Azawad-Mali
The CMA in the footsteps of the MFUA, and the struggle of Azawad continues…
France and Algeria know that they are continuing to “braid over lice”
Despite clear opposition expressed by the population concerned, the international community, impatient to resolve a problem it must have judged too insignificant to devote the necessary time to, chose to force the issue in order to compel the leaders of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) to sign agreements that clearly constitute a setback in the process intended to lead to a definitive peace between Azawad and Mali.
In view of the texts and the beginning of their implementation process, these agreements are very likely to fall into the oblivion of history, like the previous ones, once the current actors have been closely neutralized by the integration system set up by international mediation.
The repetition of the pattern of the 1990s, which led to the disarmament and disappearance of the movements, should once again generate a fairly similar process. Moreover, sensitive as well to a presentation conforming to their vision of a world very distant from them, Mali’s financial partners will not fail to show up to bail out bodies invented for the occasion, impeccable on paper, very classic in their operating mode, but bizarrely quite distant from the ground in their conception. These same partners will moreover launch development plans whose effectiveness no one will care about when the lights go out, nor their real influence on the living conditions of the populations supposed to be the beneficiaries. The use of the funds thus collected must respond to the immediate imperatives of integrating the Movements into the process of “implementing” the agreements. Without any real requirement for success, except on paper, this “implementation” of the agreements will likely have one consequence, and alas, it may be its sole success: it could, if we are not careful, foster the disappearance of any possibility of carrying forward the demands of local populations. Without imperative vigilance, it is not excluded to imagine that certain leaders of the Movements will themselves take charge of doing the work in place of the Malian state and the international community to muzzle any hint of protest. The goal sought for many actors, like in any good comedy.
The absence of references to Azawad at the Paris meeting on October 22, 2015, is troubling and indicates in this regard the state of advanced decomposition of the Azawadi spirit among certain leaders of the Movements.
Putting the evolution of this issue since the 1990s into perspective, one is forced to note that the methods used to neutralize the MFUA (Unified Movements and Front of Azawad) are still working wonderfully with the CMA. Will a flame of peace still be necessary to drive the point home, much to the dismay of the civilian victims of the repression of the 1990s, who are still waiting for the international community to transfer their executioners to the ICC to answer for their responsibility during the multiple massacres nevertheless well-documented by human rights defense associations and organizations.
Taking into account both the evolution of the international context and the weight of other threats weighing on the sub-region, it is hard to understand the choices of the International Community and the zeal of certain leaders of the Azawad Movements. A zeal undoubtedly driven by a desire to get it over with as quickly as possible, whereas it would be necessary above all to restore power to those who have demonstrated their determination to live at their own pace and not under the thumb of civil servants coming from the South behaving as under some kind of colonization—a desire that also encourages consolidating the positions of the Malian state in its constant will to reduce all the advances obtained in recent years by the fighters and populations of Azawad.
The political cadres of Azawad are victims of the weakness of their strategy vis-à-vis the Malian state and above all the International Community, which invariably succeeds in drowning the most enlightened ones in a pseudo-inclusive rhetoric whose purpose is to make the real objectives disappear and occupy them all with leadership quarrels and other ethnic or tribal considerations.
Several profiles can be observed among these cadres, despite the shifting nature of certain postures and the influence of occult forces maneuvering to undermine the unity of the Movements: the fatalists, who think they have no other choice than to yield to pressures and participate despite themselves in the destruction of achievements obtained at the cost of unheard-of sacrifices for generations, and the opportunists, whose only motivations are access to dividends and a material situation that must be reached as quickly as possible.
The distress of hundreds of thousands of Azawadi refugees, scattered throughout the sub-region and further still, should impose a great deal of caution on leaders who wish to make commitments in their name.
The aspirations of the populations of Azawad, legitimate and inalienable, will find their way in the respect of each people’s right to determine its choice of organization to strive toward a better future. The leaders of the Azawad Movements, beyond the CMA, know that “One and Indivisible Mali” exists for now only in the slogans of extremists who ride the wave of the International Community’s goodwill. In this matter, one should always keep in mind that the security and geopolitical agenda takes precedence over other considerations in the jungle of international relations.
In the end, the biggest losers could be Mali, Azawad, and the populations of these two entities.
More than ever before, the International Community will bear the responsibility for what is happening today, because the Malian state is no longer capable of posing as a credible interlocutor for the populations of Azawad. Above all, it would be necessary to devote time, resources, and deeply mobilize the men and women of this territory to reverse the feeling of abandonment or despair that every Azawadi permanently carries within them. The Malian state has been behaving like a perfect schizophrenic since independence, because while fiercely clinging to this territory to assert its power, it forgets its educational duty which should have consisted in making the people of the South accept these new Malians—very different, but Malians all the same—and sends its civil servants to “administer” Azawad as if this territory were populated by simpletons incapable of managing themselves, whereas the latter have been proving for centuries that they can live without external intervention and possess social structures as complete and competent as those governing the societies of the South themselves. Furthermore, the Malian state has failed in its governance, notably by treating populations in a differentiated manner. It does not have, and will not have anytime soon, the human and material means to ensure the security of populations for whom it represents, moreover, the main threat given the abuses committed against them since the country’s independence.
Abdoulahi ATTAYOUB
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