[News] Mali - Only the Struggle of the People Will Free the Country

Fri Aug 28 00:24:50 EDT 2020

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/34-mali-coup/ Only the
Struggle of the People Will Free the Country: The Thirty-Fifth Newsletter
(2020).
August 27, 2020 - Vijay Prashad
------------------------------

Português
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/newsletterissue/35-golpe-mali/>

Amadou Sanogo (Mali), Sans-Tete (2016).

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<http://thetricontinental.org/>.

On 18 August, soldiers from the Kati barracks outside Bamako (Mali) left
their posts, arrested president Ibrahim Boubacar Këita (IBK) and prime
minister Boubou Cissé, and set up the National Committee for the Salvation
of the People (CNSP). In effect, these soldiers conducted a coup d’état.
This is the third coup in Mali, after the military coups of 1968 and 2012.
The colonels who conducted the coup – Malick Diaw, Ismaël Wagué, Assimi
Goïta, Sadio Camara, and Modibo Koné – have said that they will relinquish
power as soon as Mali has been able to organise a credible election. These
are men who have worked closely with military forces from France to Russia,
and unlike the coup leaders of 2012 – headed by Captain Amadou Sanogo –
they are sophisticated diplomats; they have already demonstrated their
skill in manoeuvring the media.

Ibrahima Kebe of L’association politique Faso Kanu said, ‘IBK dug his grave
with his own teeth’. A veteran politician, IBK came to power in 2013 when
Mali had lost its sovereignty due to a French-led military intervention
called Operation Serval. The French claimed that they intervened to protect
Mali from an Islamist onslaught in the north of the country. But, in fact,
the spur for Mali’s deterioration comes from a range of factors, not the
least of which was the decision of France and the United States – through
NATO – to destroy Libya in early 2011. The war on Libya destabilised the
situation in Africa’s Sahel region, where countries – already weakened by
economic turbulence and International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure – now
found themselves unable to fend off French and US military interventions.

[image: Malick Sidibé (Mali), Les Retrouvailles au bord du fleuve Niger,
1974.]

Malick Sidibé (Mali), Les Retrouvailles au bord du fleuve Niger, 1974.

Mali won its independence in 1960 with great promise, as its first
president – Modibo Keïta – led it with a socialist and pan-African stance;
the Keïta years were marked by import-substitution economic policies and an
honest administration that attempted to build public sector delivery of
social goods. But the country was dependent on one crop (cotton) for more
than half its GDP, it had little processing and industry, and it had almost
no sources of energy (all the oil is imported, and the hydroelectric plants
at Kayes and Sotuba are modest). Poor soil and lack of access to water in
the northern part of Mali put pressure on agriculture; Mali’s distance from
the sea makes it hard to take its agricultural products to the market.
Further, the cotton subsidy regime in both Europe and the United States
strike at the heart of Mali’s attempt to develop its already dismal
economy. A coup in 1968 – backed by the imperialists – removed Keïta (who
died nine years later in prison); the new government with the uncanny name
of the Military Committee for National Liberation, set aside the socialist
and pan-African policies, persecuted trade unionists and communists, and
delivered Mali back into the French orbit. The 1973 drought and the 1980
entry of the IMF set the country into a cycle of crises, which culminated
in the March 1991 democratic upsurge. Those street protests – magnificent
in their enthusiasm – led to the victory of the Alliance for Democracy in
Mali (ADEMA) led by Alpha Oumar Konaré.

Konaré’s government inherited a criminal debt of over $3 billion. Sixty
percent of Mali’s fiscal receipts went towards debt servicing. Salaries
could not be paid; nothing could be done. Konaré, who began as a Marxist in
his youth but came to office as a liberal, begged the US for debt
forgiveness, to no avail. The more Mali’s government went into debt, the
less able was the government to hire an honest bureaucracy, and so the
government slipped deep into corruption. This was acceptable to France and
the US, since a corrupt government meant easier interlocutors for the
transnational gold mining firms – such as Canada’s Barrick Gold and the
UK’s Hummingbird Resources – to siphon off Mali’s gold reserves at low
prices. Behind everything that happens in Mali is its gold reserves, the
third largest in the world. A Reuters story
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mali-security-mining/malis-gold-miners-carry-on-digging-despite-coup-shares-hit-idUSKCN25F0ZM>
that came out a day after the coup had the reassuring headline: *Mali’s
gold miners carry on digging despite coup*.

