Conflict in Mali

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Meisje Mali gegeseld wegens praten met mannen

(Novum/AP) - BAMAKO - Een tienermeisje in de Malinese stad Timboektoe heeft zestig zweepslagen gekregen. Het meisje werd door islamitische extremisten, die in het gebied de dienst uitmaken, schuldig bevonden aan het praten met mannen op straat.

Volgens de islamisten van Ansar Dine stond het meisje, van zo'n vijftien jaar, op straat met mannen te praten en werd haar meermaals gewaarschuwd hier mee op te houden, aldus een inwoner van Timboektoe. Toen het meisje geen gehoor gaf aan de bevelen van de islamisten kreeg ze er zestig keer van langs met een zweep. Volgens de inwoner van de stad, die per telefoon verslag deed van het voorval, trok de voltrekking van de straf niet veel bekijks.

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Op vrijdag 6 juli 2012 13:41 schreef Viajero het volgende:

[..]

Het is natuurlijk een factor, dat ontken ik absoluut niet. Maar als dat de enige factor is dan zouden Maleisie, Singapore, Brazilie, Chile enz enz ook enorme problemen moeten hebben, die grenzen zijn ook door Europeanen getrokken.

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'Jihadisten massaal naar Mali'
Honderden buitenlandse jihadisten zijn afgelopen weekeinde naar het noorden van Mali getrokken, waar de centrale regering de macht kwijt is geraakt aan rebellen. Zowel inwoners van de steden Timboektoe en Gao en rebellencommandanten hebben dat gezegd.

Het regionale blok Ecowas bereidt een militaire interventie voor in het noorden van Mali. De net aangekomen strijders zijn afkomstig uit onder meer Sudan. Ze komen de islamistische rebellengroepen versterken die eerder de macht grepen.

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Africa and the War on Drugs – a review by Stephen Ellis

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Stephen Ellis is Professor in the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden.

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Islamic terrorists with interests in the cocaine trade have taken over northern Mali. Fuelled by narco-dollars, they are threatening further mayhem. Perhaps these same people are also the brains behind human trafficking through the Sahara to Europe, another source of misery.

Something along these lines is probably the most widely diffused message concerning the drug trade in Africa today.

It is the sort of image that Neil Carrier and Gernot Klantschnig seek to rectify by supplying us with a short, tightly organised and well informed book that provides a dispassionate view of Africa’s long relationship with psychoactive substances. Their account provides historical depth and, above all, it strives to understand the matter from an African standpoint.

The two authors, both academics with extensive experience researching the drug trade in East and West Africa respectively, discuss a wide range of relevant matters from different parts of sub-Saharan Africa in just 138 pages of text. As befits the African Arguments series, their book, while fair in its approach, is polemical in intent. Its declared target is the war on drugs that began when President Richard Nixon declared “total war” on America’s “public enemy number one” in 1972.

The war on drugs waged by successive US governments for 40 years has failed to eliminate drug consumption in the USA. It is probably the main reason for the country’s grotesque level of imprisonment, which now stands at over two million people behind bars, more than the number held in Stalin’s gulag at its height. Many professionals involved in the fight against drugs, whether law-enforcement officers or public health professionals, believe that the campaign was lost long ago.

Destroying drug production in one area simply pushes up the price of drugs in consumer markets, thereby creating higher profits for dealers. Disrupting a supply route induces traders to find a new one. Most damaging of all, the war on drugs has caused ruling elites in some states to develop close connections with professional criminals, notably in Latin America.

The ultimate nightmare for US policy-makers is of drug traders making common cause with political militants. Hence the fevered images of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the official designation adopted by a militant group of Algerian origin that currently enjoys influence in northern Mali and adjacent regions of the Sahara.

People who follow world affairs quite closely, but who are not professional Africanists, probably first became aware of Africa’s role in the international drug trade when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) produced a string of reports and statements in the late 2000s pinpointing a surge in exports of cocaine from South America to West Africa, and most notably to Guinea-Bissau, which soon gained a reputation as a “narco-state”.

The UNODC, as its name tells us, is dedicated to the study of the relationship between the drugs business and its criminal aspects. Although UNODC reports are written in a restrained bureaucratic style and make careful use of statistics, their law-and-order approach inevitably trails in its path other documents and newspaper articles that make extravagant use of a familiar vocabulary concerning “scourges”, “menaces” and “drug barons”. Close your eyes and you may think of Al Pacino in the film Scarface, transposed to Africa.

While trade in cocaine and heroin receives the most international attention, Carrier and Klantschnig take care to provide extensive information on the historical use, trade and cultivation of other drugs including notably cannabis and khat as well as the internationally legitimated stimulants alcohol and caffeine. They tell us that probably the main pharmaceutical threat to the health of African societies comes from pirated or fake prescription drugs, although this is not a subject they pursue at any length.

