The Economist Asia - 03.02.2018

The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018 39

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T THE weekly market in Toya, at the

edge of the Niger river, just outside the

ancient city of Timbuktu, little seems to

have changed. Under shelters built from

branches and tarpaulins, traders in tur-

bans with leathery faces hawk almost

everything imaginable. There are slabs of

rock salt, mined deep in the desert, next to

crates of Algerian cigarettes. Cheap radios

sit beside tins ofUSAIDvegetable oil (the

marking “not for sale” roundly ignored).

Yet all is not well here. A group of

armed UNpeacekeepers walks among the

shoppers, asking questions. One elderly

Tuareg says that justa few days earlier a

dozen armed men had wandered into the

village, flauntingtheir weapons. He will

not say who they were, but they were not

soldiers from the Malian army. “We have

fear here. When these men can come and

go as they please, there is no security,” he

says. When asked if he had ever seen the

state’s security forces, he gestures a hand

with a large silver ring at the market: “They

are never here.”

During the past decade Mali has be-

come one of Africa’s most intractable secu-

rity problems. Once seen as a model de-

mocracy, it has been plagued by violence

since 2012, when Tuareg-led jihadists with

links to al-Qaeda led a rebellion across

northern Mali, at the edge of the Sahara

desert (see map). At one time tourists used

to pour into Timbuktu to ride camels

across the desert. Now most of the foreign-

ers at the airport wear army uniforms. The

In 2015 the warring parties signed a

peace deal. But since then the violence has

continued to escalate. At leastfour separate

attacks between January 25th and 28th

killed scores of people. Last year the UN

counted 220 attacks on its operations. That

is more than in 2015 and 2016 combined.

The peacekeeping mission established in

2013, known asMINUSMA, is by far the

UN’s most dangerous. It has a force of

about 11,000, but 150 peacekeepers have

been killed. Insecurity has spread from the

north to the centre of Mali.

The country’s vast desert is not only a

breeding ground for jihadism; it is also a

trade route that carries consumer goods

south and drugs and migrants towards Eu-

rope. That partly explains why France’s

president, Emmanuel Macron, has already

visited Mali twice. France hassome 3,000

troops in the Sahel fighting terrorists, most

of whom are in Mali. America has a force

there too, as does the European Union (on

a training mission). Western countries are

also paying for a counterterrorism force

drawn from regional armies, the G5 Sahel.

In Kano, a village 60km east of Timbuk-

tu, the UNshows off what itsDDR (disar-

mament, demobilisation and rehabilita-

tion) programme has achieved. As women

in bright wraps and headscarves ululate, a

newly built water tower is ceremoniously

untapped and brown liquid gushes out

onto the sand. “It is an excellent thing,” en-

thuses Mohammed Ahmed Cissé, the vil-

lage’s portly chief. “We can grow gardens,

and...work together instead of fighting.”

Although the fighting has died down,

there is not much disarmament. Armed re-

bels still live in the village, admits Mr Cissé.

And a bigger problem isapparent. No one

from the Malian government has been

seen in almost a decade. Andrew Lebov-

ich, a Bamako-based analyst from the

European Council on Foreign Relations, a

think-tank, argues that the government has

city has said goodbye to Bono, a rock musi-

cian who once played there. But in most

other respects things have got worse.

The old fracture lines of race and tribe

widened after independence in 1960.

Many among the Tuareg and Arab minor-

ities were uncomfortable with being ruled

by black Africans in the south. Big rebel-

lions broke out in 1963 and 1990. But the

one in 2012, which came after soldiers had

staged a coup in Bamako, the capital,

marked a turning-point. The rebels, who

had developed from a secular nationalist

movement into an Islamist insurgency,

seemed ready to march on the capital. That

prompted France to send in troops, who

pushed the rebels out of most cities but did

not defeat them entirely.

Mali’s insurgency

Quicksand in the Sahel

TIMBUKTU

Western countries are backing a government incapable of bringing peace

Middle East and Africa

Also in this section

40 Abortion in South Africa

40 Buhari’s next term

41 Jihadist chick lit

41 Israel’s migrant plan

42 Disintegrating Yemen

MAURITANIA

MALI

BURKINA

FASO

GUINEA

ALGERIA

Bamako

NIGER

GHANA

IVORY COAST

BENIN

Timbuktu

Toya Kano

Niger

TIMBUKTU

500 km

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