Mali is a mess; that has been the headline for months. The
mess, however, is more than just that extremist militants have expanded their
power and conquered cities in the north of the country while a military coup
has collapsed over twenty years of democratic rule and brought the government
in Bamako to a standstill. The mess is one of both ideological quagmire and ineffectual
practical proposals.
Ideologically, there are the dueling forces of
humanitarian intervention in the name of human rights and the ever-present
specter of Françafrique and neocolonialism. Practically, there are a whole
bunch of bad options, with no viable possibility truly providing a solution
that leads to peace, unity, and democracy in Mali.
Now, after nearly a year of inaction on anyone’s
part but extremist militants, the French government has begun airstrikes to
weaken strongholds in the north, while ECOWAS troops from Nigeria, Benin,
Niger, Senegal, and Burkina Faso prepare for a ground invasion. For those who
have been following the situation in Mali and understand the history of French
military excursions in Africa, the feelings surrounding these developments are
far from simple.
For those of you not familiar with what is going on, some
background. (If you are, skip down several paragraphs.)
Mali is a one of the poorest countries
in the world, and is a former French colony in West Africa. While prior to
colonialism, several great empires encompassed southern and central Mali (and
neighboring countries) the north-east of Mali is very much in the Sahara desert,
and has never hosted a centralized or even unified political entity. There are
many ethnic groups and peoples in northern Mali, among which are the Tuaregs, traditionally nomadic herders,
traders, and craftsmen, who have been Islamic since the 9th
century.
There are tensions between
the Tuareg peoples and other ethnic groups in the north with the Malian
government in Bamako, the capital in the south, and there have been numerous
Tuareg and other rebellions in the north since Malian independence from France
in 1960. (Before you ask, no, this is not a Muslim v. Christian thing like
people simplify the conflicts in Nigeria or Sudan to be, because, in the first
place, the southern part of Mali is Muslim too.) In 2006, the most recent
agreement was made between the Tuaregs and Bamako, in theory offering north
eastern Mali some autonomy. In practice, the southern government has never
truly controlled the north.
The catalyst for the
current iteration of the conflict was the fall of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in
Libya, which sent an influx of advanced weaponry and fighters into the hands of
two particular groups, Al Qaeda in the
Magreb (AQIM), which has long operated in northern Mali, and in the last
decade has become infamous for kidnapping westerners, and Ansar Dine, a radical Islamist group. AQIM co-opted other groups,
including the National Movement for the
Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) into their rapid take-over of many northern and
central Malian towns (such as the famed Timbuktu) over the past year, which
gave them a façade of legitimacy which has since dissolved.
I must note here that I
have a major problem labeling AQIM and Ansar Dine “Islamist” groups, as the
media has so oft done, because as a resident in a Muslim country, the teacher
of mostly Muslim students, and someone who has studied Islam, there is nothing
Islamic about what these people advocate or do. They are extremist militants,
and just like every other group in history that has claimed to act in the name
of a religion while grotesquely perverting everything that religion stands for,
they should not be given the pleasure or respect of being labeled what they
misrepresent.
In April of last year
(2012), there was a military coup in Bamako during which the democratically
elected president Amadou Toumani Toure
(ATT) was ousted. The stated reason for the coup was the military’s
dissatisfaction with the lack of resources the government had provided for the
military campaign in the north.
So why is Mali all of a sudden in the
news? On January 11th, a French military campaign began bombing
targets in the north in order to weaken the extremist militants in preparation
for an Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS) led ground invasion. The French government claims
the mission is one of national security and humanitarian interests, and is not
a continuation of Françafrique,
which is a policy of French political, economic, military, and ideological
influence in Africa that has manifested in everything from Francophone African
leaders receiving their educations in France, former French colonies
maintaining colonial-style trade patterns with the “mother country”, France
propping up dictators across Africa as long as those dictators adhere to French
interests, and France further extending its social, cultural, and political
hegemony over Francophone Africa in recent decades through media control and
the (more than) occasional military campaign (See, most recently, Cote d’Ivoire
(2011) and Chad(2010)).
