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“Is there a coup in Mali?”
That was the telling question that landed on the official Twitter account of Mali’s ousted leader Amadou Toumani Toure on March 21. It sounded outrageous, given that the country last had a coup two decades ago.
The president was bamboozled.
“Could you check with your source? There is no coup in Mali. There’s just a mutiny in the garrison of Kati,” Toure tweeted in response to the query from his handle @PresidenceMali.
Prior to that query, the landlocked West African country had been reeling from a series of demonstrations and protests over the poorly equipped troops, who had been sent to quell a rebellion by a Tuareg separatist movement in the north of the country.
Many soldiers, drawn from the south, were dying at the hands of the separatists, angering their kinsmen back home. The dissatisfaction in the public spawned a mutiny in the military. The president had no idea that a coup was imminent when he replied to the Twitter query.
A day later a band of low-ranking mutineers led by a U.s.-trained Captain Amadou sanogo toppled the government, sending their clueless commander-in-chief into hiding. The bane of the coup leaders was that the government had failed to provide them with modern weaponry to fight the Tuareg separatists in the north.
The irony is that the coup took place just as the African Union Peace and security Council was winding up a crucial meeting in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
The AU Commission had called the meeting to explore possible interventions in some of the troubled regions of the continent including the raging rebellion in the Republic of Mali. The continental dignitaries were trapped.
Collective pressure
Among those trapped were Kenya’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moses Wetangula. Kenya is a member of the AU Peace and security Council.
In a brief Facebook post, Wetangula let the continent know about the surprise coup and about his dire straits.
“A coup d’etat has taken place in Mali as I was about to leave for the airport. [I] may not be able to leave. [The] airspace is closed. Pray for me,” said Wetangula, who, upon return to Nairobi, five days after the coup, was transferred from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to the Trade Ministry in Kenya’s coalition cabinet.
With dignitaries holed up in their hotels, the coup leaders got what they wanted: global attention to the rebellion in the north of the country, a rebellion which began on January 17. And the attention was fast and furious.
The AU Commission Chair Jean Ping and the UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon weighed in. They asked sanogo and his team to hand over power to a civilian government and to quickly let the trapped dignitaries go home.
But it was not only the UN and the AU that were piling pressure on sanogo. The West Africa trading bloc, the Economic Community of West African states (ECOWAs), embarrassed by the disgrace of a coup in what was essentially the pearl of democracy in the region, also weighed in with sanctions.
It had asked all of Mali’s neighbors to close their borders to any form of trade amid other sanctions.
With seven neighbors the coup leaders had no option but to stand down.
Interim leader
Having let loose the dignitaries, ECOWAs tightened the screws to have the military cede power to a civilian government.
And this they did in the first week of April, but with a demand that the ousted president had to resign first. The fugitive president came out of hiding and announced his resignation.
The plan as per Mali’s Constitution calls for the head of its parliament to take over government, name a prime minister, form a government and then organize elections.
The head of parliament, Diouncounda Traore, a 70-year-old former mathematics teacher and trade unionist, was sworn in on April 12, by Mali’s supreme Court President Nouhoum Tapily and almost immediately called for the cessation of violence in the north.
Traore must ensure that there is an election not later than 40 days after his swearing in, as per the constitution.
Cause of coup
The question on many people’s mind is why a relatively peaceful country that took a step into democracy back in 1992, with the promulgation of a new constitution, could make such an abrupt slide into chaos and anarchy.
Experts on conflict and governance told ChinAfrica that the genesis of the fighting in Mali has its roots in the Arab spring and the effect the Libyan revolution had on the lands of Tuareg nomads, which stretches across the sahara from Mali to Niger and all the way to Algeria.
Ghada shahbender of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights told ChinAfrica that the rebellion in Mali had all shades of a “clash between nomadism and modernism.”
she said that the Tuareg are by nature reclusive, so that, when they go to a place, very few of them find it easy to morph into the local way of life.
“The Tuareg have this peculiar character. They are usually persecuted to the extent that they isolate themselves; and at times, they isolate themselves for fear of persecution,” said shahbender.
But that doesn’t explain their fighting in Libya, from where they got training and arms to come back home and wage a war for an independent republic of Azawad. so, shahbender reckoned that the proliferation of small arms, undoubtedly a big security game-changer in North Africa, was behind the fighting and rise in violent crimes in the north.
“What happened is that whole armories were opened and arms given to civilians. That has a potential to cause chaos,” she said.
Professor stephen Zunes, a knowledgeable scholar of politics and international studies at the University of san Francisco, backed this view.
“What happened was that the war in Libya resulted in arms caches going into the hands of Tuareg tribesmen who brought them into Tuareg-populated areas of northern Mali, which dramatically escalated what had been a low-level rebellion, prompting the Malian armed forces to claim the country needed military rule to quash the rebellion,” Zunes told ChinAfrica.
Road ahead
so what next for Mali?
The country was scheduled to hold presidential polls on April 29. The coup made that date untenable. Now the new civilian president has to quash the rebellion and also mop up the proliferation of arms.
The Tuareg, fighting under the group, National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad(MNLA), have already declared independence. Many ethnic groups in Mali are said to be confused as to why a group that is a minority in most senses would be pushing for secession in a country of 14 million people.
However, a stable government seems like the only answer to the woes of the MNLA, which is said to have joined forces with another group with links to the global terror network, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
“In any region awash with arms and local militias interested in carving out their little sovereign spheres, the stability of any democracy can’t be assured,” Jack DuVall, President of the U.s.-based International Center of Nonviolent Conflict, told ChinAfrica on the Mali crisis.
“But even the threat of a break-away province dominated by an armed group doesn’t justify a military coup against democratically elected leader, because the people weren’t consulted. The faster a democratically elected leader is back in power in Mali, the more standing and influence its government will have regionally and internationally to deal with violent separatists,” DuVall said.
Wetangula also believes coups are old-fashioned.
“Coup d’etats are unacceptable and must be condemned by all, Mali being no exception. The flimsy reasons advanced by the coup makers and executioners are mere excuses,”said Wetangula as he praised the UN, AU and ECOWAs for proving that there was no room for military governments.
That was the telling question that landed on the official Twitter account of Mali’s ousted leader Amadou Toumani Toure on March 21. It sounded outrageous, given that the country last had a coup two decades ago.
The president was bamboozled.
“Could you check with your source? There is no coup in Mali. There’s just a mutiny in the garrison of Kati,” Toure tweeted in response to the query from his handle @PresidenceMali.
Prior to that query, the landlocked West African country had been reeling from a series of demonstrations and protests over the poorly equipped troops, who had been sent to quell a rebellion by a Tuareg separatist movement in the north of the country.
Many soldiers, drawn from the south, were dying at the hands of the separatists, angering their kinsmen back home. The dissatisfaction in the public spawned a mutiny in the military. The president had no idea that a coup was imminent when he replied to the Twitter query.
A day later a band of low-ranking mutineers led by a U.s.-trained Captain Amadou sanogo toppled the government, sending their clueless commander-in-chief into hiding. The bane of the coup leaders was that the government had failed to provide them with modern weaponry to fight the Tuareg separatists in the north.
The irony is that the coup took place just as the African Union Peace and security Council was winding up a crucial meeting in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
The AU Commission had called the meeting to explore possible interventions in some of the troubled regions of the continent including the raging rebellion in the Republic of Mali. The continental dignitaries were trapped.
Collective pressure
Among those trapped were Kenya’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moses Wetangula. Kenya is a member of the AU Peace and security Council.
In a brief Facebook post, Wetangula let the continent know about the surprise coup and about his dire straits.
“A coup d’etat has taken place in Mali as I was about to leave for the airport. [I] may not be able to leave. [The] airspace is closed. Pray for me,” said Wetangula, who, upon return to Nairobi, five days after the coup, was transferred from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to the Trade Ministry in Kenya’s coalition cabinet.
With dignitaries holed up in their hotels, the coup leaders got what they wanted: global attention to the rebellion in the north of the country, a rebellion which began on January 17. And the attention was fast and furious.
The AU Commission Chair Jean Ping and the UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon weighed in. They asked sanogo and his team to hand over power to a civilian government and to quickly let the trapped dignitaries go home.
But it was not only the UN and the AU that were piling pressure on sanogo. The West Africa trading bloc, the Economic Community of West African states (ECOWAs), embarrassed by the disgrace of a coup in what was essentially the pearl of democracy in the region, also weighed in with sanctions.
It had asked all of Mali’s neighbors to close their borders to any form of trade amid other sanctions.
With seven neighbors the coup leaders had no option but to stand down.
Interim leader
Having let loose the dignitaries, ECOWAs tightened the screws to have the military cede power to a civilian government.
And this they did in the first week of April, but with a demand that the ousted president had to resign first. The fugitive president came out of hiding and announced his resignation.
The plan as per Mali’s Constitution calls for the head of its parliament to take over government, name a prime minister, form a government and then organize elections.
The head of parliament, Diouncounda Traore, a 70-year-old former mathematics teacher and trade unionist, was sworn in on April 12, by Mali’s supreme Court President Nouhoum Tapily and almost immediately called for the cessation of violence in the north.
Traore must ensure that there is an election not later than 40 days after his swearing in, as per the constitution.
Cause of coup
The question on many people’s mind is why a relatively peaceful country that took a step into democracy back in 1992, with the promulgation of a new constitution, could make such an abrupt slide into chaos and anarchy.
Experts on conflict and governance told ChinAfrica that the genesis of the fighting in Mali has its roots in the Arab spring and the effect the Libyan revolution had on the lands of Tuareg nomads, which stretches across the sahara from Mali to Niger and all the way to Algeria.
Ghada shahbender of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights told ChinAfrica that the rebellion in Mali had all shades of a “clash between nomadism and modernism.”
she said that the Tuareg are by nature reclusive, so that, when they go to a place, very few of them find it easy to morph into the local way of life.
“The Tuareg have this peculiar character. They are usually persecuted to the extent that they isolate themselves; and at times, they isolate themselves for fear of persecution,” said shahbender.
But that doesn’t explain their fighting in Libya, from where they got training and arms to come back home and wage a war for an independent republic of Azawad. so, shahbender reckoned that the proliferation of small arms, undoubtedly a big security game-changer in North Africa, was behind the fighting and rise in violent crimes in the north.
“What happened is that whole armories were opened and arms given to civilians. That has a potential to cause chaos,” she said.
Professor stephen Zunes, a knowledgeable scholar of politics and international studies at the University of san Francisco, backed this view.
“What happened was that the war in Libya resulted in arms caches going into the hands of Tuareg tribesmen who brought them into Tuareg-populated areas of northern Mali, which dramatically escalated what had been a low-level rebellion, prompting the Malian armed forces to claim the country needed military rule to quash the rebellion,” Zunes told ChinAfrica.
Road ahead
so what next for Mali?
The country was scheduled to hold presidential polls on April 29. The coup made that date untenable. Now the new civilian president has to quash the rebellion and also mop up the proliferation of arms.
The Tuareg, fighting under the group, National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad(MNLA), have already declared independence. Many ethnic groups in Mali are said to be confused as to why a group that is a minority in most senses would be pushing for secession in a country of 14 million people.
However, a stable government seems like the only answer to the woes of the MNLA, which is said to have joined forces with another group with links to the global terror network, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
“In any region awash with arms and local militias interested in carving out their little sovereign spheres, the stability of any democracy can’t be assured,” Jack DuVall, President of the U.s.-based International Center of Nonviolent Conflict, told ChinAfrica on the Mali crisis.
“But even the threat of a break-away province dominated by an armed group doesn’t justify a military coup against democratically elected leader, because the people weren’t consulted. The faster a democratically elected leader is back in power in Mali, the more standing and influence its government will have regionally and internationally to deal with violent separatists,” DuVall said.
Wetangula also believes coups are old-fashioned.
“Coup d’etats are unacceptable and must be condemned by all, Mali being no exception. The flimsy reasons advanced by the coup makers and executioners are mere excuses,”said Wetangula as he praised the UN, AU and ECOWAs for proving that there was no room for military governments.