Ethnic politics continue to be significant in events in northern Mali, with militant groups appealing to ethnic fears to gain support.
As Mali and the international community continue to waver between plans for an intervention and pushes for a negotiated political solution between the south and its militant-controlled north, increasing attention has been paid to the diverse actors who may make up an intervention force.
Even as questions abound about a possible Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) intervention force in Mali, Mali’s army continues its halting movement towards reorganisation alongside a group of citizen and sectarian militias with past involvement in northern Mali. These militias, which include new iterations of the Ganda Koy (“Masters of the Land”) and the Ganda Iso (“Sons of the Land”), bring to the fore the possibility of ethnic violence and retribution in any operation to retake northern Mali. Already, observers describe the language employed by some militia members as “quasi-genocidal” toward ‘light-skinned’ populations like Tuareg and Arabs, recalling the bloody violence perpetrated by similar militias during rebellions in the 1990s and 2000s.
Northern Mali is an ethnically diverse, if sparsely populated, area. Accounting for approximately 10% of Mali’s population in an area roughly the size of France, the region encompasses traditionally nomadic and semi-nomadic Tuareg and Arabs, as well as sedentary Songhai, Peul, Bella, and others. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which started Mali’s fourth rebellion since independence in January, vigorously claims to represent all the various populations of the region. However, the group itself is largely Tuareg and evolved from decades of shifts in Tuareg society, the growth since the 1990s of new kinds of Tuareg nationalism, and increasingly untenable attempts by the government of deposed president Amadou Toumani Touré to manage the north by “remote control”.
Appearing local
Yet it is not just the militias aiming to retake the north that have their eye on Mali’s ethnic fault lines. On November 24, the jihadist forum Ansar al-Mujahideen published a statement in Arabic by the ‘Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin in Gao’ following the outbreak of fighting in Gao between the MNLA and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). This fighting, which broke out on November 16 near Ansongo and Ménaka, appears to have ended in defeat for the MNLA in the movement’s last major stronghold. While both sides and third parties have given dramatically different tolls from the fighting, witnesses and town notables have indicated that MUJAO forces executed some of those involved in defending the town, including the president of the local cercle, Alwabégat Ag Salakatou.