Alright,
so back to why this is not such a simple story of the West swooping in to stop
those radical terrorists and save the poor, weak citizens of a less-developed
country…
On the one hand, these extremists have been terrorizing the
populations they have conquered, imposing medieval laws, cutting off limbs,
blatantly abusing human rights, and are ultimately causing a massive
humanitarian crisis. There is no reasonable narrative in which AQIM and Ansar
Dine (the two groups primarily responsible for the military take-over of towns
and land from Timbuktu to as far south as Konna, dangerously close to the
capital, Bamako) are "good guys" or "freedom fighters" for
the state of Azawad, whose actual advocates were co-opted by these extremists
for their ideologically vacant cause. The government in Bamako, of little
legitimacy as it may be, did ask the French for assistance, as the Malian army
has proved to be completely incapable of driving out these extremist militants.
It is not wrong that so many in Africa and abroad are cheering the French and
ECOWAS intervention in the name of humanitarianism. A post from a Malian on
Twitter on January 12 read:
Translation: “My neighbor, an old
Malian soldier of WWII, says that he is proud to have fought the Germans to
defend France. He is very affected/emotional today.”
It all seems very sweet. Another tweet read:
And while I, as a former and perhaps continuing student of
political science am all too aware, two tweets does not constitute a sample
upon which any conclusions can be made, I would like to simply enter these as
evidence to a phenomenon that, should one choose to find ample evidence from
social and news media, would become readily apparent.
However, to see this simply as "France, in this
operation, does not pursue any interest other than saving a friendly
country," as French President Holland said in a statement announcing the
action, is to be blind to France's role in the region and naive with
regard to international relations.
One may rightly accuse any ideological inquiry
as being privileged and ignorant of the conditions on the ground, in which real
people are actually suffering and dying as a result of the cruel policies of
the extremist militants in northern Mali, and yet ideology is what fuels so
many players' actions, and a critique of the ideological could potentially lead
to a more long-term solution to the very real violence that any practical solution
would only ameliorate momentarily.
Mali is barely viable as a state. The southern
government has never had real control of the territory north of Timbuktu- not
in the pre-colonial imperial era, not during French colonialism, not during the
post-colonial dictatorship, and not during the recent democratic era. In terms
of state penetration of society and capacity to dictate law and policy, the
government has had, at best, a loose agreement with the north. ATT's
government, prior to the 2012 coup, had granted some autonomy to the region for
this very reason.
Therefore, should the combination of French
airstrikes and ECOWAS ground troops succeed in driving out the militants who
currently occupy northern Mali, the liberation of Gao and Timbuktu will likely
be sustainable, but there will be nothing in this military campaign that
actually solves the weak or non-existent state situation in the northern
region, especially considering it will not be Malian troops themselves that conquer
the territory. That land and those people will continue to lack a sense of
loyalty to Bamako, economic prospects, or political voice, and the conditions
that enabled an influx of arms from the fallen Libyan regime to fuel a
full-scale rebellion in the region and the empowerment of extremist militants
will continue to exist.
So the French airstrikes and ECOWAS troops save some lives
(while causing a hell of a lot of casualties and refugees in the process) and maybe,
just maybe, even train Malian troops and provide some funding so that any gains
will not immediately be lost. What then? The very fact that the French were
called on to intervene, as they have many times across Africa, is a testament
to the continued dependency of Mali on France.
And so we come to the debate on Françafrique, which is where I might actually have something different to contribute than can be found on every
single news outlet’s website.
Françafrique
is not dead, but neither has it been static. If Françafrique
is defined as, simply, French economic, political, and cultural intervention in
Africa for the preservation of its hegemony in the region, it continues in full
force, though not in the flagrant way it did in the past. What changed? The
values and norms of the French people and the international community are no
longer such that obvious public support of villainous dictators (as was the
case with Zaire’s Mobutu, Cote d’Ivoire’s Houphouet Boigny, and Chad’s Habré,
to name a few) is considered “socially acceptable”. While support of
undemocratic or violent regimes or actors may continue, it does so much more
discretely, and often with a well constructed veil of pretext.