Their general thrust is to contest the widespread view that the trade in cocaine and heroin is in itself a deadly threat to Africa. Concentration on this trade obscures the question of local addiction to dangerous drugs, which appears to be quite high in South Africa and parts of East Africa. The policy of suppression adopted at American behest in Nigeria, for example, is ineffective in suppressing the trade and draws attention away from debates on local consumption and other domestic aspects of drug use and abuse.

Many Africanists, generally sympathetic to African societies and sceptical of both the moral justification and the effects of America’s insistence that other countries follow its lead in the war on drugs, will probably agree with the sentiments expressed by Carrier and Klantschnig in this book, the best general introduction to its subject by some way. Nevertheless, in the opinion of this reviewer the two authors rather underestimate the degree of political involvement in drug trading by African governments.

The one case they examine in detail is that of Guinea-Bissau, whose politics was marked by violent competition between rival factions long before large cargoes of cocaine started arriving in the country from South America. So it was, but few observers doubt that the wish to maintain pole position in the cocaine trade has now added to the problem by providing a massive incentive to new struggles. In South Africa, a chief of police has been convicted of having passed confidential information to a leading drug dealer whom he had befriended.

The drug trade perhaps risks becoming a source of sometimes violent political competition in Africa to a degree the two authors seem rather reluctant to conceive. Still, thanks to this book future debates can now assume a breadth and depth that has been lacking to date.

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Duitsland zou deel kunnen nemen aan een Europese trainingsmissie in Mali, om daar de regeringstroepen te helpen.
Dat zei de Duitse bondskanselier Angela Merkel maandag.

Het leger in Mali wil zo snel mogelijk ingrijpen in het noorden van het Afrikaanse land, waar rebellen het al een half jaar voor het zeggen hebben. Het roept daarbij de hulp in van de internationale gemeenschap.

.''De vrije en democratische landen kunnen niet accepteren dat internationaal terrorisme een veilige plek vindt in het noorden van Mali",' zei Merkel.

''We weten dat de Malinese troepen zwak zijn, ze hebben hulp van buitenaf nodig. Een Europese trainingsmissie is daarom niet denkbeeldig.''

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'Franse drones naar Mali'

Toegevoegd: dinsdag 23 okt 2012, 01:40

Frankrijk stuurt voor het einde van het jaar onbemande vliegtuigjes naar West-Afrika om de Malinese regering te helpen bij de strijd tegen extremisten.

Dat meldt het Amerikaanse persbureau AP op basis van gesprekken met medewerkers van het Franse ministerie van Defensie en diplomaten.

Al-Qaida
De Franse regering voert ook gesprekken met de Verenigde Staten over het beëindigen van de bezetting van Noord-Mali door islamitische extremisten. Grote delen van het West-Afrikaanse land zijn sinds een half jaar in handen van radicalen die gelieerd zijn aan al-Qaida.

Frankrijk en de VS zouden bang zijn dat Mali zich ontwikkelt tot een tweede Afghanistan waar extremisten terreuracties kunnen smeden en voorbereiden.

Wat voor interventie-opties worden besproken, is niet duidelijk. Parijs en Washington zouden bij een militair ingrijpen de voorkeur geven aan een missie die wordt geleid door troepen van de Afrikaanse Unie.

Merkel
Ook Duitsland is bereid om een bijdrage te leveren aan het heroveren van Noord-Mali. Bondskanselier Merkel zei maandag dat Duitsland het leger van Mali wil trainen en logistieke ondersteuning wil geven.

De Duitse bijdrage zou wel deel moeten uitmaken van een gezamenlijke, Europese inspanning, zei Merkel.

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Mali: no rhythm or reason as militants declare war on music

Tuesday 23 October 2012
Islamist militants are banning music in northern Mali, a chilling proposition for a country where music is akin to mineral wealth

The pickup halted in Kidal, the far-flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy award-winning band Tinariwen. Seven AK47-toting militiamen got out and marched to the family home of one of the band members. He wasn't home, but the message delivered to his sister was chilling: "If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we'll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with."

The gang then removed guitars, amps, speakers, mics and a drum kit from the house, doused them all with petrol, and set them ablaze. In northern Mali, religious war has been declared on music.

When a rabble of different Islamist groups took control of the region in April there were fears that its rich culture would suffer. But no one imagined that music would almost cease to exist – not in Mali, a country that has become internationally renowned for its sound.

"Culture is our petrol," says Toumani Diabate, the Malian kora player who has collaborated with Damon Albarn and Björk, to name but a few. "Music is our mineral wealth. There isn't a single major music prize in the world today that hasn't been won by a Malian artist."

"Music regulates the life of every Malian," adds Cheikh Tidiane Seck, a prolific Malian musician and producer. "From the cradle to the grave. From ancient times right up to today. A Mali without music? No … I mean … give me another one!"

And yet that is the bland reality dawning on this once joy-filled land. International observers claim the leaders of the three armed Islamic groups who now control the northern Malian cities of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao are motivated by money and power rather the dream of a caliphate in the Sahel. There are strong ties between these groups and the less than holy interests of major drug-traffickers and arms smugglers.

But many of the mujahideen that have zoned in on the conflict from all over the Muslim world are fired by an unquestionable religious zeal. The same goes for Iyad Ag Ghaly, a Touareg strong man and born-again Salafist, who founded the Ansar-ud-Deen movement at the end of last year.

"He believes in what he's doing," says Manny Ansar, director of the Festival in the Desert that has been taking place every January in and around Timbuktu and Kidal since 2001. "And that's what frightens me. I'm not convinced that he wants to kill everyone who is not a Muslim, like the people in al-Qaida do, but I've seen him giving up the fruits of this life for God."

Back in the 1990s, before he succumbed to the preaching of the Pakistani proselytising movement Tablighi Jamaat, Iyad Ag Ghaly liked to smoke cigarettes and hang out with musicians from Tinariwen. He even composed songs and poems of love, rebellion and the beauty of his desert home. Now music, and with it a major source of communal cohesion and well being, has either disappeared or gone underground throughout the territory under his control.

An official decree banning all western music was issued on 22 August by a heavily bearded Islamist spokesman in the city of Gao. "We don't want the music of Satan. Qur'anic verses must take its place. Sharia demands it," the decree says.

The ban comes in the context of a horrifically literal and gratuitous application of Sharia law in all aspects of daily life. Militiamen are cutting off the hands and feet of thieves or stoning adulterers. Smokers, alcohol drinkers and women who are not properly attired are being publicly whipped. As one well-known Touareg musician from Kidal tells me: "There's a lack of joy. No one is dancing. There are no parties. Everybody's under this kind of spell. It's strange."

Manny Ansar says: "People think that the problem is new. But the menace of al-Qaida started to have an effect on us in 2007. That's when al-Qaida people started to appear in the desert. They came to the nomad camps near Essakane [the beautiful dunes to the west of Timbuktu where the Festival in the Desert used to be held] and at first they were pleasant and said, 'Don't worry, we're Muslims like you.' Then they began to say, 'We have a common enemy, which is the west.' That's when I understood that things were going to get difficult."

The Kel Ansar

Remarkably, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) never targeted the festival or any of the thousands of westerners who braved the journey to attend it. According to Manny Ansar, some people put this down to the fact that his tribe, the Kel Ansar, are said to be descended directly from Muhammad and are highly revered. "Others even thought that we cast spells to block their route," he says with a wry laugh. In truth, Aqim knew that if they wanted to keep the locals sweet and compliant, they were well advised not to mess with the Kel Ansar.

Not all music events were so blessed. Returning from the Tamadacht festival near the eastern town of Anderamboukane in January 2009, a British tourist, Edwin Dyer, was kidnapped and sold to Aqim, who beheaded him four months later because the British government refused to pay a ransom fee. It forced the Festival in the Desert to move into the safe confines of Timbuktu city limits in 2010.

This year in January, no doubt the last festival to be held in Timbuktu for a while occurred in an atmosphere of high alert after recent kidnappings and the murder of a German tourist by al-Qaida. The event was attended by Tinariwen, a host of other Touareg and Malian musicians and Bono.

"I was impressed by Bono's courage and that of his team," Manny says. "He asked the soldiers who were assigned to protect him to leave him be and let him roam around the town freely or go and drink tea out on the dunes. But I wondered if I wasn't a bit mad myself to let him do that. I mean, Bono, kidnapped! Imagine that." La Maison, the hotel in Timbuktu where Bono and his entourage stayed, is now the headquarters of the city's Islamic Tribunal.

Manny felt like giving up when the rebellion erupted a few days after the end of the festival. But after talking to many musicians, as well as friends and international backers, he decided to organise a Caravan of Peace and Unity that will tour West Africa and visit refugee camps in February next year. He will also be promoting the Festival in the Desert in Exile in Europe, the Middle East, the US and elsewhere. "It's my way of fighting back," he says. "Before our music was heard in Essakane. Now it'll be heard in all the big festivals in the world. So it's the opposite of what the Islamists want. It's our victory and their defeat."

Meanwhile, almost all the musicians in the north have fled the country like more than 500,000 of their fellow Malians, most of whom languish in refugee camps in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger or Burkina Faso. It is the biggest humanitarian crisis the Sahel has ever known. "There's no music up there any more," says Vieux Farka Toure, son of the king of the West African blues, the late Ali Farka Toure. "You can't switch on a radio or a TV, even at home."

The town of Niafunké just south west of Timbuktu, where Ali Farka Toure was mayor for many years, is now under Islamist control. "I know that if Ali were to awake from his tomb today," says Afel Bocoum, Toure's former sidekick and Albarn's partner on the 2002 Mali Music project, "he would just go straight back into it. He would die twice." Both Bocoum and Vieux Farka Toure have fled south to the safety of the Malian capital, Bamako, with their families.

But down south, music is also in crisis, for related reasons. The military coup that toppled President Toure on 23 March and kissed goodbye to one of Africa's most lauded democracies has left the capital fearful and economically depressed. "People just aren't used to meeting soldiers in the street, so they tend to stay at home," says Adam Thiam, one of Mali's leading journalists.

Many live music venues in the capital, such as Le Diplomat, where Toumani Diabate and his Symmetric Orchestra used to play every weekend, have closed. The same goes for hotels and restaurants, starved of their once plentiful foreign tourist clientele. Nightclubs and weddings are still thriving but the trend is to save money by hiring sound systems and DJs rather than live musicians. "People use what they earn to feed themselves, not to have fun," says Bassekou Kouyate.

But in west Africa nowadays, when the going gets tough, the rappers get going. Like Y'en A Marre, the rap collective that ignited nationwide debate during the election crisis in Senegal last year, rappers in Mali have stepped up to denounce political skulduggery, Islamism and military rule.

"I don't give a fuck what they say," was Malian rapper Amkoullel's terse answer to a question about the Islamist ban on music in the north. "We won't let them get away with it. We don't need them to teach us how to be Muslims. We're a secular tolerant country, where everyone declares their religion according to their feeling. And in any case, they know that a Mali without music is an impossibility."

Amkoullel set up his own pressure group of rappers, activists and friends called Plus Jamais Ça (Never Again). So far he has released a couple of videos, including one called SOS, which has become a YouTube hit. It has also been censored by the state broadcaster ORTM, which is still under the heavy hand of the military.

"We had this feeling that a heavy blow had been dealt to democracy," Amkoullel says of the 23 March putsch. "And it had been done in a period of popular disillusion. It's as if in the collective consciousness, democracy was a failure in Mali." Like Les Sofas de la Republique, the other rap collective raising the standard in rhyme for unity, democracy, peace and good governance, Amkoullel and his team have been organising demonstrations, debates and gigs. He has also received three death threats.

"I knew that our phones were being bugged," he says. "Then I got this call that was like, 'Yeah … we're watching you, so you'd better calm down or take the consequences.' The second message wasn't from the same person. 'You're talking too much,' they said. 'Shut up or you'll disappear and won't understand a thing.' That was much clearer!"

And yet, despite the twin-pronged threat to the culture they have made world famous, all the musicians of Mali agree it remains at the core of their identity. "I'm a Muslim, but Sharia isn't my thing," says Rokia Traoré, one of Mali's most famous international stars. "If I couldn't go up on stage anymore, I would cease to exist. And without music, Mali will cease to exist."

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Op dinsdag 13 november 2012 19:25 schreef zuiderbuur het volgende:

Frankrijk hamert erop de toestand aan te pakken maar zal zelf geen troepen leveren.

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Extremisten in het noordoosten van Mali hebben zondag laten weten nog meer historische bouwwerken te slopen. Ze hebben gezegd dat ze in de oude stad Timboektoe wat er over is van ketterse bouwsels aan het slopen zijn. De 'beeldenstorm' woedde er ook al in juli en in oktober, maar de extremisten van de beweging Ansar Dine hebben nog niet alles verwoest. Ze noemen het erfgoed heidens.

'Er blijft geen enkel mausoleum in Timboektoe over' aldus een zegsman van de beweging die begin april samen met andere gewapende bendes de stad veroverde. De stad was eeuwenlang een belangrijk centrum van islamitische godgeleerdheid. Timboektoe heeft daarom veel cultuurschatten verworven en is een belangrijke toeristische trekpleister geweest. In november 2011 werd er een Nederlander uit Woerden ontvoerd.

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Op zondag 23 december 2012 15:51 schreef Shawn het volgende:
Misschien beschikken ze juist wel over historisch besef en weten ze dat beeldenstorm ook in Nederland voorkwam.

Maar de VN Veiligheidsraad heeft groen licht gegeven voor militair ingrijpen in Mali.

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Op zondag 23 december 2012 15:51 schreef Shawn het volgende:
Misschien beschikken ze juist wel over historisch besef en weten ze dat beeldenstorm ook in Nederland voorkwam.

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Op zondag 23 december 2012 15:51 schreef Shawn het volgende:
Misschien beschikken ze juist wel over historisch besef en weten ze dat beeldenstorm ook in Nederland voorkwam.

Maar de VN Veiligheidsraad heeft groen licht gegeven voor militair ingrijpen in Mali.