The self-proclaimed independence of the Azawad province in Mali has never been recognized.
The day before, the ‘Mouvement national de l’Azawad’ (National Movement of the Azawad, MNLA), the spearhead of the Tuareg insurrection, which was launched a few weeks earlier in northern Mali, had just declared a unilateral cease-fire after taking control of the entire northern part of Mali, now totally deserted by government forces.
On that day, Friday, April 6, 2012, Moussa Ag Attaher, currently Minister of Sports in the government of the ruling junta in Bamako, then one of the movement’s spokesmen in Europe, appeared on a French television to confirm an announcement that had appeared a few hours earlier on his organization’s website. The announcement, signed by the secretary general of the MNLA, Bilal Ag Cherif, proclaimed “the independence of the Azawad,” a vast arid territory in northern Mali the size of France and Belgium combined, which since the country’s independence in 1960 has been regularly rocked by uprisings.
“We solemnly proclaim the independence of the Azawad as of this day,” Mossa Ag Attaher declared on France 24 at the time. “We have just completed a very important fight, that of liberation,” he said, without specifying that another rebel group was fighting his companions to take control of the region: the Ansar Dine Movement, an Islamist-inspired group led by Iyad Ag Ghali, a hero of a previous Tuareg rebellion that had destabilized the country in the 1990s, but which now dreams of an entirely Islamic Mali, thus hostile to the region’s independence. As a result, Ansardine recently allied with fighters from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that had settled in the area for several years.
France, Mali’s former colonial power, through its Minister of Defense, Gerard Longuet, immediately stated that “a unilateral declaration of independence that would not be recognized by the African states would not make sense.” French Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesman, Bernard Valero, made it more specific, stating that the Quai d’Orsay considered this declaration of independence “null and void.” These words are in sharp contrast, however, with the confidences that APA news has gathered in recent days from several senior MNLA founders, including Hamma Ag Mahmoud, the movement’s “chief diplomat,” who is now far from the organization.
“It is France that is at the origin of this rebellion. At the time, many Malian Tuaregs had been living in Libya for several decades and had joined Muammar Gaddafi’s army. France, which had just started a war in Libya to oust Gaddafi from power, had the idea of convincing part of its army to abandon him. It had then contacted certain Malian Tuaregs who were close to certain Libyan soldiers of Malian origin. Paris suggested that they put pressure on Gaddafi’s military of Malian Tuareg origin to withdraw from Libya and return to Mali.
France “promised to support them in liberating their brothers in northern Mali from the yoke of Bamako, which despite several rebellions, followed by peace treaties that remained unimplemented, continued to marginalize and despise them,” concedes this former prefect, minister and advisor to the Malian presidency, who assumes both his time in the rebellion and his attachment to Mali.
“I was part of the group that imposed the idea of independence. We were almost all former Tuareg politicians or executives who had worked in Mali. We know the power system and the elites in the capital, Bamako, very well. Several peace agreements have been signed with them by past rebellions. After the moment of signing, these agreements were all immediately ignored by the power and elites of Bamako. Asking for independence was for us a way of demanding the maximum to get the minimum. Our objective was, at the very least, true decentralization within the framework of the same country, especially since Mali has always been a territory where communities have always lived together in this way for several centuries. But the moderate elites of Bamako, entirely trained in French schools, have been stuck since colonization on the model of the French-style centralized state,” the Tuareg official, now a refugee in a neighboring country, justifies.
The fact remains that the self-proclaimed independence of the Azawad region has never managed to find the slightest support outside the restricted circle of MNLA supporters.
Gabon’s Jean Ping, the erstwhile President of the African Union (AU) referred to that proclamation as “a joke,” adding that the pan-African organization “totally rejects the so-called declaration of independence” and “strongly condemns this announcement, which is worthless.”
The United States had also rejected the declaration of independence. “We reiterate our call to preserve Mali’s territorial integrity,” said Patrick Ventrell, then a U.S. State Department Spokesman.
Great Britain simply decided to “temporarily” close its embassy in Bamako and “withdraw” its diplomatic personnel, the Foreign Office had said in a statement.
Mali’s neighbors and member countries of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), proclaimed their attachment to the territorial integrity of this member country of the organization, even though they had just imposed a total diplomatic and economic embargo on Mali after a group of soldiers, citing President Amadou Toumani Toure’s failure, overthrew him a few weeks earlier, to, as they put it, prevent the army from collapsing in the face of the rebels.
Ecowas had even announced that it was preparing to send a military force of 2,000 to 3,000 men to Mali to restore the country’s unity. Ecowas army chiefs of staff, meeting in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, 24 hours before the rebels’ unilateral declaration of independence, had decided a “mandate” for this force.
Accustomed to playing the fireman during past rebellions in its southern neighbor, Algeria, the regional military power, whose six diplomats had just been kidnapped by Islamists in Gao, had, for its part, declared that it would “never accept a challenge to the territorial integrity of Mali,” calling for “dialogue” to resolve the crisis, former Prime Minister, Ahmed Ouyahia, told the French newspaper Le Monde in an interviewed.
The country’s strongman at that time, Captain Amadou Aya Sanogo, the head of the junta that had just overthrown ATT, was content to acknowledge, implicitly, his powerlessness to protect the people of the North, calling on them “to resist” by their own means.
The outcome is well known: Ansar Dine and its allies claiming to be Al Qaeda affiliates eventually took over the MNLA. For almost a year, the Islamists were the sole masters of northern Mali. Driven out of the towns they occupied in January 2013 by a French-led international military intervention, they were not defeated. Still active in Mali, they are now present in neighboring Burkina-Faso and Niger, and have ambitions to establish themselves throughout West Africa.
LOS/fss/abj/APA