brief answer to the most essential of questions: why did the Touareg of northeastern Mali rebel in the first place? Nina Wallet Intallou, ex-Malian politician and member of the MNLA’s executive council, proffers the simplest of answers; because the new nation was a mistake. What she means is that the new borders of Mali divided the Touareg of north eastern Mali from the Arab and Berber dominated desert lands further north, with which they had deep economic, cultural and historical ties, and lumped them together with the sedentary black people of the south, with whom they had less in common.

Many Touareg could not see why the Bambara, Soninké and Malinké people of the south should impose their language, culture and socialist ideas on them, especially as these ‘blacks’ had never actually vanquished the Touareg in battle, which, although painful, might at least have given their new overlords some kind of legitimacy. And, yes, racism was part of mix as well. Some northern Touareg and Arab leaders argued that they came from noble Cherifian lineages that went right back to the Prophet Mohammed and, as such, found the idea of being subservient to less ‘favoured’ southern blacks completely unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the new rulers of Mali, hundreds of kilometres down south in the capital Bamako, thought of the Touareg as belligerent, racist, feudal, arrogant and lazy. They couldn’t understand why these recalcitrant nomads refused to salute the new Malian flag and accept the government’s bright new socialist ideas, especially their modern ‘scientific’ collectivised farming methods or the secular school curriculum, all of which, the new leaders hoped, would drag the Touareg kicking and screaming from their outmoded, ‘medieval’ way of life and into the 20^th century.

It was, in short, a dire mismatch. The first rebellion of 1963 and its brutal suppression by a paranoid and inexperienced Malian army ensured that relations between the central government and their far-flung nomads in the north got off to the worst possible start. The bitterness generated by the conflict was deepened by the terrible droughts of 1972-3, during which up to 80% of the northern animal herds died and thousands of Touareg families were forced to flee the country in search of food and work. The corrupt misappropriation of aid by government officials during the crisis only made things worse.

From about 1985 right through to the signing of the National Pact in 1992, which signaled the official end of the great rebellion of 1990-1, the Touareg rebel movement was perhaps more unified under the leadership of the then firmly secular and nationalist Iyad Ag Ghali than it has ever been, before or since. But after the Pact was signed, the movement split along tribal lines into a chaotic alphabet soup of different militias, some of which ended up actually fighting each other in open combat. At the roots of this split was a jealousy and fear of the ruling Ifoghas tribe, to which Iyad Ag Ghali belonged. Other competing tribes like the Idnan and Taghat Mellet formed their own rival rebel group, in which Imghad or ‘vassal’ groups, think of them as the Touareg working classes (a gross over simplification, but I fear more complexity at this stage will simply loose you dear reader), slowly gained prominence and eventually ended up fighting a bitter internecine war with the Ifoghas.

As the 1990s progressed, the new democratically elected Malian government of President Amadou Toumani Touré, an ex-soldier who many Touareg accused of perpetrating atrocities against civilians during the rebellion, did little to honour the promises made in the National Pact and continued the policy of divide and rule in the north. Rebellion broke out again in 2006 and then again in January 2012. In fact, many Touareg argue that the north has been in one constant state of rebellion, with periods of greater or lesser open armed conflict, since 1963.

Nonetheless, the status of the Touareg within the Malian republic has undoubtedly changed over the years, whatever the ultra-nationalist Touareg might say. When Mali threw out the military dictatorship of Moussa Traore and brought in multi-party democracy in 1992, which heralded a period of great hope and social dynamism in the country, the total isolation that the Touareg of the far north east had known since independence was broken. Touareg leaders were given representation in national politics, and in 2002, for the first time ever, a Touareg was nominated prime minister. Even though many of the funds allocated to developing the north were embezzled, either by corrupt local leaders or central government officials, some of the money did get through and some schools, wells and clinics were built, although far too few in the eyes of those who continued to clamour for development and independence.

Touareg clans who had been subservient to the warrior-nobility in colonial times, such as the vassal Imghad or Bellah (‘slaves’) favoured the weakening of the old social hierarchies that being citizens of the Republic of Mali inevitably entailed. It gave them the chance to climb up the social ladder and achieve both wealth and status, a redrawing of social boundaries that often angered old clan bigwigs.  The Malian government also favoured a few talented Imghad men when it came to filling important vacancies in local administration or the army, much to the envy and fury of some belonging to ‘nobler’ tribes.

Furthermore, many younger Touareg, born after the years of drought and deprivation in the 1970s and 1980s were less driven by the notion that a future within Mali was impossible. They had, de facto, been Malian all their lives. Many had traveled to the south and learned at least a few words of Bambara. They listened to southern music and watched TV programmes made in Bamako. Whilst they still felt separate in many ways, that sense of alienation was weaker than it had been in their parents’ day.

But the bitterness and frustration remained and so did the marginalization. Touareg soldiers like Hassan Ag Fagaga, leader of the 2006 uprising, seethed at being denied promotion in the Malian army. Touaregs saw injustice in the fact that there was hardly any Tamashek music on national TV and absolutely no Tamashek language programmes. They bemoaned the lack of proper schools, clinics and roads in the north east. Furthermore, bitter old memories continued to die hard. Most of the Touareg rebel leaders in northern Mali are the “sons of ‘63”, in other words, men whose parents suffered great injustices in the uprising of 1963. Ghali Ag Babakar, the father of Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali, was killed in that uprising, as was the father of Mohammed Ag Najm, the military leader of the MNLA. Their hurt is still visceral and deep, as is their mistrust of the government in Bamako.

Islamism, however, is an entirely new element in this story. Until the mid 1990s, no Touareg leader had ever fought a rebellion in order to impose his brand of Islam on others by force. It was around 1995 that proselytising preachers from the Tablighi Jama’at, a peaceful Pakistani Muslim missionary organisation, started spreading their daw’ah or ‘summons’ throughout Mali. Iyad Ag Ghali, fascinated by their message, invited them up to Kidal in the northeast. He was disillusioned by the fractiousness of Touareg tribal politics and had more or less come to the conclusion that an independent Touareg state in northern Mali would never work. Moreover, although he doesn’t belong to the sub-clan of the Ifoghas from which the clan chief is chosen, he hoped that by associating himself with this new Islamism he would reinforce his prospects of becoming the first non-hereditary leader of the Ifoghas Touareg. No one doubted his supreme talents as a military and political leader, but Ag Ghaly lacked legitimacy as a religious figure. He figured that an association with the ‘alien’ Salafi doctrines of the Tablighi Jama’at and their logical ‘modern’ view of Islam might provide him with that legitimacy and allow him to contest the authority of Intallah Ag Attaher, the current aging leader of the Ifoghas clan.

Other figures in the Ifoghas nobility were also seduced by the ‘purist’ Salafi teachings of the Tablighi preachers, including Alghabass Ag Intalla, the current leader of the MIA, and the notorious war lord Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, who was killed in a ‘car crash’ in the summer of 2011. [NB Getting ‘killed in a car crash’ is often a desert euphemism for being assassinated in some way]. But in the end it only was Iyad Ag Ghali and a very close coterie of fellow Ifoghas who immersed themselves entirely in this new religious philosophy. Some, including Iyad, went so far as to further their studies at a Tablighi centre near the city of Lahore in Pakistan and at mosques in Bamako and Paris. He also became very strict and puritanical in his outlook and personal habits.

After Islamist terror groups from Algeria started to operate in northern Mali from about 2001 onwards, they soon made common cause with Iyad and a small but growing group of Touareg Salafists. Moreover, the GSPC, precursor of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), began to earn large sums from kidnapping, smuggling and money-laundering. Their presence and nefarious activities skewed the economy of northeastern Mali, such as it was, and realigned it around kidnapping, and the smuggling of drugs, arms, cigarettes, stolen cars. Tourism died a swift death, and, thanks more to desperation than religious fervour, some young Touareg accepted employment with the Islamists as drivers, informers, foot soldiers and runners.

In order to undermine the continuing Touareg insurgency, the governments of Mali and Algeria at best tolerated this presence and, at worst, actually encouraged it in clandestine ways. Confusing the cause of Touareg self-determination with that of Islamic militancy bought Mali kudos in the international community and enrolled their decades old secessionist problem into the much wider and better publicised global war on terror. France and the USA reacted to the creeping presence of Al Qaida-affiliates in northern Mali by boosting military aid, money that often disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians and generals. Eventually, the Touareg nationalist cause became synonymous with Islamism, Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden and the global war on terror. The effect was a very neat emasculation of Touareg dreams and a deep tarnishing of the Touareg image in the eyes of the rest of the world.

With weapons stolen from Colonel Khadafy, a man who had always dampened Touareg ambitions whilst seeming to support their cause, the latest and most far reaching rebellion was launched a year ago. But it was hobbled from the outset by disunity. A large number of the Touareg soldiers who returned from Libya belonged to a tribe called the Idnan who had traditionally competed with the Ifoghas for dominance in the northeast. Iyad Ag Ghali demanded to become leader of the new rebellion but his advances were rejected. He also tried to impose his Salafi philosophy on the movement, but he was once again turned down. Smarting from this rejection he formed his own militia, Ansar ud-Dine, to which the best Ifoghas fighters soon swore allegiance. Blood proved thicker than water, or political philosophy for that matter, and furthermore, his coffers full of AQIM money, Iyad was able to pay and equip his army properly. His aim was not independence but Shari’ah law for all of Mali. He ‘lent’ his muscle to the MNLA but when the Malian army were defeated in May, he and his backers in AQIM hi-jacked the whole uprising and turned it into an Islamist takeover. The MNLA meanwhile, abandoned by most potential backers at home and abroad, limped along without the necessary funds.

Now, the Touareg nationalist cause has been as good as buried under a tempest of paranoia about “Al-Qaida linked terrorists” in the Sahel, a new front in the global war on terror and all the other pat phrases that the media habitually resort to in these circumstances.  Iyad Ag Ghaly and his fellow Ifoghas Salafists will obviously bear the brunt of the blame for this turn of affairs. His reputation in certain Touareg circles, once fairly glowing and venerable, is now devilish indeed.

France has piled in to stop the rot. Malians are understandably jubilant. But contrary to what the British Prime Minister David Cameron said in the House of Parliament recently, this isn’t primarily a global problem. It’s a very local one. Yes, the Algerian terrorists who run AQIM have sworn allegiance to the global Al Qaida franchise. Yes, they dream the same dreams and talk the same flowery language as jihadis in Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. But the prime reasons behind the existence of radical armed terrorist groups in northern Mali are all to do with local problems; poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, crime, regional self-determination, ethnic aspiration etc etc.  To wade in with MIGs, tanks and boots on the ground without understanding the specific local problems facing people in northern Mali is to court eventual defeat and disaster.

Perhaps, on deep reflection, it’s possible to define a few hopes and dreams that unite most Touareg. I say ‘most’, because total agreement seems virtually impossible. A visceral attachment to their earth, to the beauty, pristine wildness, simplicity and space of their desert home seems to be almost universal. So is the deep nostalgia or assouf felt by most Touareg when they’re absent from it, either by compulsion or of their own free will. This feeling alone accounts for the emotional power of 90% of all Touareg music, including that of world famous Touareg guitar groups like Tinariwen, Tamikrest and Terakaft.

Most Touareg want to see this natural beauty, this freedom of the wide open spaces preserved and with it the nomadic pastoralism that has been practised there for millennia. Then again, there are some, a few, that consider nomadism to have no future at all and who urge their fellow Touareg to accept the sedentary life as the only route to a modern and sustainable future.

Allied to nature and nomadism is the Touareg’s unique Berber culture, especially their language, which is called Tamashek and their alphabet, the oldest in the world to have been kept in continuous use, which is called Tifinagh. Keeping Tamashek alive has been a major motivation behind the Touareg rebellions of the past, spurring demands for Tamashek education and Tamashek speaking television channels

Then there are the other mainstays of Touareg culture that most Touareg treasure. Among them are music, poetry, jewellery-making, leather-working, story-telling, traditional healing, camel breeding and more. But, once again, this cultural pride isn’t felt by all Touareg. A tiny ‘lunatic’ fringe of Salafi Touareg consider their Berber culture to be backward and irrelevant in the modern world, a folksy throw-back kept alive by meddling western anthropologists. They would prefer their people to adopt Arabic, the language of the Qu’ran and of the wider Muslim community. With that they would welcome a greater Arabisation of the Touareg. They deem certain other aspects of Touareg culture, especially music and dance, to be licentious and ungodly and they object to the relative freedom and social power that Touareg women enjoy. They also revile the old ‘backward’ Sufi traditions of Islam that most Touareg adhere to.It’s important to stress however that these Salafi attitudes are shared by a small minority of Touareg. Unfortunately, that minority includes a few of the most powerful men in Touareg society, including Iyad Ag Ghali.

Lastly, almost all Touareg bemoan the dearth of social and economic development in their homeland since the end of colonialism. They would like to see more schools, more health clinics, more wells, better roads, cheaper petrol, cheaper food, better distribution of goods, less criminality, more peace and stability. When a Touareg musician sings that his desert is dying of thirst, this is what he means. Without development, the desert is going nowhere.