One of the reasons why Françafrique has been prematurely
buried is that it has often been simplified into military or economic terms
(even though French economic interests still overwhelm Francophone Africa,
despite all the talk of China’s takeover of the continent; look at any data of
trade balances for the region for confirmation). Françafrique is the
manifestation of dependency theory in Francophone Africa. Dependency theory, an
international relations explanatory construct of the Marxist variety, contends
that elites in the developed world co-opt elites in the developing world to
form a system in which the majority of the people of the developing countries
are working in industries tailored for the economic needs of said developed countries,
thus continuing the colonial system, while the developing countries’ elites are
able to stay in power through the support of elites in the developed world, all
the while helping to exploit their own people.
Here, let me draw you a diagram:
Maybe that helps.
This is still the case, though less so with the entrance of
other players, except that there was ALWAYS another element to the Françafrique
model- one that the less-established international relations school of
neo-Gramscian theory accounts for quite accurately. Antonio Gramsci was an
Italian Marxist who, during the early 20th century, wrote a great
deal about the power of ideas and hegemony. Neo-Gramscians have taken his work
and applied it to how ideas and ideology develop hegemonic status and can be
movers in the international system. One of the many relevant aspects of neo-Gramscian
theory to Françafrique is the element of ideological cooptation that must
occur. The people who are being exploited and oppressed must somehow buy into
the idea of French superiority, in this case, for the hegemonic regime of
French culture, political, and economic power to continue.
Do the people in Francophone Africa, generally, buy it? You
bet they do, or, at least, more than you’d imagine. Having lived and traveled across
West Africa in particular for years, it has always astonished me how many
people, especially those less educated, still suffer from the “colonized-complex”
that African leaders and intellectuals from Sekou Touré (the first president of
Guinea, and a really atrocious leader if not a gifted orator) to Frantz Fanon
spoke about sixty years ago. The number of people that actually seem to believe
they are inferior to the French (or British, or Americans) in some way makes me
ill. (In less circumstantial evidence, the Afrobarometer survey in 2011 showed overwhelmingly
positive attitudes towards France in Francophone Africa and immigration to
France from its former colonies has been steadily increasing.) But what are
they supposed to think, when, in Francophone countries, most of the high
quality products, the military rescues, the media, the election planning, and the
revered cultural and social phenomena come from France?!?
Also, France desires the continuation of its hegemony in
Africa, not because it is absolutely dependent upon economic ties, not because
instability or violence in African states is a major threat to its national
security, and not simply out of the goodness of its huge heart, but because it
must maintain a position of power on the world stage to feed the ego of
nationalism. Again, for some Gramsci, the French state is not completely separate
but is thoroughly entwined with its people and their desires, and the interests
of French civil society and the state are not ones of mere economic or
political arithmetic, but ones completely infused with ideology.
When NATO intervened in the Libyan conflict, there were some
that hailed the prevention of slaughter in Benghazi and the swifter end of a
bloody conflict, and others who decried the violation of sovereignty and
neoimperial actions that, were the country in question not in the developing
world, would be unheard of. I felt both. Now, with the French intervention in
Mali, just as with the French intervention in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011, I feel
equally torn. This is the continuation of a constantly evolving Françafrique system,
and will not only fail to fix the underlying problems in Mali and the Saharan
states (that’s a whole other issue of state viability), but will perpetuate Françafrique
through continued dependency on France and views of France as savior rather
than partner. However, a real humanitarian crisis is ongoing in Mali, and, if
one believes in some idea of the moral good (as I do), it is good for these
extremist militants to be defeated, and would be bad for them to expand or even
continue their terrorist acts on the Malian people.
This is not an easy position, just as neither is the
congruent conundrum of Syria, or of any international intervention by the
developed world into the developing. I guess I just wish there were a bit more acknowledgement
of the complexity in the nightly news…such as this article from the BBC endeavors
to do, but in an American society where most people don’t know where Mali is
and are perhaps likely to believe that the “Islamists” the French are fighting
are typical Muslims, complexity is probably just too much to ask for.
A few of the articles on the current situation that I've read:
