Why Are We Going to Mali?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Mali, a former French colony in the Sahel region of west Africa, is torn by religious and tribal conflicts that aren’t amenable to a quick fix – if at all. It is a failed state, one with various militant groups controlling vast swaths of territory. 

Yet Canada has now decided to join a United Nations peacekeeping mission in a place, unfortunately, where there is no peace to keep. 

Canada will send six helicopters to Mali to help with medical evacuations and the transporting of United Nations troops and supplies.

Mali’s problems go back decades. In the early 1990s the nomadic Tuareg in the north, a Berber people, began an insurgency. It gathered pace in 2007 and after the end of the Libyan Civil War in 2011 an influx of weaponry led to the Tuaregs gaining strength.

By 2012 separatists fighting to make the area an independent homeland called Azawad had taken control of the region.

Mali’s president was then ousted in an army coup, and Islamist groups took advantage of the chaos to impose their own rule in the area.

The government of Mali asked for French help and much of the north, including the fabled city of Timbuktou, was recaptured. But despite sporadic ceasefire agreements between government forces and insurgents, violence remains endemic. 

The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) was established by the Security Council in 2013. Some 12,600 UN peacekeeping troops officially took over responsibility for patrolling the country's north from France.

As of mid-February, MINUSMA had suffered 162 fatalities, and 80 per cent of the force’s resources are spent on self-protection from northern separatists and Islamic extremists. Things will get worse ahead of presidential elections scheduled for July.

Ottawa will also take the opportunity to increase the number of peacekeepers who are women among the 200 to 250 Canadian military personnel to be deployed to Mali.

Is this just virtue-signaling without regard for unforeseen consequences? Mali is the most dangerous UN mission in the world.

The country is “characterized by worsening human rights, food insecurity and daring attacks on mission forces,” Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN’s under-secretary general for peacekeeping, indicated in his Jan. 23 report.

Most of Mali’s armed groups today fall into one of two major coalitions: the pro-government Platform and the pro-separatist Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA). 

The CMA is mainly Tuareg, while Platform is anti-Tuareg.  Islamists have also created a new Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), backed by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Canada’s mission, aimed at the JNIM, may anger local populations that actually feel more secure under the Islamists.

Last October, four American soldiers were killed in neighbouring Niger, near the Mali border, by Islamists who attacked their convoy. They were hoping to locate an American who had been kidnapped in Mali.

Let’s hope Canadian forces don’t join the list of casualties in this volatile Sahel region.

Mali’s descent into chaos also demonstrates the overly optimistic view many academics take regarding the evolution of political tolerance in many states around the world.

In “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations’,” published by the eminent Columbia University political science professor Alfred Stepan in 2000, the country was described as having an “electorally competitive” system. 

“Rethinking Islam and Democracy,” written by Robert Hefner, an anthropologist at Boston University twelve years later, concurred with Stepan’s contention that Mali was an electoral “overachiever” relative to its level of economic development, and concluded that it had “no democracy deficit whatsoever.”

This is, as we now know, was very far from the truth.