These then are the dreams that most Touareg share. It’s the conflicting views on how to make those dreams come true that divide them. The nationalists believe that Mali can no longer be trusted to serve the best interests of the Touareg. They argue that the Touareg and other northern ethnic groups, especially the Arabs, will forever be marginalised and discriminated against within a Malian state. Only independence can guarantee a future for the Touareg people and their culture. The MNLA have also been at pains to prove that this opinion is shared by all the major ethnic groups in the north – Touareg, Arab, Songhoi, Fulani, Bozo etc. Mostly however, it’s only Touareg and Arabs who buy into it in large numbers. The nationalists also look outwards and favour alliances with foreign powers and international institutions such as the UN and the EU, as long as they further the cause.

The hardline Islamists believe that borders only serve to divide up the great Muslim community or ‘ummah’ and will eventually lead to greater human suffering and evil. For them, a simple and strict adherence to the word of God and to his law is all the Touareg and the greater Malian nation need in order to eradicate the vices introduced from the west and re-establish a safe, clean and prosperous state of affairs in the Sahel. They distrust the west of course, and if help is needed, prefer to consider local resources or appeal to other Muslim states, especially those in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia or Qatar, for support. Iyad Ag Ghali himself is especially adamant that Muslims should help each other and not go running cap in hand to infidels. That is why he chose to make a pact with Al Qaida and accept their ‘dirty’ money in his fight to create an Islamic Republic in the north of Mali, even though he doesn’t necessarily share AQIM’s cold hatred of all things non-Muslim or their propensity to target innocent people. More moderate Islamists like Alghabass Ag Intalla have rejected this alliance with the ‘narco-terrorists’ and aligned themselves with MNLA whilst maintaining their insistence that the future autonomous region of Azawad should essentially be founded on Islamic principles, in legal, political and moral terms at least.

It must be said that what motivates Touareg Islamist leaders like Iyad Ag Ghali and what spurs young Touareg men to join his cause isn’t necessarily the same. For the latter, the promise of safety within a large, powerful and well-armed group coupled with the prospect of good equipment and regular salary are major attractions. Furthermore, for a young man who has known only poverty, unemployment and hopelessness is recent years, a job and concomitant status with Ansar ud-Dine can seem bright and attractive.  The fact that Ansar ud-Dine has seem its ranks heavily depleted almost overnight following the French intervention is proof of the opportunistic motives of many of its former footsoldiers.

Some have even claimed, probably too charitably, that Iyad Ag Ghali created Ansar ud-Dine in order to given young Touareg a chance to express what he believed to be their natural Islamic identity whilst avoiding the compromise of joining the Arab dominated Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.  In other words Ansar ud-Dine offered young Touareg the opportunity to be both genuine Islamists whilst preserving their essential Targuité or Touaregness.

Lastly, there are the loyalists who prefer to see Mali remain intact. They believe that a Touareg dominated state in the north is an impossibility. The Touareg are simply too internally divided, they say, too inexperienced in terms of administration and statesmanship and too dominated by self-serving clan elites to make an independent state viable. They’ll probably admit that Mali is far from perfect, but better to build a future within its democratic and republican confines than accept the possibility of an autocratic ruler in the north, who needs must will inevitably resort to repression and violence in order to keep all the disparate tribal and ethnic tensions in an independent Azawad at bay.

Moreover, what would an independent Azawad actually live on. Gold? Oil? Phosphates? Livestock? Tourism? The economic life of the Sahara is simply too fragile, and too dependent on more urban societies to the south and north to exist independently. Lastly and most importantly, Azawad is an impossibility simply because Algeria would never allow it.

This loyalism is common not only among the Imghad clans of the far north east, but among other Touareg tribes who have had a less tortured relationship with Bamako in the past than that of the Ifoghas. These include the giant Iwellemeden confederation of the Menaka area, the Kel Antessar of Timbuktu and Goundam and the Chamanamas of the Gao region.  But then again, within all those groups, the full range of opinions can still be found.

So what do the Touareg want?  Impossible to say in one snappy soundbite. Except perhaps, a good drenching of rain to soak the parched earth every summer.  But that, only the Almighty can provide.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

First published in Al Jazeera English Online eMagazine.  Download it from iTunes!

The post What do the Touareg want? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Alghabass Ag Intalla, leader of the MIA

I conducted this interview with Alghabass Ag Intallah over the phone late last Monday night, as he was preparing to bed down in a desert camp somewhere near Kidal. He sounded tired but quite relaxed. He gave his answers in a good though heavily accented French, which he spoke quietly without any great emphasis. He had contacted me the day before through a Touareg friend, who said that Alghabass wanted to give an interview to explain the platform of his new political movement. As he is undoubtedly one of the most important players in the drama that is current unfolding in the far north east of Mali, which involves various factions of the Touareg community, the French army, Chadian soldiers, Mali and the wider international community, who are waiting at a distance with baited breath to see what happens, an opportunity to interview him was one that I couldn’t possibly refuse.

First a bit of background: Alghabass Ag Intalla is the leader of the new and supposedly moderate Touareg Islamist movement, the Islamic Movement of Azawad (MIA in French). He’s the son of the hereditary chief of the Ifoghas, the dominant ‘noble’ Touareg tribe in the far north east of Mali. The Ifoghas have ruled the vast Adagh region, whose capital is Kidal,  since the arrival of the French in the early 1900s. They have also taken a leading role in all the Touareg rebellions since 1962.  In late 2011, Alghabass was nominated heir apparent to the position of amenokal or chief of the Ifoghas. When the Touareg rebellion broke out in January 2012, his father Intalla Ag Attaher took a decidedly moderate and anti-Islamist stance, disowning the belligerent and radical Salafist Touareg rebel leader Iyad Ag Ghali, who belongs to a lesser branch of the Ifoghas clan. 

Initially, Alghabass claimed allegiance to the secular Touareg nationalist movement, the MNLA. But sometime in February 2012, in slightly mysterious circumstances, Alghabass joined Ansar ud-Dine, becoming political chief under Iyad Ag Ghali.  Below he claims that he made this move because Ansar ud-Dine were more powerful and better organised. Others have speculated however that he joined Iyad hardline movement in order to keep a firm eye on the most famous Touareg rebel leader in history and make sure that Iyad didn’t lead the Ifoghas and the wider Adagh Touareg community to catastrophe. However, in a dramatic turn of events, Alghabass split from Iyad on January 24th and formed his own movement, the MIA.  The word is that his aging and infirm father prevailed on him to see reason and split away from Iyad. If you read on, you’ll see that Alghabass has a different story. With many Ansar ud-Dine soldiers joining his ranks, he is now one of the most powerful leaders in Kidal.  The future peace and prosperity of northern Mali will depend significantly on him and on what he decides in the coming weeks. 

Please don’t confuse this article with a piece of commentary or analysis. I’m simply transmitting what Alghabass told me and I don’t necessarily endorse any of his views.  I leave to you to judge whether his is right or wrong.  Here’s the interview:

Andy Morgan:  How’s it going?

Alghabass Ag Intallah:  Very well, thanks, hamdullilah.

AM:  Great, so I’ll start. Can you describe the current situation in Kidal?

AAI:  Well, in Kidal, it’s ok. Kidal is still ok. Today the MNLA have come to join us. So a lot has happened. We’ve created a new movement called MIA…Movement Islamique de l’Azawad. We’ve split completely from Iyad and other groups, who aren’t on the same path as us.

AM:  And can I ask why you decided to split from Iyad?

AAI:  Because we don’t have the same goals. The situation we’re living through is that we have our own territory, we have our cause, which we are all defending. We have a dialogue with the rest of the world. We discuss. We negotiate with the Malian state of course.

AM:  With Mali did you say?

AAI:  Yes, yes. We’re ready to talk to Mali. We were ready right from the start. That’s our strategy. And we saw that not everyone agreed with us. So we’ve declared our own autonomous group, which is separate from all the other groups.

AM:  But at the start of the rebellion in January 2012, you were still with the MNLA at that time.

AAI:  Yes, right at the start we were with the MNLA. But afterwards we joined Ansar ud-Dine. We thought that this was how we could defend religion in our society and at the same time defend our territory. And protect our entire culture, right here. I found that Ansar ud-Dine were fairly strong compared to the MNLA, in their actions against the enemy. So, we preferred to go with Ansar ud-Dine. But after that, we saw that Iyad went too far, one might say. We had it out with him the other day and we said, really, we want to talk with the rest of the world.

AM:  So at what point did relations with Iyad begin to get difficult?

AAI:  Yes, that’s it. So we created our own group. It’s over. We’ve totally split from Iyad.

AM:  Yes, but I’m asking when did relations with Iyad become a bit difficult. When did you think it was the moment to separate? What was the final straw?

AAI:  It was really the moment when he declared that he wanted to break off negotiations with the others. Because the position that we had agreed on together, was to accept the negotiations and to accept that we have our limits. To accept that we demarcate ourselves clearly from the terrorist groups. Those were our positions. Little by little, we felt we were going in a direction without a clear end in sight, so we just stopped.

AM:  Is there any relationship between Iyad and the Algerian government?

AAI:  I don’t think so. Unless it’s the same old relationship in which Algeria always wants to save us from AQMI. I don’t know if that’s what it is. But it’s not a relationship that forces him to do anything. I don’t think so.

AM:  Do you think Algeria is a friend of the Tamashek people? Or does Algeria act against the interests of the Tamashek?

AAI:  Algeria is like all the neighboring countries who have Touareg populations within their borders. They think that if the Malian Touareg take a bit of a strong position it will oblige the Touareg of Algeria, or Libya, or Niger to do the same. So that’s the problem of the neighbouring countries. That’s why Niger is so keen on the ECOWAS military intervention.

AM:  So do you think that Algeria during this rebellion, during the last year, has in fact hindered the evolution and success of the uprising of the Tamashek. Do you think they’ve been working against it?

AAI:  You know, if we talk with Algeria they’ll say that they’re our friends, they’re our brothers, they’re this and that. But in their actions, especially over the past year, they closed their borders to our families, to our old people, to our refugees who sought shelter on Algerian territory. Really it signals that they don’t care much about the Tamashek people.

AM:  I know that Touareg music, guitar music, assouf etc, is like Ambassador for Tamashek people all over the world. It spreads awareness of the culture as well as the problems of the Tamashek, to many many people. But it seems that Ansar ud-Dine want to ban this music. They don’t want it to exist. They want all music to have a very religious character etc. Was that what you wanted also?

AAI:  I think that music, if it’s done with proper standards, nobody can be against it. But it’s when it becomes a problem, a bordello, excuse the expression, no one who respects their world or their religion can accept that kind of music.

AM:  So you don’t have anything against the music of Tinariwen, for example, or bands like Tamikrest or Terakaft?

AAI:  Well, if music really doesn’t stray outside the proper standards, then it isn’t a problem at all. As you said it’s an ambassador that helps to make the Touareg people better known. It’s a mission that music has been engaged in since the first uprising, since the 1980s through to the rebellion of the 1990s. Right up until now, music has a role to play through to the present day, in the movement, in the uprising of the Touareg people.

AM:  So why did Iyad attack Konna two weeks ago, an attack that lead to the intervention of France?

AAI:  Well, I don’t know. The army in Konna and then Diabaly haven’t stopped harassing nomads who are innocent. They’ve never stopped pillaging innocent people in those various communities, Touareg communities.

AM:  So that was the reason why Iyad attacked and pushed south?

AAI:  That’s the explanation that we have but, well, I don’t know the deeper reasons behind it.

AM:  You don’t know the deeper background?

AAI:  That’s the explanation we have. We know that there were nomads who were killed, several times. It’s the soldiers who killed them. It’s even carrying on now, after the attack.

AM:  But we’re trying to understand why Iyad provoked the counter-attack, and the result is that France has come into the conflict and now what you might called the Islamic revolution, with Ansar ud-Dine, has lost a lot of ground thanks to that. So that’s what I’m trying to understand.

AAI:  We don’t really know the reasons, but according to the explications, that’s what it was. The soldiers are killing innocent civilians every day, so they’re obliged to react in some way, as they were close to that zone.

AM:  But don’t you personally regret that this attack has provoked France into coming in and the result is that Gao is in the hands of the Malian army, Timbuktu as well and probably they’ll come to you, to Kidal, very soon, no?

AAI: Well, perhaps. We don’t know. But there’s no problem. We don’t know why it has provoked the French. We can always say that France left us as colonizers and handed us over to the Bambara. And now that we’re rising up a bit against the colonisation of the Bambara they’re going to tell us to shut up, under Bambara colonisation.

AM: And are you trying to come to some kind of agreement with the French, so that they don’t come and bomb Kidal for example?

AAI: Yes, we’re trying. No problem. If there’s a possibility of doing it, then why not?

AM: To make an agreement you mean.

AAI: Yes, that’s right. With our brothers in the MNLA who arrived in Kidal today. It’s true that we’re all facing in the same direction together.

AM: And can you explain what that direction is? What’s your strategy now? What are your hopes?

AAI: We’re trying to talk to the whole world to say that we have cause that the world knows. It’s nothing to do with the extremism or terrorism which has evolved in our community. It’s a Touareg cause which everybody knows about. The Touareg people and the Arabs who are with us, nobody can say that they don’t know that cause. It’s lasted for years, from colonial times and independence right up until now.

AM: Yes, but now the French army are there, the Malian army too. They’ll probably come in your direction, slowly or very quickly, toward the Adagh and Kidal and those towns, so what will your position be in order to avoid a massacre? How are you thinking of negotiating an agreement? Because it’s urgent isn’t it?

AAI: Yes of course, it’s urgent. But we are negotiating, we are talking with the others. We’re contacting the ECOWAS and Burkinabé mediators. So perhaps its their forces who will come to meet us.

