Mali’s Tuareg Rebellion - Andy Morgan

By Andy Morgan, March 27, 2012



This interview with Andy Morgan offers a detailed and fascinating look at the background to the Tuareg conflict in Mali. Tracing the unrest back over 50 years, he looks at the outside influences of Muammar Gaddafi, local Al Qaeda groups, Algeria and Mauritania.

Could you give us the general picture of what is going on in Mali at the moment?
The Tuaregs have been fighting an insurgency against the central power in Mali since the late 1950s but in terms of open fighting, since 1963. So this is a very old story. What we are seeing is the latest chapter, but a chapter with a great many differences. The Tuaregs this time are better equipped, better trained and better led than they ever have been before and as a result they have been able to clinch a series of military victories which have given them control of the northern half of Mali – bar the big cities, such as Timbuktu and Gao, which they haven’t attacked yet although I suspect now with all the confusion that is going on in Bamako they might take their chances in the next 48 hours and do just that.

This time people are referring to a Libyan knock-on effect, with Tuaregs returning from Libya, having fought with Gaddafi, now heavily armed and with a lot of money to spend. Is this a true picture?
The answer is both yes and no. The relationship between Gaddafi and the Tuaregs goes back to the 1970s, when Gaddafi had a romantic vision of the Tuaregs as superlative warriors. Gaddafi himself, as everyone knows, had a vision of himself as a liberator of oppressed peoples throughout the world. He took it upon himself to bring the Tuaregs into his fold and he trained them up to be soldiers. This happened particularly in the 1980s. The relationship between them at that time was always very ambiguous, as on the one hand he said that he wanted to help the Tuareg people to win back their homeland, but on the other hand he seemed to do precious little to help make that happen in concrete terms – apart from giving a bunch of young Tuareg men some military training in Libya, who he then sent to fight wars in Chad and Lebanon but not back home in Mali or Niger. They have always had a complex relationship, which I like to compare to the Irish Republican movement and the USA. Libya was a source for money and support but no actual encouragement to reach their goals.

How did the Tuaregs end up working in Libya?
The reason why a lot of Tuaregs ended up in Libya is that it is a very oil-rich nation which had a lack of manpower. Not only Tuaregs, but many sub-Saharan Africans ended up working in Libya. Some of those Tuaregs were actually a part of the Libyan army. The Malian press have accused the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) of being Libyan mercenaries but in reality they weren’t mercenaries but actually regular members of the Libyan army and had been for 20 years. For example the leader of the MNLA, Mohamed Ag Najm, was a colonel in the Libyan army. The story goes, and I need to check some of this but, it appears that there was a very well known Tuareg rebel/freedom fighter/bandit depending on your point of view called Ibrahim Ag Bahanga who was a real thorn in the side of the Malian authorities from 2006 onwards until he was defeated militarily in 2008 and exiled to Libya. There, he started to make connections with all these Tuareg officers in the Libyan army, many of whom were in the same clan and the same tribal group as he was. When the Libyan uprising started in Benghazi and things started to go very wrong for Gaddafi, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga and others persuaded some Tuareg officers in the Libyan army to defect, raid the Libyan army arsenals and take the weaponry back to Mali. I have also heard a rumour, which I have not been able to confirm, that they actually had a meeting with the National Transitional Council, the anti-Gaddafi rebels, to get their blessing for this project.

http://www.theglobaldispatches.com/articles/malis-tuareg-rebellion

This is posted just for information. Details have been sketchy from elsewhere.