A protracted battle shaping up in Mali

Mobhare Matinyi, Washington DC. The Citizen, Tanzania. Friday, January 18, 2013.

Fierce fighting is going on in the vast Malian desert between Islamic guerillas who occupy the northern part of the country and the national defence forces supported by the scrambled French Air Force. Certainly, this is another looming protracted military crisis that will cost hundreds of lives.

While the United Nations estimates that about 30,000 people have been misplaced since the French intervened last week, another 230,000 people have already been displaced within their own country. As of last month Mali had already spilled about 160,000 refugees into neighbouring Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Togo.

The year-long sporadic fighting and harsh implementation of strict Islamic law that started in March 2012 have perplexed the 16.5 million who inhabit the landlocked country. To an extent, Mali is in total disarray and at some point the international community didn’t know what to do.

Currently, the French troops are fighting to prevent the Islamic fighters from reaching the capital Bamako by relentlessly attacking them from the air in Diabaly, a town 400 kilometres northeast of the capital. Another attack is taking place in Mopti, about 240 kilometres east of Diabaly but 480 kilometres northeast of the capital. The French have saved Bamako from falling into the hands of Islamists who are not acceptable in the whole of Mali.

As the French pursue the highly motivated desert warriors, the Nigerian-led 3,300 troops from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) are busy getting ready to be airlifted to Mali to provide the much-needed ground troop presence. The Canadian and British royal air forces have promised to send transport planes to carry out the risky job.

The Americans as well are planning to assist in logistics and communications but without sending their troops; of course Mali does not produce crude oil. However, Washington doesn’t want to see another Taliban-styled state emerging in West Africa, thus, if needed, President Barack Obama will only send drones to avoid another headache as was the case in the two debacles in the Gulf and Asia.

While speaking in a telephone interview with French radio Europe 1 this week, the military leader of the Islamic fighters who are known in their French acronym Mujao, Omar Ould Hamaha, urged the French to fight “like real men” by sending their ground troops.

Hamaha said: “We will welcome them with open arms,” and then added: “France has opened the gates of hell; it has fallen into a trap much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia.” Luckily for him, President François Hollande is gradually increasing the deployment to about 2,500 from the current 800.

With a bunch of battle-hardened fighters from the so called Al Qaeda in Maghreb (Aqim), the guerillas who roughed up Algeria for years, Hamaha seems to know what he is talking about but confronting a powerful air force is not a picnic. Aqim is officially a North African-based Al-Qaeda franchise.

Mujao is the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa made-up mainly of black Africans who felt marginalized by the Arabs in Aqim. Thus, Mujao, which is known also as the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mojwa), is simply a break-up group from Aqim. Unfortunately for Mujao, Mauritania and Algeria have closed their borders with Mali to make it easier for the French to pound them in the desert. Honestly, nobody likes these guys.

In Mali, Mujao currently terrorize an area the size of Somalia and Syria combined, with most of it under the “caliphate” rule of Shariah. Chopping off limbs, forcing people to marry, and women to stay indoors has now become the order of the day despite people’s silent outcry. Furthermore, historical sites of Gao, Timbuktu and Jenne have already been destroyed.

The government in Bamako was not the first casualty of the Mali uprising but the secessionist Tuareg under the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). The nationalist Tuareg, who had just arrived from Libya following the death of their godfather Gadhafi, had managed to establish the secular independent state of Azawad or “the Land of the Nomads” in the north of Mali in January 2012.

While Bamako was still puzzled, a coup took place in March, a month before presidential elections. Within no time Ansar Dine, or the “Defenders of the Faith”, ousted the Tuareg from their newly-established “state”. That’s when the world took notice of Mali. All efforts to rescue the upcoming West African democracy without firing a shot proved a failure, and now it is blood against blood.

Mali has just become another big battleground for a prolonged conflict in Africa but there no option. Africans, we must learn to respect, preserve, protect, and defend democracy by all means. These trouble makers are not liked by anyone in Mali; they deserve to be punished!