AM: And will those meetings happen in Ouagadougou or Kidal or where?

AAI: I don’t know. Wherever they want. It’s no problem.

AM: So they can come to Kidal to meet you. They’ll be welcome.

AAI: Yes, they’re welcome in Kidal.

AM: And is your vision of the future with Mali still one of total independence? Or is more a kind of autonomy, or a federal position? What’s your vision of the future of Azawad?

AAI: I think, as a start, we need to have a broad autonomy for Azawad, a large autonomy, like that of the Kurds in Iraq or another model.

AM: And are you totally ready to share power with the other ethnic groups of Azawad, like the Songhai, the Arabs…

AAI: Absolutely. We’re together with the Arabs, because they’re pillaging and attacking Arabs.

AM: And what’s your relationship with the MNLA right now? The MNLA have often said things that are opposed to Ansar ud-Dine. That’s to say, that in the past they clearly stated they weren’t with Iyad. They didn’t agree with an Islamic republic. Rather they demanded something secular etc. So how can you reconcile your outlook with the MNLA?

AAI: You know, the problem with the MNLA is that they have a lot of spokespersons. And each of them has their own vision of things. Their vision isn’t very coordinated. But now, in general, we agree with the MNLA on a lot of things. Today, we’re not Ansar ud-Dine, we’re the Islamic Movement of Azawad. So we’re not talking in the name of Ansar ud-Dine today, we’re talking under that name, the MIA.

AM: I understand but if the MNLA’s bottom line was a secular republic in which everyone can choose their own religion and practice it freely, could you accept that or would it be acceptable?

AAI: Well the MNLA has just arrived here, we’ve just met. It’s just today that we met the MNLA around a fire. We’ll be discussing these issues and inshallah we’ll understand each other. Because we’re living the same reality.

AM: Has Bilal Ag Acherif [Secretary General of the MNLA – Ed] come to lead the discussions?

AAI: They’re all there, almost. There’s Mohammed Ag Najm, there’s Hassan Fagaga, there are all those people in Kidal. Bilal is also coming in the next few days.

AM: But you don’t think that religion will separate you…that’s say, you don’t think they’ll take a secular position and you’ll insist on an Islamic Republic. You have a hope that you’ll be able to get over that difference.

AAI: We don’t think that anybody can say that they’re against Islam in their way of seeing religion, in front of that group of people. Nobody wants to say that. If someone wants to live that somewhere, then its his affair. But anybody who speaks here, on this territory, cannot say that they’re against Islam.

AM: Yes, but it’s not a question of being against Islam. Of course, you’re all Muslims. It’s just leaving people to approach Islam in their own way, according to their habits.

AAI: Well, perhaps that won’t be out of the question. It’s never been out of the question in the area that we control.

AM: Except that what we heard in Gao and Timbuktu etc, people didn’t have that freedom. Because all the people in Gao and Timbuktu were already Muslims. They were just Muslims in a way that AQMI and MUJAO didn’t like. Was that the situation?

AAI: You know, regarding Gao and Timbuktu, I don’t know much about what went on there. I saw certain things on TV quite often, and the amputations. But that’s another group. You have to judge them in another way.

AM: Why did it take so long to separate from Iyad, if you didn’t agree with him on so many things. Why did it take months and months to separate from him?

AAI: All things must end. Everybody knows that.

AM: Yes, but you were together for at least ten months. Was it the arrival of the French that made you decide not to carry on fighting with him?

AAI: No…the French…the French. Even if we had decided to wage war against France, we could have stayed with him, that’s no problem. But there are many causes that created this split. I can’t say everything right now, straightaway. But there were many.

AM: There are many things which you disagreed on?

AAI: Yes, many many things.

AM: And I also wanted to ask, there were moments when your father Intalla made certain statements against Iyad, against terrorism. He more or less gave his support, at least in the beginning, to the MNLA. So it seems to me, coming from outside, that at a certain point you opposed the will of your father. Was that true or have I misunderstood something?

AAI: Well, all of that is between him and Iyad. I never got involved in that way. And that’s one of the things that I can’t really say out loud one to one. That’s one of the conditions that they created, you see. So I’m uncomfortable talking about that on the phone.

AM: Right now, how much support is there for Iyad and Ansar ud-Dine?

AAI: I’m not sure. There are many officers and important figures who were in Ansar ud-Dine but who have come to our side now. I think about 80% of Ansar ud-Dine has come to us.

AM: So Iyad is very isolated now. We’ve read in the press that he’s tried to flee to Mauritania. Do you know anything about that?

AAI: No, I don’t know. I can’t confirm it.

AM: So can you explain the aims and objectives of the MIA.

AAI: It’s still just to revive and strengthen Touareg culture in this region, Touareg and Arab who are all here together. And almost, if it wasn’t for the question of Islam, it’s almost the same platform as that of the MNLA.

AM: And are there Arabs in MIA.

AAI: Absolutely, just as they are in the MNLA. Arabs and Touareg.

AM: Are you prepared to hold peace talks to stop the fighting?

AAI: Our first communiqué said just that. It was an appeal for peace, an appeal for negotiation, an appeal to open a dialogue.

AM: And in your opinion do people in the north, around you, are they tired of war and conflict? Does the population want peace?

AAI: Absolutely, absolutely. What we’re demanding answers the needs of the population in our zone.

AM: And are you aware of the situation of the refugees over the borders. Do you hope they come back as quickly as possible?

AAI: Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, because it’s precisely they who are our priority today. The refugees who are scattered everywhere, who aren’t very well received in the various neighbouring countries. They’re not welcome in Mauritania, they’re not welcome in Niger, they’re not welcome in Burkina, they’re not welcome in Algeria, they’re not welcome anywhere. They’re crying every night and every day to come home.

AM: And over the last ten months when all those people had to leave their home, leave their animals etc, did you often think of them and their suffering?

AAI: Absolutely, that’s our main problem, our main worry, this population who are in a bad way everywhere.

AM: It’s your priority.

AAI: Yes, that’s our priority.

AM: So now, between the MNLA, Ansar ud-Dine, MIA and I think there also people from AQMI and MUJAO who have come, they say they’re in the Tegharghar and all that. Between you all, who is the most powerful in military terms?

AAI: Well, you can’t know straightaway but I know that if we make an agreement together, ourselves and the MNLA, that will create the most powerful group.

AM: And if a condition of France and Mali is that you help to chase out the terrorists, who kidnap etc, would agree to do it? For example, to rid the territory of people who are trafficking drugs, for example, or kidnap and those kinds of activity. You’re ready to chase them out?

AAI: Well, for the narco-traffickers, we’ve already taken action against it. We’ve mounted patrols in recent times, even on the day that Konna was attacked. But as for terrorism, that has to be managed by an international body. It’s no us who can deal with it. It will create an internal war which will never end.

AM:  So it will create internal tensions that can last and last and do a lot of harm. That’s what you’re saying?

AAI:  Absolutely. We don’t even want to get involved in all that.

AM:  But in what way? Is it too dangerous for your relationships with certain Arab communities for example? Or people coming from Algeria? I’m trying to understand your problem in relation to all that.

AII:  No, it’s just that if you create an internal problem like that, it’ll never end. People who know where you sleep at night, where your animals are kept, they know where you live. It’s not good to create a conflict with those people. I think that you can manage terrorism on an international level. But you can’t oppose it on your own.

AM:  So one last thing: I’m giving you an open mic to address everyone over here in the UK and elsewhere. So there, Alghabass, you can say what you would like. Go ahead…

AII:  OK. So, hello everyone. I thank you for giving me the chance of transmitting this message. We’ve created our own Islamic Movement of Azawad, to say that we’ve completely broken away from Iyad, and finished with him. We’ve created this movement to answer the call of our friends all over the place, and of our people too, to help the cause that the MNLA is fighting for on the ground. So the appeal that we make to the world is for the world to see the suffering of the Touareg everywhere. Those who have left their families and their homes and been scattered here, there and everywhere, to Mauritania, to Algeria, to Burkina and in Niger. And where they were now they’re really not welcome, they’re suffering everywhere. We see old people, we see young children who are crying for their country. And recently it’s the French bombing which has forced people to leave their homes. Many have already been displaced, because, since ten months, there have been plenty of dangers, so that’s why they’ve been taking refugee in every direction, right up until the French bombing. So they’ve been forced to leave. Even those out in the bush have left, because they hear planes circling over their heads and they don’t know if the French will make mistakes, just as the Malian army did in Konna and before.

So thank you. That’s my message.

Interviewed by Andy Morgan (c) 2013

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Mokhtar Belmokhtar aka Laouaar aka Monsieur Marlboro aka One Eyed Jack

The following is an extract from my forthcoming book Kel Tinariwen – A Saharan Odyssey. The context is a visit I made to Tamanrasset in southern Algeria in January 2010, where I stayed with Eyadou Ag Leche, the bassist of Tinariwen. Obviously, the story of AQIM has evolved substantially since then but for present purposes I’ve decided to keep the context intact and limit this extract to the period 1990-2007.  I made no reference to subsequent events such as the Touareg uprising of January 2012, the alliance of Touareg Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali with AQIM, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 or Belmokhtar’s dramatic hostage grab at the In Amenas oil refinery in January 2013.  I will be bringing the story up to date before publication, but in the meantime, I hope this offers some useful background today’s dramatic headlines…

Out in the yard of Eyadou’s house, we talked about the Great Game that had gripped the southern Sahara. We asked all the usual questions in the eager hope that Eyadou might be able to throw some light on them. Who exactly are Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?  Why are they allowed to operate in northern eastern Mali? Why has the Adagh, the home of Tinariwen and their ancestors, become a bolt-hole for terrorists and their hostages?  Are AQIM involved in the drug trafficking trade?  Do they have links with the Touareg in the area?  Or with local Arabs?  Are they an invention of the Algerian secret services?  Are they in cahoots with the Malian government?  Is the President of Mali involved in drug trafficking? How come a Boeing 727 can land in the desert, unload up to ten tonnes of coke into a waiting convoy of 4x4s and then get torched without the local authorities intervening or even raising the alarm? Many questions spiralled in and out of each other like eddies of sand.  It was as if our vision of the whole problem ended at the tip of our noses.

Eyadou didn’t know the answers either. Not many people know the answers, and those who do aren’t the type to blithely spill the beans over a good lunch. Terrorist emirs, Malian secret service operatives, corrupt local politicians, Saharan drug barons, Algerian generals, politicians in Bamako, Touareg rebel leaders in Kidal, arms dealers from Tamanrasset and Timbuktu, Mauritanian customs chiefs, none of them are the most garrulous conversationalists and raconteurs, especially if they happen to be talking to a western journalist who’s asking too many questions.

There are facts about Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that are reassuringly hard and verifiable. The organisation exists. It’s run by Algerian Arabs. It’s made a home from home in the north east of Mali, on Tinariwen’s native earth. It earns millions and millions of euros from kidnapping westerners. No one knows exactly how much. Every now and then it chops the head off one of its victims. All in the name of Allah.

But beyond that solid core of certainties floats a penumbra of intrigue and supposition, a mist of conspiracy theorising that turns AQIM into a mystery with the power to obsess, like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster or the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas. And beneath all that speculative hot air, the people of the deserts, the Kel Tinariwen, languish in misery. Many of them live the truth, a daily gritty unglamorous truth that armchair theorists and analysts cannot know. But most live without knowing the geopolitical mechanisms behind that truth. They know their desert is dying. They know that rain is rarer than it was, that the government 1,500km away in Bamako has abandoned them, that the basics of civilization – schools, clinics, sustainable energy, a functioning economy, welfare – are absent from their lives, and that tourism has been killed by foreigners, i.e Algerian Arabs, in the name of Islam.  But why?

In the early 1990s, the small cabal of army generals who had wielded real power in Algeria since independence found themselves unpopular at home and isolated abroad. The anger and resentment of ordinary Algerians against these shady strong men and their party, the FLN, the only party in this one party state, had reached breaking point by the middle of the 1980s. Inspired by the Berber Spring of 1982, feelings exploded into a inflammable display of people power in October 1988. This popular uprising, an ‘Arab spring’ un-fêted and largely ignored by the rest of the world, lead directly to Algeria’s first free multi-party democratic elections in 1991. The first round of the ballot, held in late December 1991, gave an unassailable lead to an Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamic du Salud or FIS in French). But the generals decided that they couldn’t risk handing power to a party that considered democracy itself to be an unIslamic western apostasy. Islamist dogma held that power can only come from God, not the people, and that democracy itself is therefore ungodly.   The general’s dogma held that power was theirs, by right and privilege. The two dogmas were incompatible and so the generals cancelled the second round of voting, which was due to be held in late January 1992.

This spectacular abortion of the democratic process soiled the image of the Algerian leadership in the eyes of western democracies such as France and the USA. Back home, its effect was catastrophic. Fury cooked the nation’s heart. Some Algerians came to the conclusion that the generals, the ruling FLN and their entire rotten system of power had to be annihilated by any means necessary. Anyone with a stake in that system would have to be punished for robbing the nation of its dignity and its freedom. The generals tried to appease the popular ire by importing a new leader in the shape of Mohammed Boudiaf, a hero of the struggle for independence who had been exiled to Morocco for opposing President Ben Bella in the early 1960s. They installed him as temporary President in January 1991 but the move turned out to offer little more than a flicker of light in a storm of emotion that refused to abate. Boudiaf was assassinated six months later by a sub-lieutenant who belonged to an elite security unit affiliated to the Algerian secret services.

Gradually, throughout 1991, the hope that the Algerian people had placed in democracy mutated into gross civil disobedience, bloodshed and guerrilla war. The more radical elements in the FIS took to the hills and formed a number of different Islamist militias who vowed to continue their struggle for an Islamic state by violent means. Most of these home grown jihadists were clear that their enemies were the state, the army and the police. They considered the targeting of civilians to be haram, a sin. Hearts soon hardened however, and vengeance grew colder, a process that accelerated with the return of Algerian men who had fought with the mujahedeen against the Russian army in Afghanistan during the 1980s and others who went there to do a stint in the new Islamist training camps in the 1990s. Collectively, these ‘pros’ were known as Les Afghans and they were responsible for introducing ever more lethal guerrilla tactics as the decade went on.

The Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée or GIA) was formed by one of these Afghans, a man called Mansour Meliani, in the summer of 1992 and it soon became the most feared and powerful terror organisation in the country. It vowed death to all heretics and unbelievers, who, by their definition, meant not only the government, the army and the police but also journalists, writers, artists, musicians, academics, commentators, intellectuals, opposition politicians and countless entirely innocent civilians. In their polarised vision of the world, almost the entire Algerian population was guilty of complacency and ‘co-operation’ with the government, and thus were legitimate targets for their bullets and bombs. Eminent cultural figures like the rai singer Cheb Hasni and the writer Tahar Djaout were killed by GIA mujahedeen.

The FIS soon tried to alienate themselves from the GIA by forming their own Islamic Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut – AIS) in order to conduct jihad in what they considered to be the ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ way. The GIA then became more bent on fighting the FIS, the AIS, and the old Islamist militia, the Armed Islamic Movement (Movement Islamique Armée – MIA), than the Algerian army or police. The political intrigue and blood-letting within the jihadi movement became murderous and complex. By the end of 1994, the GIA was under the command of the bloodthirsty Djamel Zitouni, whose ambition was to refocus some of the GIA’s brutal power directly on France, Algeria’s hated ex-colonial overlord. He masterminded the highjacking of Air France Flight 8689 in Algiers on Christmas Day 1994, intending to fly it into the Eiffel Tower. He also sent mujahedeen to plant bombs on the Paris Metro, killing many innocent civilians. But the suffering of foreigners was nothing compared to that of Algerians themselves.

After Zitouni was killed by a splinter group in 1996, the GIA was taken over by Antar Zouabri, a man with an even greater thirst for innocent blood. He espoused the notion that the entire Algeria population were guilty of heretical behaviour, by their docility, their moral depravity and their aspiration to democracy. Religious guidance was sought from the Jordanian preacher and jurist Abou Qatada, then based in London, who issued a legal judgement or fatwa in 1995 which claimed that the killing of innocent women and children was justified if they had converted from Islam or were ‘apostates’.  Abou Qatada and the GIA espoused the extreme Kharijite doctrine of takfir, whereby entire groups or populations of Muslims are declared to be unbelievers, sinners and apostates and therefore condemnable to death under Shari’a law. This was the judgement which lead to the killing of over 100,000 innocent Algerians. Even though, by 1997, the GIA had begun to fall apart under the weight of its own internal cat-fighting and frequent purges, the carnage it perpetrated during Algeria’s dirty war of the 1990s has been well documented and lamented. By the middle of the decade, not only the level of violence, but its sheer inventiveness and depravity had plumbed unimaginable depths.

GIA recruitment policies were famously lax, and the organisation was soon burdened not only with large number of petty criminals turned opportunistic jihadists, but also by undercover government agents. The theory soon began to emerge that early in their campaign of terror, armed Islamic groups, especially the GIA, had been infiltrated the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), aka La Sécurité Militaire (SM), aka the Algerian secret services. The general whisper was that shadowy forces in the government were in fact responsible for instigating some of the inhuman acts outwardly committed in the name of jihad. The stench of conspiracy was reinforced by the testimony of former DRS agents who ‘turned’ and sought asylum abroad, where they revealed some of dark machinery of power that operated within Algeria. The finger was often pointed at the head of the Algerian secret services, General Mohammed Mediène, aka ‘Tewfik’, one of the most secretive figures in the Algerian military high-command, and, together with General Smain Lamari, the real power in Algeria.

Whether or not their struggle was partly puppeteered from above, by 1997 many GIA foot soldiers, and some cadres too, were tired and dismayed with the brutality that their leaders, especially Antar Zouabri, seemed happy to continue inflicting on a bruised and battered Algeria. One of these GIA leaders, a former army paratrooper and commander of the GIA’s eastern sector, Hassan Hattab aka Abou Hamza, broke away with other dissidents and announced the formation of a new organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafist pour le Predication et le Combat – GSPC), in March 1999. Hattab defined the group’s enemy strictly and narrowly as the army and the state. Killing innocent civilians was forbidden. This new direction attracted thousands of defectors from both the GIA and the AIS, and GSPC numbers soon swelled to over 3,000 fighters. Osama Bid Laden was alleged to have given the project his blessing. GIA tactics had proved too extreme even for the don of global jihad.

The horror in Algeria had become overwhelming. The generals and the FLN government confessed to have realised that military victory against the insurgents was an impossibility and a more conciliatory approach was required. Between 1995 and 1998, President Lamine Zeroual issued numerous decrees of clemency and pardon which persuaded over 4000 Islamist fighters to lay down their arms. In April 1999, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a 62 year-old FLN cadre who had the backing of the army, was elected President on a platform of national reconciliation. A law known as the Concorde Civile was passed in September 1999, offering a general amnesty that persuaded many more GIA grunts to come in from the cold. Further pardons were granted in 2005 by The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation which was approved by the people in a referendum. The nation was sick of violence and a large proportion of the Islamist movement began to turn away from Semtex and the Kalash’ towards the ballot box and other forms of non-violent opposition.

Only the GIA and GSPC spurned all peaceful overtures and vowed to keep on fighting until their dream of an Islamic caliphate in Algeria became a reality. But by the turn of the millennium, a combination of battle fatigue, conciliatory government policies and successful army and police operations against Islamist militias was slowly re-establishing law and order in the north of Algeria. The GSPC decided to seek new battlefields in areas where the government’s grip was still limp. They also wanted to implement a new ‘internationalist’ agenda, and bring their movement in line with the objectives of the global jihad. Representatives of the GSPC had travelled to Pakistan in 1998 to attend a meeting organised by Osama Bin Laden in an attempt to unite disparate groups of mujahedeen around the world into one global Islamist front. The predominant doctrines that united these groups were Salafism and Wahabbism.

The Salafists preach a return to the pure and unsullied moral principles of the as-Saaleh as-Salaf, the ‘righteous originators’, those first Muslims whose life and moral rectitude is admired and venerated by modern adepts. It’s a kind of religious nostalgia that looks back to what it imagines was a complete, unified and morally clean doctrine for living that held sway in the years immediately following the death of the Prophet but had since been corrupted and tarnished. Some claim that Salafism is actually a rather modern concept cobbled together by scholars in the Asian subcontinent at the end of the 19th century to free young Muslim minds from the chains of colonialism and bind them to a strict interpretation and application of the Qu’ran and hadith, or body of Muslim law. Since then, ‘Salafis’ has become something of a catch-all adjective used to describe any Muslim who vows to impose Sharia law and an unadulaterated Islamic way of life on an unwilling society by peaceful, or, if necessary, violent means.

An early proselytiser for a return the pure life of the as-Salaf was Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Arabian preacher who wrote the highly influential Kitab at-Tawhid or ‘Book of Oneness’. His ideas became entrenched in the Arabian peninsula and were adopted by the House of Saud in the early 20th century. Despite their love of material excess and their warm relationship with the USA, the Saudi royal family and princes from Qatar and other Arabian principalities have been among the chief funders of Salafism and Wahabbism throughout the world. Their money has helped to build mosques and madrassas in North and West Africa and fund the activities of Salafists. The GSPC were Salafists through and through, and they began to believe that they would be better off signing up to a worldwide movement of similarly minded mujahedeen, rather than continuing to fight their corner in Algeria alone.

New leaders emerged to challenge Hattab’s tenure as the overall emir or leader of the GSPC, especially after Hattab had tried to distance the movement from Al Qaida and its brazen violence against civilians following the 11th September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Furthermore, many men in the movement considered Hattab to be a weak leader, lacking in total commitment and unable to produce sufficiently horrifying and headline spawning results. Most prominent among these new dissenters were three men; Abdelmalek Droukdel aka Abu Mousad Abdel Wadoud, a graduate in mathematics and one of the GSPC’s most talented bomb makers, Nabil Sahraoui aka Mustapha Abou Ibrahim, one of the most admired and revered militia leaders in the GSPC, and Amari Saïfi aka Abou Haidara aka Abderrazak El Para.

The debate raged around the question whether the GSPC should be fighting a battle for the soul of Algeria or the soul of the entire world. In other words, were the Algerian generals the ultimate target, or was it America, Israel and ikufar or unbelievers and apostates throughout the globe. Droukdel, Sahraoui and Saïfi wanted the organisation to be part of a global jihad, modelled on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Hattab however still thought of the FLN and the Algerian state as the main enemy. In the end, the internationalists won the argument. Hassan Hattab was forced to resign and Nabil Sahraoui, “a towering minaret and courageous hero” according to the GSPC website, became the new emir in August 2003. In May 2004 he released a communiqué entitled “The War on Foreigners”, in which he vowed vengeance against Zionists, crusaders and the apostate regimes of the Arabo-islamic world. He also announced a plan to start attacking foreigners on Algerian soil. Less than a month later, he died in a hail of bullets near Akfadou in the Kabyle mountains. The copiously bearded Abdelmalek Droukdel took his place as the new emir.

A key matchmaker in the looming nuptials between the GSPC and Al Qaida was a Yemenite called Abdel Wahid Ahmed Alouane, aka Abou Mohammed al Yemeni, who visited the GSPC on many occasions in the early years of the new millennium as Bin Laden’s special envoy in North Africa. Following the US invasion in 2003, Bin Laden knew that Afghanistan’s days as the ideal training ground for the global mujahedeen were numbered. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman az-Zawahiri, were looking for another part of world in which to base their operations. The Sahara seemed to offer a number of advantages as a theatre for jihad; weak government control, remote hiding places, porous borders, corrupt officials already tainted by their involvement in smuggling, a poor and therefore pliable population and a thousand unwatched desert tracks on which to flee beyond the reach of the security forces. It was also the ideal pad from which to further the Al Qaida project in Africa, a continent which Bin Laden deemed most propitious for his hardline vision of the future.

After a few particularly bloody seasons, the GSPC leadership began to accept that they weren’t exactly winning hearts and minds in Algeria’s north. Their tactics were simply too brutal, and too damaging to the human and material capital of the country. The support of the populace, so essential to any guerrilla insurgency, was increasingly sporadic and begrudging. Moving south and targeting foreigners seemed to be a wise diversionary tactic, which would hopefully ease the bruised sensibilities of ordinary Algerians in the north and tap in their deep-seated resentment against France in particular and whites in general, who had been bogeymen in the general conscious ever since the debasement of the colonial era and the brutality of the war of independence.

The two GSPC emirs in charge of Algeria’s southern and eastern sectors at the turn of the millennium, Abderrazak El Para and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had already been active in the Sahara and Sahel for a few years. By ‘active’ it should be understood that the pair indulged in a range of activities, not all of which were inspired by the divine call to jihad. A large part of their time was spent smuggling. Belmokhtar was an archetypal Saharan smuggler and had been since his early teens.

Terrorism and insurgency, which involves feeding and arming many hundreds of full-time fighters, is an expensive business that needs a constant supply of black cash. During the 1990s it was relatively easy to raise the necessary funds by appealing to Islamist pockets worldwide. In the places like Saudi Arab and Qatar, those pockets were extremely deep. Apart from large donations from Middle Eastern princes, emirs and business, contributions were sought from the faithful in mosques, madrassas, universities, clubs and societies from Paris to Peshawar and Detroit to Djakarta. A complex network of Islamic charities, associations and banks was set up to channel these funds from the donors to the mujahedeen in far-flung parts of the world. However, after 9/11, the ease with which this money could fly backwards and forwards across the globe was severely diminished by new laws prohibiting the funding of terror.  Other means of generating cash needed to be found.

The GSPC involved themselves in the more lucrative end of the trans-Saharan smuggling game, namely cigarettes, second hand cars, illicit petrol, weapons, illegal migrants and drugs. Arms purchased in Northern Mali, Libya, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and countries further afield, were used to fight jihad or secessionist rebellions in Algeria and Mali. There was no dearth of stock. Small weaponry, from hand guns to automatic rifles and RPGs, often of Russian and East European manufacture, had flooded into West Africa during many forgotten wars of the previous decade. Tobacco, a favourite cash cow of armed insurgencies around the world, was a good earner. Marlboro cigarettes or other pirated brands could be snapped up cheap in the ports of West Africa, especially Lomé and Cotonou, and then smuggled north through the desert to Algeria’s mediterranean coast and on into Europe. The stringent duties payable in many north African and European countries on legally imported cigarettes made the black-market trade very profitable.

Unemployment, corruption and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa were also the root causes for an ever more lucrative trade in people. Poor African migrants on an epic search for a better life were loaded up onto trucks on the southern perimeter of the Sahara and transported north by people traffickers before being dumped and left to their own devices in the coastal towns of Algeria, Morocco and Libya. Finally there were drugs. Hashish was purchased from growers in the Rif mountains of Morocco and carried south through Mauritania and Mali, and then west up through Niger, Egypt, the Middle East and up into Europe via Turkey and Balkans. Cocaine was also beginning to trickle into the desert, but not yet in the quantities that were later to shock the world.

Smuggling has been around in the southern Sahara for as long as trans-Saharan caravan trading has existed, in other words, since time immemorial. The transport of goods from north to south across the Sahara and vice versa is the prerogative of desert people, most notably the Arabs, or Moors, and the Touareg. Members of certain families and clans are caravan traders almost by birthright, and the desert road is in their blood. Nice distinctions between the legality and illegality of different types of cargo matter less to these traders than to the distant governments under whose authority they are supposed to operate. After all, one man’s legitimate desert caravan is another man’s train of contraband. Dates, palm oil, ostrich feathers, ivory, salt, slaves, gold, cars, Marlboro cigarettes, ghetto blasters, transistor radios, fake Rolex watches, cooking oil, pasta, powdered milk, sugar, jeans, diesel, petrol, hashish, second hand cars, illegal migrants, weapons, cocaine; whatever the cargo, it’s always just been a question of supplying demand and earning a living. Without caravanning and smuggling, the Saharan economy, such as it is, would have collapsed long ago.

In bygone colonial and pre-colonial times, trans-Saharan trading was often dominated by large Arab families and clans, especially the Chaambi from the Tidikelt, the Ahl Azzi of the Touat, the M’zabi of the Ghardaia region, the Berabiche clans who lived in the deserts north of Timbuktu and the Kounta who lived on the eastern shores of the Niger bend, north of Gao. These families would trade across the desert with each other, turning the Sahara into one unified economic, social and cultural space. Their activity created links and ties that have survived and gradually mutated into the trading or smuggling networks of today. As British anthropologist Judith Scheele’s superb work on the subject, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (African Studies) so ably explains, the Sahara works on quite different economic and spatial principles than many other parts of the world. A trader in Adrar in the Touat might have closer family and clan ties with people in Timbuktu or Gao that with his immediate neighbours. Not only trade goods, but politics, religion, tribal loyalty, power and influence are determined by those ties, making the Sahara one of the most complex regions in the world to understand. This economic and social unity of the Saharan space also explains why the borders imposed on the region at the end of the colonial era were so problematic to livelihoods and connections and so often despised by desert people.

As the 19th century drew to a close, there was a large influx of Arabs from Mauritania into the deserts north of Gao, many of whom came to fight for the Kounta in its wars against the most powerful Touareg confederation at that time; the Iwellemeden. Many of these Mauritanian Arabs settled in the area and formed a distinct sub-tribe known as the Tilemsi Arabs, who became vassals of the Kounta and paid tribute to them. The descendants of these Tilemsi Arabs have become successful businessmen, smugglers and livestock herders, whose networks stretch far north and west into Algeria and Mauritania. In recent decades, smuggling hasn’t just been the get-rich-quick solution for the ‘lower class’ Arabs of the Tilemsi and Timbuktu regions, it has also been a means of securing political, social and tribal independence from their former masters. This process has been accompanied by deep and often severe social strain and political upheaval.

Nowadays Algeria, with its soft currency and its strictly controlled or ‘closed’ import and export policy, is a paradise for smugglers. Travel through Morocco and everyone wants to sell you something. Travel through Algeria and everyone wants to buy something from you. The Algerian state imposes ludicrous restrictions on the movement of basic food stuffs and livestock across its southern borders. Only second-rate and barely edible dates seem to be allowed through without hindrance. And yet, almost everything that goes into peoples’ bellies in Kidal and Gao has been smuggled into Mali from Algeria, whether it’s pasta, sugar, powdered-milk, flour or couscous. And the flow south of other essentials, including petrol, is constant and unstoppable. In such an environment, black economies thrive and provide ample opportunities to make, and loose, fortunes.

But smuggling isn’t only about money. It provides an answer to the soulful yearnings of the desert man. It’s a way of regaining pride, of pitting your wits, your courage and your physical strength against nature and against the oppressive control of distant States. It’s a way of becoming a young man of means, fit to marry one or even more wives from ‘good’ families, an asset to family and tribe, a ‘true Arab’ who feels pride in his heart. The smuggling road leads to independence and freedom, both of the pocket and the spirit. It allows a young Arab or Touareg to feel good about himself and his world once again, after decades of drought, of degradation, of rebellion against the state, of social change and collapse. Speeding across the lunar flatness of the Tanezrouft, behind the wheel of a powerful boulboul or Toyota Landcruiser HG60, at 120 kmph, with money in the pocket, payload in the back and eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, is a dream so much more powerful than anything else the Sahara can offer a 16 year old youth. It beats sitting around in some distant desert villages, penniless, wifeless, hopeless. It’s a dream of freedom.

Neither the GSPC, nor the GIA before them, actually controlled the trans-Saharan smuggling rackets. The Saharan emirs or militia leaders often came from a smuggling background and were well versed in the ways and wiles of the trade.  But the notorious smuggling dons of the 80s and 90s, men like the drug lord Ahmed Zendjabil aka El Chelfaoui aka The Pablo Escobar of Algeria or Tamanrasset’s smuggling lynchpin Hadj Bettou, weren’t necessarily Islamists. They were simply businessmen and mafia godfathers with enormous power. Hadj Bettou is suspected by many to have instigated the successful plan to assassinate the interim President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1992. Boudiaf vowed to ‘clean up’ Algeria in general, and Tamanrasset in particular.  Big mistake.

Terrorists and traffickers the world over co-exist in the same murky underworld. In the Sahara, family, clan and tribal links often bind together the smuggler, the Islamist mujahid and the agent of the State – whether a policeman, a customs official or an army officer – in one large and geographically far flung network of self-interest and self-preservation. It’s not that the presence of the state is necessarily weak in the distant border areas of southern Algeria and northern Mali, it’s just that what state officials do operate there are often more interested in making sure that in the daily struggle for security and advancement, the interests of their family and their clan aren’t overlooked.

If drug lord or people smuggler wants to transport his cargo through an area controlled by Islamists, then a brown envelope stuffed with protection money is handed over. If some impoverished army officer at the barracks in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu needs to earn a little extra on the side by selling a few surplus semi-automatic weapons and rounds of ammunition then he can just call the man from the GSPC. If a mafia boss wants to secure a more long term advantage then he can fund an Islamist group on a regular basis, just to keep things clean and stable.  That’s how the cogs of underworld turn. Other examples of insurgency and crime sharing different sides of the same coin are plentiful: The Taliban in Afghanistan and the heroine trade, Colombia’s FARC and cocaine, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and precious gems or rare wood, the IRA or ETA and narcotics or weapons, the Kurdish PKK and narcotics…the list goes on. What’s happening in the Sahara fits a well established global pattern.

Terrorism and smuggling meet in the figure of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka Khaled Abou El Abassa, aka Laaouar, ‘the one-eyed’, who is something of a Bin Laden, Scarlet Pimpernel and Al Capone all rolled into one; a desert boy, born and bred in Ghardaia, Algeria, who was “seduced”, in his own words, by jihad and especially by the writings and recordings of the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam. In his teenage years he travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in Al Qaida camps near the city of Jalalabad and it was in Afghanistan, so he claims, that a piece of Russian shrapnel robbed him of an eye. Belmokhtar returned home in the early 1990s and became the Mr Big Stuff of southern Algeria’s smuggling rackets, forging strong links with arms, drugs and people smugglers and befriending various Touareg and Berabiche tribal leaders in the process. He even married one, or possibly several Berabiche Arab girls from Timbuktu and once declared that he would like to ‘retire’ to northern Mali when his hustling days are over. He also joined the GIA soon after its inception and then left with Hattab to become part of the GSPC in 1999.

By the turn of the millennium, Belmokhtar had risen up the ranks to become the GSPC’s emir of zone 9, the southern beat that comprised most of Algeria grand sud, the open southern deserts so enticing to the inveterate criminal smuggler. In the early naughties he collaborated with Abderrazak El Para, then the emir of zone 5, the eastern zone, on refocussing GSPC operations further south, but the pair soon fell out, jealous of each others’ power. Whereas El Para ventured into ill-advised waters by seeking to buy arms in Chad and eventually got himself caught and extradited back to Algeria, Belmokhtar, with unfailing shrewdness of judgement, has evaded capture for more than two decades. The French security services call him l’inssaisisable, the ‘uncatchable’. Whilst his current rival at the top of AQIM’s Saharan hierarchy, Abou Zeid, is reviled for his brute cruelty and appetite for chopping the heads off his kidnap victims, Sahara watchers often regard the one-eyed Belmokhtar aka Monsieur Marlboro with a grudging respect, recognising his relative restraint in the treatment of hostages and his nose for a good deal. Many are convinced he’s only in it for the money and always has been. “Belmokhtar will kidnap, rob or smuggle anything for anyone,” a silver-haired Saharanist once said to me, “so long as the price is right.”

In 2003, the GSPC katiba or ‘militia’ lead by Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para kidnapped thirty two German, Swiss, Austrian and Dutch tourists in southern Algeria. This spectacular coup launched Islamic terrorism in the southern Sahara, an area that had hitherto been spared the worst excesses of Algeria’s horror. El Para, as his nickname implies, was a one time para-commando and captain of special forces in the Algerian army who had trained with US Green Berets in Fort Bragg and elite troops in Russia. He then served as bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, minister of Defence and one of the seven senior generals, or salopards (‘arseholes’) as GSPC fighters liked call them, who rule Algeria. He deserted the Algerian army not once, but twice, joining an armed Islamic terror group each time. His last desertion dated back to 1997, when he joined the GIA and then the GSPC under the leadership of Hassan Hattab. He soon emerged as an able man in the field, and a contender for Hattab’s crown. But the incident that clinched his fame was, according to the ‘official’ account at least, the result of an accident.

In February 2003, El Para and the men in the katiba el Maout, were still basking the ‘success’ of their spectacular ambush of an Algerian army column near Batna in the Aurès mountains, which had claimed the lives of over forty paratroopers. In order to make himself and his men scarce, El Para decided to travel south and buy some weapons in Niger. The katiba was crossing the remote desert near Illizi, a small town north of Djanet in the depths of the Algerian Sahara, when it happened to chance on a group of Swiss and German tourists who were indulging in some deep desert rough riding on all-terrain motorbikes, without a guide. Or so the story goes. El Para kidnapped the tourists and proceeded to lay his hands on a further five separate groups of European adventurers who had the misfortune of being in the Algerian Sahara and within the reach of El Para’s men in those months of February and March 2003.
After the final tourist had been captured, and a large number of Land Cruisers and dirt bikes requisitioned by the terrorists, El Para found himself in charge of a total of 32 hostages; sixteen Germans, ten Austrians, four Swiss, one Dutchman and a Swede. They were held captive in two completely separate groups, several hundred kilometres apart. El Para enlisted the help of Belmokhtar to guard them. A group of 16 hostages who had been captured in March were freed only a few months later after a bizarre ‘non’ battle with the Algerian army near Djanet. The other fifteen were held in the remote Tanezrouft desert and then taken south into Northern Mali, to a secret camp somewhere near Tessalit, the birthplace of Ibrahim and Hassan from Tinariwen. By the end of August, all but one of the hostages had been freed. Michaela Spitzer, a middle-aged German women, died of heat exhaustion and other desert maladies on the long trek from Algeria to Mali, and was buried in the desert.

El Para’s haul generated about 5 million euros in ransom revenue and cemented a relationship of sorts between the GSPC, the military security establishment of Mali, certain leaders of the Touareg rebellion, Arab army officers and business men and other key hustlers in the southern Sahara. The fatal agreement of the German and Swiss governments to pay a ransom established an irresistible economic case for further kidnappings, with disastrous consequences for the region and its relationship with the outside world. From that moment, tourism, an important means of livelihood for hundreds and thousands of Touareg, began to die a slow death. The doors of the desert creaked shut, slowly, inexorably. In the meantime, the GSPC used their ill-begotten lucre to buy more sophisticated weaponry, faster cars and the hearts and minds of more young recruits.

After numerous chases across vast expanses of desert with US special forces in hot pursuit, Aberrazak El Para was captured by the Chadian rebels of the MTDJ and kept prisoner in north western Chad, hidden away in the remote Tibesti mountains, until he was eventually handed over to Libya and then extradited back to Algeria. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable judicial farce involving abortive and inconclusive trials in his native country. For many years after his return to Algeria in October 2004, he was kept in secret locations under the surveillance of the DRS, during which time he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by an Algerian court. How the law of a land can find a man guilty in absentia when that country’s own security services are holding him in their custody is beyond baffling. Only recently, in 2011, was he transferred to a more ‘regular’ prison in Serkadji. His definitive trial for numerous crimes of terrorism, which include not only the 2003 kidnappings, but also the murder of seven French monks at Tibhirine  in 1996 (subject of the famous film ‘Of Gods and Men’) and of the paratroopers in the ambush near Batna, has yet to take place.

In reaction to this increase in terrorism and illicit trans-border activity, the US government declared a new front in the Sahel under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom, their global war on terror. In 2004 the Americans set up the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) to funnel training and equipment to the armies of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to help establish specialist anti-terror and anti-crime units tasked with taking on and defeating both the Islamic terrorists and the traffickers. The PSI mutated into the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in 2005, with a wide-ranging five year programme and a budget of half a billion dollars. Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia were brought into the field of play and anti-terror and anti-crime bases began to be established with American backing all over the southern Sahara and Sahel, including several in the Kidal region of north-eastern Mali. White men with army crew cuts were seen travelling through the desert in convoys of new 4×4 vehicles, or wandering nonchalantly around Kidal’s central market. US Army transport planes landed on Kidal’s dirt air-strip.

The Americans were convinced that the Sahel was becoming a crucible for anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam. Pondering the anti-american topography of the globe, they noticed that a huge contiguous swathe of central Asia, east and west Africa was becoming ‘radicalised’, from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, into Africa via Somalia, the Sudan and across finally to Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. With that strategic and remote point of view so favoured by intelligence analysts and their political clients, this banana shaped chunk of earth was seen as a homogenous battleground, with each territory within it linked to the others by dark and hostile forces.

Tinariwen’s home region of the Adagh in north eastern Mali, right in the middle of the banana, was deemed especially significant in this struggle against terror. The Touareg from this region had long been categorised as ‘trouble-makers’ by governments and security heads, ever since the rebellion of 1963. The uprising of 2006 only confirmed this. Furthermore, a proselytising missionary organisation called the Tablighi Jama’at, who preached an uncompromising return to piety and the core tenets Islam had been active in the Adagh for many years, building mosques, organising social welfare at a grass-roots level, and charming political and tribal leaders with their vision of purity and the pursuit of religious excellence. The GSPC, who had begun to use the Adagh as a convenient rear-base, over the border and beyond the reach of the Algerian security apparatus, were also digging their claws into Adagh society, making alliances with local communities and leaders, and ’sweetening’ this desperately impoverished corner of the desert with their ill-gotten gains. The Saharanist Baz Lecocq also points out that the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, physicist Abdul Kadeer Khan, had become a fan of Mali’s northern deserts, and had bought himself a house in Timbuktu. Just over the border in Niger were the uranium mines of Arlit, from where, according to false information given to the Pentagon, Saddam Hussein had obtained the uranium for his weapons of mass destruction. There were huge as yet unexploited deposits of the mineral all over northern Niger and Mali.  This coincidence of dark and threatening circumstances was, for the Americans, a ‘no-brainer’.  And yet there were brains, and very good ones at that, who disputed the logic of American policy.

Professor Jeremy Keenan is a controversial figure in the global community of Saharanists. The bluff old English anthropologist once had an enviable reputation, rare for an anglophone academic, as a specialist on the Kel Ahaggar Touareg of southern Algeria. Despite a number of books and treatises by German, Danish, Dutch, Italian and American historians and anthropologists, the academic study of the Sahara has mainly been a francophone preserve.  Keenan’s seminal works The Touareg, People of the Ahaggar (1973), Sahara Man: Travelling with the Touareg (19??) and The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Contested Terrain (2004) are respectable mainstays of the Saharan bibliography. Then, in 2003, according to some of his fellow academics, Keenan ‘lost the plot.’  Or did he find it?

Fascinated by the 2003 hostage crisis, he became convinced that El Para was in fact, an agent of the DRS and that entire kidnapping episode had been masterminded by the black ops stooges of the Algerian secret services, with the approval of the CIA. Their aim was to concoct a high profile terrorist outrage, of sufficient magnetism to hypnotise the international media, and thereby provide a dramatic headline-grabbing premise for the USA to increase its military presence in the Sahara and Sahel. Whether by pure coincidence, or by some darker chain of cause and effect, it was indeed in the wake of El Para’s hostage grab that the USA began the implementation of various large scale military-security initiatives in the Sahel. The result is that US influence in the Sahel, and especially in Mali and Mauritania, has increased exponentially, and military ties of a seemingly deep and enduring nature have been cemented with with the regional powers.  What’s in it for the Americans?  Well, according to Keenan and the conspiracy theorists, it’s all the usual unholy grails:  Security, influence, oil and blocking the Chinese take over of Africa.

For Professor Keenan, going public with this enticing conspiracy theory represented a leap out of hard-edged factual academia and into the murky world of supposition. The change was reflected perhaps in the fact that he chose to publish his first article on the subject, entitled ‘Building Castles in the Sand: US Military Basing in Algeria’ (Review of African Political Economy, Dec 2003) under the engaging pseudonym of Mustafa Barth. Keenan then resumed his habitual identity and published numerous lengthy articles exploring the obscure whys and wherefores of his theory, which he eventually summarised in his book ‘The Dark Sahara’, published in 2009.

But Keenan wasn’t the only one to smell a desert rat. Algerian journalists like Salima Mellah and Salima Tlemçani have also written extensively about DRS involvement in terror groups, and about the many unanswered questions that still hover around the 2003 hostage crisis. Frenchmen, like the terrorism consultant Alain Chevalérias and François Gèze, the CEO of Éditions La Découverte, also support the notion of DRS collusion with the GSPC and AQIM.  In fact, a sizeable body of French and Algerian writers, journalists, analysts and obsessives continue to uphold the idea that El Para was a DRS man through and through. They see nothing surprising or outrageous in the claim. After all, cases of collusion and manipulation of Islamist groups by the Algerian secret services during the ‘dirty war’ of 1990s are legion. El Para was a ‘special ops’ man in the Algerian army before he allegedly became an Islamist. Join the dots and this was just more of the same.

For these doubters, there’s too much about the 2003 hostage crisis that doesn’t chime. According to the hostages themselves, far from being the result of happenstance, the kidnappings seem to have been prepared in advance, although clearly not that well. Soon after their capture, they were taken to secret bases in the desert, already stocked with food and provisions, along specially prepared tracks. Their captors, who didn’t seem to know the desert or its climate very well, were never short of provisions. Where did these provisions come from and who supplied them?  The hostages saw Algerian army helicopters flying near the base, almost on a daily basis, and were perplexed as to why their location hadn’t been discovered and they hadn’t been freed. El Para issued no ransom demand for months and the GSPC itself never actually claimed any official responsibility at all for the kidnappings. The GSPC had never taken western hostages before. It just wasn’t their style. Why now?

After the initial kidnappings, a bizarre silence reigned around the whole affair, both nationally and internationally, at least until mid April.  The first group of 17 hostages were freed near Amguid only three days after the German foreign minister, Joska Fischer and the head of German intelligence paid a high level visit to Algiers. The ‘light skirmish’ that took place during the Algerian army’s assault on the camp seemed, according to several hostages, to have been staged.  All the debriefings of hostages in Algeria were conducted by the DRS and not the army or police. Back in Germany the hostages underwent further interrogations, this time by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German criminal investigation police.  Several hostages were astonished to be shown photos of their captors by the BKA, photos that were recently taken, at ground level.

By mid June, the second group of 15 hostages were being held in remote mountain range north west of Tamanrasset. Although they had been in captivity since mid February, El Para had yet to issue a formal ransom demand. He asked a french speaking hostage to help him write a letter to the Swiss and German embassies in Algiers, but it contained nothing except a rather verbose outline of the GSPC’s general aims and philosophy. El Para himself was often absent from the group, leaving his fellow jihadists perplexed and ignorant of his purpose or whereabouts, feelings which became the cause of increasing frustration among the katiba’s foot soldiers.

Towards the end of June, El Para came back to the camp and lead the entire group south into northern Mali, an arduous and often waterless journey that cost the life of Michaela Sptizer. By mid july, a full five months after the kidnapping of the first hostages near Djanet, El Para was finally in contact with the German Embassy in Bamako to begin formal ransom negotiations, albeit amid much confusion and uncertainty. During the negotiations, various Malian mediators including Touareg rebel leaders like Iyad Ag Ghaly, Alhaji Ag Gamou and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, or northern Arab strong men like Colonel Ould Meydou and Major-Colonel Lamana Ould Bou, were tasked by the Malian government with leading negotiations.

The question of what alliances were then formed and what promises were then made is the subject of enduring and irresolvable debate between Sahara heads and conspiracy theorists. What’s certain is that from this moment onwards AQIM acquired a ‘home from home’ in the north east of Mali, a safe haven in which the terrorists could while away the hours and days with their hostages whilst the business of ransom negotiation was pursued. With a couple of rare if significant exceptions, AQIM have never actually kidnapped their victims on Malian soil.  They’ve only brought them back to Mali for safe-keeping. And with the equally rare exception of a major clash north of Timbuktu in July 2009, in which 28 soldiers were killed, the Malian army have never actually lead a full frontal assault on Al Qaida.

These two facts alone have lead many conspiracy theorists and almost the entire Touareg intelligentsia at home and abroad, to conclude that Al Qaida were invited on to Malian soil by the Malian government in order to the discredit the Touareg nationalist movement and mask the illegal trafficking going on in the north, from which a number of middle-ranking and senior Malian officials were drawing hefty amounts of black cash. In the atmosphere of anti-Islamist paranoia that seized the world following the 9/11 attacks, it was expedient for any government to twist the international image of a recalcitrant separatist movement and pass it off as an Islamist terror one instead. The strategy masked the true nature of the separatist struggle, confused international opinion and secured almost immediate benefits in the form of better diplomatic and security ties with the USA and Europe, more military aid, both in money and in kind. That’s what happened in Mali in the years following 2003.

The problem with the theory of collusion between AQIM and the Malian government is that no firm evidence has ever been produced to back it up. No one has actually photographed or recorded a Malian army officer or secret service agent chatting with an Al Qaida emir, or taking possession of a fat brown envelope full of narco-cash in some distant corner of the northern deserts. Of course, that’s the nature of this shadowy world. Nothing is ever written down. Dirty deals are done behind closed doors, or on an impossibly remote sand dune right in the middle of nowhere. The north of Mali has been closed to outsiders, especially journalists, for years.  AQIM money is carefully laundered through various banks and legitimate businesses in Mali, Niger, Mauritania and further afield. Or it’s used to buy huge herds that chomp happily on the pastures of the north, away from the prying eyes of the world. There are no witnesses on record because there has never been any proper investigation. And even if there had been, who would risk their skin to expose skullduggery at such high levels. Fully uncovering the matrix of villainy that has been choking Tinariwen’s homeland since the beginning of the millennium presents a journalistic challenge that would make Watergate look like an episode of Miss Marple.

At the moment, all it can ever boil down to is one enormous hunch, a devil’s choice between a damning and a marginally less damning scenario. At best, finding AQIM on their territory, the Malian government just left them there to fester, knowing full well that their presence would putrefy the social fabric of the northern deserts. They did this because they didn’t want to risk Malian lives by taking fight to the terrorists, and / or because there were Northern Arabs in the Malian army and secret services who had strong family and cultural ties to AQIM and encouraged its presence on Malian soil because it provided an effective screen behind which they could continue with their high-stakes smuggling. Furthermore, AQIM’s presence in the north east would sully the Touareg independence cause with the taint of Islamic terrorism, an especially apt consideration following the Touareg rebellion of May 23rd 2006. At worst, all of the above is true, except that instead of waking up one morning and finding them there, the Malians actually invited AQIM to come and establish their iniquitous presence on this once open and welcoming land. That Malian policy towards AQIM should have been quite so cynical might come as quite a surprise to many. Diplomats at the US Embassy in Bamako were certainly quit taken aback when, in October 2006, a key official in the Malian Ministry of Territorial Administration told them that hostilities between the GSPC and the latest in a long line of Touareg rebel movements, the ADC, worked to the government of Mali’s advantage. Following clashes between the Touareg rebels and the GSPC, the terrorists had vowed to wipe out the ADC leadership. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” stated the Malian politician. Exactly how friendly, he refused to say.

On August 18th 2003, El Para’s remaining fourteen hostages were finally handed over to the Malian authorities and driven back to Bamako via Gao. Their ordeal was over. The Americans ‘honoured’ El Para by conferring the title of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on him, one normally reserved only for the “most wanted” of jihadis, including Osama Bin Laden. A court in Karlsruhe, Germany, issued an international arrest warrant for El Para, but neither Germany nor the US made any real attempt to bring him to justice. No due and proper police investigation or judicial process was ever conducted against El Para and his men, either in Algeria or Europe. After the hostages returned home to Europe, some of them seemed to display the partial effects of Stockholm Syndrome and spoke about the strangely warm and amicable relationships they had struck up with some of their captors, referring to them not as brutal terrorists, but almost as friends, much in the same way that a desert tourist might remember his or her guide after the Saharan trip of a lifetime. It seems that one of the GSPC men even gave the hostages his personal mobile number, and that a year after their release, some of the hostages were still in touch with him.
Whatever the mission or the alliances that motivated El Para in this affair, the German government committed a grave and unpardonable error in the opinion of many when they handed over their huge ransom to El Para and his men. Kidnapping now had form and precedence in the criminal sub-culture of the region, and it was adopted as a strategy of choice by an Islamic insurgency who had never indulged in it before. It became the fast-track to cash par excellence, far more effective than cigarettes, arms, drugs and protection rackets. And what’s more, it had the immense advantage of generating huge international publicity and sowing fear in the hearts and minds of western infidels. It was win, win and double win.

The great El Para kidnap of 2003 begs questions and attracts speculation like flies to a carcass. But maybe it should be taken at face value. The hostages confirmed that their kidnappers were fanatically devout, and obsessed with all the usual jihadi obsessions:  the moral failures of western civilisation, the evil of America, the ‘Great Satan’, and its zionist plot to support Israel and rob the Arab world of its freedom and dignity, the heinous crime of fighting a new crusade against the muslim brothers in Kuwait and Iraq, so near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the crimes committed against Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Palestine. All the usual stuff. And far from serving the DRS or the CIA, perhaps El Para was merely out to replenish the GSPC coffers. Kidnapping westerners – the killer cash machine.

And yet, despite all these core and fringe benefits, it was to be another five years before AQIM kidnapped another westerner. That fact alone gives pause to wonder. In January 2004, just six months after El Para released his final hostages, the third Festival in the Desert took place amidst the talcum white dunes of Essakane, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu, the Malian home of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and many of his Arab Berabiche allies. At least five hundred westerners made their way along the appalling track that links Timbuktu and Essakane, often getting bogged down in the soft sand for hours, even days. In terms of kidnapping potential, we were a turkey shoot. Not only that, but the very presence of a horde of westerners dancing, carousing and revelling in the pure white sands of a Muslim Sahara was surely in itself an unpardonable affront to the Salafist principles of the GSPC. But no band of GSPC desperadoes touting AK47s ever appeared. Not a single solitary bearded preacher or fanatic reared his head to disturb our revels. The atmosphere was open, generous, tolerant, as it always had been in Mali.

The same thing happened in January 2005 and 2006. During those years I travelled with scores of others – French, English, Italian, American, German, Dutch – to see Tinariwen, bombing up to Kidal, Tessalit, Aguel’hoc, Anefis and Gao without a care in the world apart from running out of petrol or missing the flight back home due to a broken axel. Only a few years later, this area was to become the red zone, the off-bounds fiefdom of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which was deemed suicidal for a westerner to visit. But until 2009, despite El Para’s introduction of the kidnapping business into the region, tourism thrived in Mali’s north east in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

That’s not to say that the GSPC went to ground entirely in those intervening years.  After the capture of El Para in Chad in March 2004, the GSPC slowed down their Saharan activities and went through a period of reorganisation. The 9th zone, which had been under the total control of Mokhtar Belmokhtar for some years, was split into two katibat, the katiba Al Moulathamoun, under Belmokhtar’s command, and the katiba Tarik Ibn Ziyad, aka Fatihin, under the command of Abou Zeid. The GSPC were also strengthening their international ties, especially Al Qaida in Iraq. The GSPC leadership had been impressed by the ‘successes’ of Abou Musab az-Zarqawi’s campaign of terror in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. In May 2005, Abdelmalek Droukdel issued a communiqué through an intermediary in which he requested support from his fellow mujahedeen in Iraq for his own struggle in North Africa. A few months later, a letter written to az-Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaida executive proposed an alliance between Al Qaida in Iraq and the GSPC, but not before their ideological strength and trustworthiness had been thoroughly checked. Intriguingly, the Al Qaida leadership still had a suspicion that the GSPC was heavily infiltrated by the Algerian secret services, a hunch that dated from the bad old days of the GIA. Nonetheless, the GSPC continued to followed az-Zarqawi’s exploits in Iraq with admiration and a certain amount of envy, especially when az-Zarqawi kidnapped and then executed two senior Algerian diplomats in the summer of 2005.

The GSPC’s thirst for moral cleansing and infidel blood was sharpened by the arrival of US troops in Mauritania, Mali and other countries in the Sahel from 2004 onwards. The mujahedeen saw this opening of a new battlefront in the US-lead war on terror, right on their doorstep, as a delicious provocation. Delicious, because they now felt part of a global rather than merely local struggle. In the autumn of 2005, the GSPC issued a proclamation that glorified this widening of the battle. “O young men of Islamic Maghreb…” it began, “from Egypt to Mauritania, Algeria to Nigeria, and the remainder of Muslim minorities in Africa. Many of you were unable to go to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Chechnya… However, Allah has brought those evil people to your own homelands… This prolonged and exhaustive war that was begun by Cheikh Usama Bin Laden is starting to bear fruit… This is your chance to erase colonial borders…that were established surrounding our Islamic countries and turning them into prisons ruled by various oppressors who have trampled on our religion and defended our enemies…therefore, demolish those borders. O young Muslim men, travel to the battlefields and attack the fortresses of the criminals and their supporters…Our war against the crusader American enemy is closely linked to the wars of our Muslim brothers around the world. [We] will be another brigade to join the brigades of holy jihad manifested by the holy attacks on New York and Washington under the leadership of Usama Bin Laden.”

The call was being answered in the Sahara; both the Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Mouthalamoun brigades saw increases in their fighter numbers in this period, although neither ever exceeded a couple of hundred. The GSPC was mutating into transnational enterprise. Algerians, Malians, Nigeriens, Nigerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Mauritanians, Burkinabés, Senegalese, Guinéens, Ivory Coasters, Beninois joined up to the cause in a sombre rainbow of ardent young hearts. These youth, often barely past their mid teens, were often recruited in mosques and Qu’ranic schools, seduced by inflammable speeches on grubby cassettes or videos of mujahedeen in Iraq and Afghanistan blowing up US army convoys and giving the Satanic west a bloody nose. Sometimes they promised the chance to fight for Allah in these distant lands, but ended up somewhere under the Sahara sun, as unforgiving as their own born-again spirit. Stripped down, the basic attraction of jihad was simple. It offered opportunities to young men who otherwise had none at all; opportunities to travel, to earn a little money, to carry arms, to defend Islam, to feel a part of something large, important, purposeful. Youth needs opportunity and in lands where poverty, displacement, war, corruption and social degradation have destroyed all most opportunities, it’s a case of take whatever comes along.

The GSPC now needed a major coup to prove the combat readiness and effectiveness of these new southern brigades. For the next major outrage following the 2003 kidnappings, they turned their attention to Mauritania, a country that had hitherto been spared the whip of Islamist violence, and launched an attack near Lemgheity, an outpost of impossible remoteness in the far north east of Mauritania, 400 kilometres east from the mining town of Zouérate. You’ll find it hard to get hold of a map that even recognises Lemgheity’s existence. On the fourth of June 2005 about one hundred and fifty mujahedeen sporting battle fatigues and black cheches attacked a Mauritanian army convoy near the village, killing fifteen soldiers and wounding seventeen more. Belmokhtar and his Mouthalamoun brigade were later revealed to be responsible for this strike. His declared aim was to punish Mauritania for having diplomatic relations with Israel and for cultivating alliances with the Great Satan.  Three days later, the US led ‘Operation Flintlock 2005’ against terrorism in the Sahel was launched, with the arrival of up to 1000 US military personnel in Nouakchott. Another red rag to the conspiracy bull.

In April 2006, a GSPC convoy carrying arms through the desert south of Ghardaia attacked a unit of Algerian customs men and killed thirteen of them. The army responded swiftly and heavily, killing a number of GSPC fighters and recovering a trawl of weapons, bought in Niger and destined for northern Algeria, that included: 1 x heavy machine gun, 6 x RPGs, 1 x mortar canon, 4 x RPK machine guns, 59 x automatic machine guns, 15 hand pistols, 311 ammunition chargers, 53 mortar shells and 16 cases of ammunition. Mokhtar Belmokhtar was reportedly behind the attack but, as always, he evaded his pursuers and simply disappeared into the desert.

Meanwhile, the links that El Para, Belmokhtar, Droukdel, Nabil Sahraoui and others had been forging for years had borne fruit. In late 2006, on the ultra-symbolic date of September 11th, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s no. 2, announced that the GSPC was now officially aligned to the global jihadi franchise. The GSPC pre-empted Al Zawahiri’s announcement with a communiqué released a few days his announcement. “We swear allegiance to Cheikh Ousama Ben Laden,” it read. “We will pursue jihad in Algeria. Our fighters are under his orders so that he might strike who he wants where he wants through our intercession… We advise our brothers in all the other jihadi movements, everywhere in the world, not to miss this blessed union. Al Qaida is the only organisation able to bring together all the mujahedeen, to represent the Islamic nation, and speak on its behalf.”  In a separate posting, Abdelmalik Droukdel claimed that “God ordered us to be untied, to be allied, to cooperate and fight against the idolaters…the same way they fight us as military allies and in economic and political groupings. Why shouldn’t we join our brothers while almost all these nations have united against Muslims and separated them, dividing their land, and taking away their Al Aqsa mosque. These crimes are committed by the Jewish-Crusader alliance.”  Unity…oneness…tawhid. After so many years of division, of in-fighting, of isolation and internal strife, all the mujahedeen of north Africa would now be united in one struggle, one jihad, under the banner of Al Qaida, in the service of the ultimate goal, an Islamic caliphate, not only in Algeria, but in all the Muslim lands of North and West Africa. Jihad in North Africa was now ‘fit’ for the new globalised millennium.

A few months later, in January 2007, the GSPC changed its name to Tanzim al-Qa’ida fi-Bilad al-Maghreb al-Islam or The Al Qaida Fighting Group in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. The title quickly contracted to the more portable AQIM or AQMI in the Francophone world, a big nightmare with a little name. The GSPC and Al Qaida leaders hoped that the group would eventually incorporate the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (MICG), the Libyan Islamic Combatant Group (LICG) and the Tunisian Islamic Combatant Group (TICG) into one structure, headed by the GSPC emirs. It was a classic efficiency drive, a rationalisation of disparate entities in the service of greater synergy and success, the kind of process that any management consultant might be proud to foist on a client. It was accompanied by a snappy new website, which proved that the Algerians were learning lessons from their more media and marketing savvy Al Qaida partners.

The last attack perpetrated by the GSPC before they rebranded themselves AQIM occurred on 10th December 2006. Two buses carrying employees of Brown Root & Condor, a joint venture between the Algerian state oil giant Sonatrach and the US firm Halliburton, were blown up as they drove from the wealthy suburb of Bouchaoui back to the Sheraton Hotel in Algiers. An Algerian driver and an American employee were killed. At the time, Brown Root & Condor was implicated in a vast and juicy scandal involving massive overpayments for goods and services, often of American provenance. The company had been distributing the proverbial bulky brown envelopes, stuffed with thousands of dinars and dollars in kickbacks and inducements to senior personnel in Halliburton and Sonatrach as well as the wider military, security and energy communities for years. Brown Root & Condor, which was founded back in 1994, was the nodal point in a tight relationship between the military-industrial complexes of America and Algeria which grew steadily throughout the 1990s and then flourished like a shameless bougainvillea following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The US security establishment realised that no one in world had more experience of the dark arts of fighting terrorism than Algeria and its DRS, and the Algerian security establishment was only to happy to provide their powerful new friends with information, expertise and lucrative procurement contracts.

2006 had been a relatively light year in GSPC annals. 2007 however was bathed in blood. It started with the detonation of seven bombs at police stations in the Boumerdès and Tizi Ouzou districts of northeastern Algeria. In March AQIM attacked a bus carrying employees of Stroitransgaz, the Russian firm that was building a gas pipeline from the fields in south west of the country up to the Mediterranean coast.  One Russian and three Algerians were killed.  Matters degenerated from there on.  Scores and scores of people, both security personnel and civilians, died in AQIM attacks in Lakhdaria, Batna, Dellys and Algiers. Kidnapping also flourished in the north. Capturing men of wealth, or members of their family, and cashing them in for fat ransoms became a work-a-day pastime. In 2007, there was at least one kidnapping incident a day in Algeria, although, interestingly, none of the victims were European or American. This was thanks in part to the assiduous security measures that were taken to protect foreign business men, workers and tourists. Overall, it was one of bloodiest seasons in the history of the troubles. But none of the violence touched the southern Sahara until the end of the year.

On Christmas Eve 2007, François Tollet, a 73 year old retired chemist from the Charentes area of France was driving south on the road between Aleg and Maghta Lahjar, about 250 kilometres south east of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. With him in the car were his brother Gérard, his two grown up sons Jean-Philippe and Didier, and a childhood friend of Didier’s, Adda Hacène. They had stopped by the side of the road for a picnic lunch when three turbaned men drove up in a black mercedes, got out and demanded money. When the tourists refused to hand over their cash, the assailants took out AK-47 rifles and killed four of them; Tollet’s two sons, his brother and his friend. Only François Tollet survived the attack, although he was severely wounded in the leg.

Tollet had long been a fan of Africa and the desert, and had travelled there almost on a yearly basis. How cruelly the desert betrayed that love. Or had it always been misplaced? Do desert lovers like Tollet swim in the rose-water of its seemingly endless hospitality, its generosity of space and time, the sweet calmness of its sunset hour. Are they blind to the human struggle that goes on in the Sahara every day, the poverty, the corruption and the anger, the nurseries of violence and extremism. I’ve often pondered that question. Maybe Tollet has too. This was the first time he had taken his two sons along with him on one of his African road trips. To see them murdered with his own eyes, in cold blood, by the side of a lonely desert road, in an immensity of sand and rock stretching to a wide and level horizon, must have been like a punch in the gut from a fist that had once belonged to a friend.

The Mauritanian authorities were quick to lay the blame for the attack at the door of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But this knee-jerk attribution was treated with suspicion by some in Mauritania. “I don’t believe in the terrorist attack theory,” a local journalist told The Figaro newspaper, “The GSPC men could more easily have struck in the tourist region of the Adrar if they had wanted to carry out a big coup.” Three men were eventually arrested in Guinea Bissau thanks to an operation reportedly masterminded by French intelligence. One of them, Sidi Ould Sidna, then escaped from the Palace of Justice in Nouakchott before being recaptured by Mauritianian security forces in April 2008. He was only 21 years old. Another jihadist, Maarouf Ould Haiba, an ex soldier and petty criminal, was already behind bars, having admitted taking part in the killing. “I killed those French miscreants,” he told the Mauritanian court.

The attack on Tollet and his family took place over two thousand kilometres away from Tinariwen’s homeland in north eastern Mali. There was a palpable fever of insecurity at the time but that was as a result of the recent Touareg uprising and not Islamic terrorism. Then, on February 22nd 2008, a full five years after El Para’s hostage coup, the strange hiatus in the Islamist kidnapping game came to an end. Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, a tourist couple from Salzburg in Austria, were kidnapped as they were exploring in the Matmata region of south eastern Tunisia, close by the Algerian border, an area famous for its caves and the troglodyte hotel which starred as the original home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars IV.

Ebner and Koiber were reportedly captured by the Tarik ibn Ziad katiba of AQIM, lead by the dreaded Cheikh Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.  Abou Zeid was born Mohammed Ghadir, sometime in the mid to late 1950s, no one knows exactly when. His family belonged to the Chaamba, originally a nomadic tribe that roamed with their herds between Debdeb and El Oued in the far eastern corner of Algeria, near the Libyan border. Abou Zeid’s spent most of his youth looking after the family goats and camels and occasionally attending Qur’anic school. Life was hard, but the young diminutive shepherd, whose nickname was “P’tit” (“Little’un”) was tough and resourceful. He was also steely, stubborn, and prone to violence if contradicted. By his early twenties, he already owned an old Land Rover and had started to smuggle goods, especially tea and cooking oil, along remote desert tracks that crisscrossed the nearby frontiers. The open desert tracks were to him like the sky is to an eagle. He was a loner, ascetic and austere, who abjured the pleasures of alcohol and cigarettes, although not necessarily women, of whom he married four by the end of the decade.

Over time Abou Zeid became a notorious smuggler, a status that earned him a few stints in the El Oued prison. Abou Zeid himself didn’t consider his activities to be criminal, just necessary for a decent life, and most of the youth of the Debdeb area shared his outlook. He even went on pilgrimage to Mecca twice during the late 1980s. His religious faith began to play a central and unforgiving role in his life. Abou Zeid’s strengthening zeal fused with an increasing hatred of the police, customs officials and border guards whose job it was to inhibit his ‘honest’ trade, galvanising eventually into a steely view of the world, streaked with a profound disgust for the political corruption, cronyism and moral degeneracy of modern Algeria. Thanks to his sweat, his courage, his cunning, Abou Zeid had escaped the pecking misery of his youth to become wealthy and independent. No one was going to steal the fruits of his hard labour from him.

When the FIS emerged as the torch bearer of anti-government fervour in the early 1990s, they found a willing recruit in Abou Zeid. He began to propound the imposition of Sharia law as the cure-all remedy for Algeria’s sins and became an active benefactor, distributing alms and food to the poor of Debdeb, especially during Ramadan. His faith was ardent and sincere, although he found the verbal niceties of political and spiritual debate hard to master, a weakness which blocked his path into mainstream politics or religious leadership. This lack of erudition left a void that fuelled envy and resentment against intellectuals who could spin words and ideas beyond his grasp.

In 1994, Abou Zeid was arrested and imprisoned for giving material support to terrorist groups. The charge wasn’t too far off the mark. Using his intimate knowledge of the secret pathways of the desert, Abou Zeid had been smuggling arms into Algeria from Libya and further south, and selling them on to the small terrorist groups who were already beginning to operate in the Sahara.  He was sentenced to three years in jail.  Prison was a school. Abou Zeid not only absorbed the violent fervour of the other mujahedeen who were locked up with him but he also learnt the tricks of jihad. On his release in 1997 he went underground, below the radar, with a brother and two uncles, joining a GIA katiba operating in the El Oued area. Its leaders had already been his associates in the clandestine supply game, and Abou Zeid was given the role of keeping his katiba stocked with guns, bullets, petrol and food. In 1998, he was sent on a mission to find new sources of arms further south, and he spent the next few years travelling throughout southern Algeria, Libya and northern Mali and Niger, cementing solid business relationships with traffickers, corrupt officials and bent army officers. If Mokhtar Belmokhtar was already enthroned as the King of the Saharan Islamist smugglers, Abou Zeid earned a reputation as the crown prince during those years.

After Hassan Hattab’s defection from the GIA and the creation of the GPSC, Abou Zeid found a natural ally in Abderrazak ‘El Para’, the new emir of the southern 5th zone. El Para made this tough resourceful man his lieutenant and kept him in his inner circle, until he decided Abou Zeid was ready to lead his own cell, the katiba Tariq Ibn Ziad. Its first mission, in 2002, was to prepare  for the planned expansion of jihad south into the Sahel and black Africa. The scene was set for the great hostage crisis of 2003, in which Abou Zeid played a crucial supporting role. His activities in the years between 2003 and 2008 are vague and barely known. However, with the kidnapping of Ebner and Kloiber, he returned to forefront of terrorism in the Sahara and has remained there ever since.

After their capture, the two Austrians were driven through Libya and Algeria and into northern Mali, where they were held in a secret base north of Kidal. It was Ennahar, an Algerian newspaper that has close links with the DRS, that published a list of the five prisoners that AQIM wanted freed in return for the lives of tourists in early March 2008. It included Amari Saïfi aka El Para, who was still being held by the DRS at the time, despite the fact that he had already condemned to death by an Algerian court.

A number of mediators were involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. One of them was Ibrahim Mohammed Assalegh, a Touareg member of the Malian national assembly. He spent months shuttling back and forth between Bamako and the far northeastern corner of the country, where the hostages were being held, although he claims he never actually met anyone from AQIM itself. He left that job to a well known smuggler and border hustler called Mahmoud Ag Mohamed, who came from In Khalil, the border town set up surreptitiously by the Algerian authorities as an ‘market’ for contraband traffic of all kinds. In Khalil isn’t the kind of place you’d ever want to spend a two week holiday. Think of it as a desert version of Dead Man’s Gulch, a lawless little burgh out in the middle of nowhere, a sinkhole of clandestino dreams built out of mud and sweat, a place to import, export, hand over, receive and then get the hell out as quick as humanly possible.

Assalegh and another Touareg bigwig, a former government minister called Mohamed Ag Erlaf, worked with the Malian secret services on a plan to persuade local nomadic groups to put pressure on Al Qaida to free the hostages. The nomads in question included Reguibat tribesmen from the Western Sahara, who Assalegh encountered in the far north of Mali, around the salt mines of Taodenni. He refers to them simply as ‘Polisario’, since the Western Sahara’s independence movement is largely made up of Reguibat. He urged all the nomads he met to help Mali free the hostages. If they didn’t, he argued, they might get caught in the crossfire of a war between the Malian army and Al Qaida. To Malian soldiers from the south, a man in a cheche is a man in a cheche, and differentiating between nomad and terrorist is testing, if not impossible.  The nomads in the north were also promised new wells, which were probably never delivered.
Apart from Assalegh and Ag Erlaf, several northern Arabs, or Berabiche were also involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. This group had the backing of Libya, who provided cash, vehicles, satellite phones and other essentials. Why would Libya be interested in helping a couple of kidnapped Austrian tourists?  Why, thanks to the warm friendship between far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, of course. The desert cultivates strange relationships. Among the Arab team was Major Bou Ould Lamana, a native of Timbuktu who worked for the Malian secret services or DGSE and was a protégé of Colonel Mamy Coulibaly, the Malian secret service supremo. Ould Lamana was also suspected to have been involved in arms trafficking and selling weapons to the GSPC as far back as 2001. The US Embassy called him “The Saharan version of a bent cop.”

Ould Lamana was part of a coterie of northern Arab army officers, political officials and business men who wielded enormous influence and power. They were dons in northern Malian smuggling rackets, and their networks stretched far and wide through West Africa and the Maghreb. Chief among this group were Colonel Mohamed Abderrahmane Ould Meydou, a handsome brick-chinned officer who was one of the Malian army’s ‘desert foxes’, charged with keeping a semblance of government control in the lawless northern provinces and thumping recalcitrant Touareg rebels with his own hand-picked militia of fellow Arab fighters.  Then there was Mohammed Ould Aiwanatt, an immensely rich Arab trader and trafficker from the Tilemsi region north of Gao, whose fingers were stuck in all manner of merchandise, both sweet and sour.  And last, but not least, there was Baba Ould Cheikh, mayor of the tiny but criminally significant village of Tarkint, north of Bourem.

All these men had their legitimate trades, but a desert potentate cannot operate on a measly government salary or a polite business in kosher goods alone. You’ve got to cross a line or two if you want to be a big shot Saharan player. All four harvested rich pickings in an ever hardening sequence of contraband goods. Their role as government and Gaddafi-backed hostage-negotiators offered a number of synergies with their other activities, including influence, protection for smuggling rackets, fame, kudos and a handsome cut of the ransom pie.

Certain Touareg officials and traders also benefited from AQIM’s presence in northern Mali, even though negotiators like Ibrahim Mohammed Ag Assalegh deny ever receiving a penny for their services. Iyad Ag Ghali, the ultimate Touareg ‘fixer’ and hostage-negotiator has hardly said a word to the media, either national or international, since he swapped rebellion for God in the mid 1990s. But it seems unlikely that men of his ilk would get involved in such a strenuous, draining and time-consuming endeavour as negotiating the release of western hostages without receiving a cut of the millions of euros paid by some western governments in return for the freedom of their subjects. Most Malian Touareg leaders were genuine in their frequently-voiced fear that the presence of AQIM in northern Mali was likely to damage the reputation of their people and lead to a disastrous confusion of Touareg nationalism and Islamist terrorism in the minds of international governments, the media and the public at large. On the other hand, they also held the view that hostage-negotiation was a job that deserved a handsome pay-out. If western governments were going to pour these astronomical sums into the coffers of international terrorists, then why shouldn’t they be recompensed for their honest humanitarian efforts. Furthermore, lower down the food chain, Touaregs, whether petty criminals or ordinary young men out of luck and out of hope, also provided services to AQIM as drivers, guides, cooks, suppliers of fuel, food and other essentials, informants and even, ultimately, ‘procurers’, who job it was to actually kidnap the hapless victims and hand them over to men like Abou Zeid or Mokhtar Belmokhtar for a fee.
But the northern Malian Arabs were closer to AQIM than the Touareg, ethnically, linguistically, ideologically and commercially. They were plugged into networks of kith and kin that extended from Gao to Timbuktu up to Taodenni and deep in Mauritania and Algeria. The one-eyed AQIM emir Mokhtar Belmokhtar was married to an Arab woman from Timbuktu. He was part of a family there, and families in the southern Sahara can be like quasi-political organisations, with far-reaching roots and branches stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the shores of Libya.

Austria dispatched a four man team to Bamako to coordinate efforts to free the hostages, headed by the sharp-suited stripey-shirted diplomat Anton Prohaska. They refused to negotiate directly with Al Qaida, outwardly at least, but instead tried to persuade other ‘friendly’ Muslim nations to put pressure on the Al Qaida leadership. Their dealings with Malian bureaucracy were frustrating, especially when it came the head of the Malian secret services Col. Mamy Coulibaly, whom one of the Austrian team described as “long on promises but short on information.”  Prohaska did the rounds of the foreign embassies, frequently dropping into the US Embassy for a chat and some advice. Another Austrian team that was sent to Algiers also made little progress. One of them described the Algerians as “extremely tough and security minded.”  There was also a confusing side-track opened by the arrival of a two-man team from the private security firm Blackwater, already notorious for its work for the US government during its occupation of Iraq. The duo booked into one of Bamako swishest hotels and tendered their services to the Malian government and the Austrian, proclaiming their expertise in hostage negotiating and promising to liberate Ebner and Kloiber in return for a handsome cut of the ransom of course.  They weren’t successful.

The negotiations dragged and so did the months. Wolfgang Ebner’s son Bernhard pleaded with the terrorists to show clemency, and eventually came to Mali himself to try and help free his father, without success.  The phone lines between Vienna and Bamako vibrated with high-level but ineffectual diplomacy.  Prohaska was well into his eighth month in the Malian capital, and began telling all and sundry that his useful time there was coming to an end.  Ebner tried to escape from the AQIM camp in northern Mali, but managed to walk a mere 25 miles before he was picked up by a trucker who returned him to the camp. In the end, Ebner and Kloiber were released on October 31st 2008, nine months and nine days after they were kidnapped.  Did they survive thanks to nomadic pressure, or to the fact that they converted to Islam whilst in captivity, through spiritual conviction or dire expediency it’s hard to tell, or to the Berabiche negotiators and their Libyan slush fund?  No, probably none of the above. The real reason was a 2 million euro ransom that was brought to Bamako aboard a special Austrian government airplane by Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, on board a special flight.  2 million euros in a country where a teacher earns barely 70 euros a month.  It was about the same as paying 200 million euros to a criminal gang in Europe.  That kind of money buys you a lot of weapons, and brand new cars.  And influence.  No wonder Al Qaida’s appetite for ransoms only grew keener.

 Andy Morgan.   (c) 2013, all rights reserved.
An extract from my forthcoming book on Tinariwen and the story of the Sahara desert since independence.

The post GUNS, CIGARETTES AND SALAFI DREAMS – The roots of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.