[image: Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali), Non à la Charia au Sahel, 2013.]

Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali), Non à la Charia au Sahel, 2013.

Since its independence, Mali has struggled to integrate
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/28/what-s-happening-in-mali/> all its
vast territory – twice the size of France. The Tuareg communities began a
rebellion in the *idurar n Ahaggar* mountains in 1962 demanding autonomy
and refusing to honour the borders that divide their lands between Algeria,
Libya, Niger, and Mali. A century-long deterioration of the land around the
desert, magnified by the droughts of 1968, 1974, 1980, and 1985, devastated
their pastoral way of life, sending many Tuareg to seek their livelihood in
the cities of Mali and in Libya’s military as well as its informal labour
force. Peace agreements signed between Mali and the Tuareg rebels in 1991
and 2006 fell apart due to the weakness of Mali’s military (salaries for
soldiers were held down due to IMF pressure) and due to the arrival in the
area of various Islamist groups expelled from Algeria.

These Islamists – the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM),
the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb (AQIM) – coalesced and took over northern Mali in 2012-13. These
groups – notably AQIM – had become part of the trans-Sahara smuggling
networks (cocaine, arms, humans), and raised revenue through kidnapping and
protection rackets. The threat posed by these groups was used by France and
the United States to garrison the Sahel countries from Mauritania to Chad.
In May 2012, the French approved a plan to intervene in the region, which
was hidden behind the fig leaf of UN Resolution 2085 of December 2012. The
G5 Sahel agreement yoked the countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali,
Mauritania, and Niger into the security agenda of France and the United
States. French troops entered the old colonial base at Tessalit (Mali),
while the US built the world’s largest drone base
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-war-machine-already-death-march-across-african-continent/>
in Agadez (Niger). They built a wall across the Sahel – south of the Sahara
– as Europe’s effective southern border
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-war-machine-already-death-march-across-african-continent/>,
compromising the sovereignty of these African states.

[image: Penda Diakité (Mali), Bouana (2019).]

Penda Diakité (Mali), Bouana (2019).

Protests against Ibrahim Boubacar Këita’s re-election in March 2020
escalated with trade unions, political parties, and religious groups taking
to the streets. Media attention focused on the charismatic Salafi preacher
Mahmoud Dicko (sensationally called
<https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/07/10/l-imam-dicko-peut-offrir-une-porte-de-sortie-a-la-france-au-mali_6045833_3212.html>
the ‘Malian Khomeini’); but Dicko represented only a part of the energy on
the streets. On 5 June, these organisations – such as the Mouvement espoir
Mali Koura and the Front pour de sauvegarde de la démocratie, along with
Dicko’s association – called for a mass protest at Bamako’s Independence
Square. They formed the Movement of 5 June – Rally of Patriotic Forces
(M5-RFP), which continued to pressure IBK to resign. State violence
(including 23 killed) did not stop the protests, which called not only for
the removal of IBK, but also for the end of colonial interference and for a
total transformation of Mali’s system. M5-RFP had planned a rally on
Saturday, 22 August; the military coup took place on Tuesday, 18 August.
But the energy of the streets has not dissipated, and the coup leaders know
that.

France, the United States, the United Nations, the African Union, and the
regional bloc (Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS) have
condemned the coup and called – in one way or another – for a return to the
status quo; this is unacceptable to the people. L’association politique
Faso Kanu has proposed
<https://www.facebook.com/associationfasokanu.ml/videos/vb.103014601522989/2648075665406539/?type=2&theater>
a three-year political transition driven by the new leaders produced by
M5-RFP, with transitional bodies created outside the formal state structure
to strengthen the country’s depleted sovereignty. ‘Only the street of the
people’, they write, ‘will free the country’.

In 1970, the South African Marxist Ruth First – who was assassinated on 17
August 1982 by the apartheid regime – published *Barrel of a Gun: Political
Power in Africa and the Coup d’État*. Looking at a variety of coups,
including the 1968 coup in Mali, First argued that the military officers in
post-colonial Africa had a range of political views, and many of them came
to power to redeem the national liberation dreams of their people. ‘The
facility of coup logistics and the audacity and arrogance of the coup
makers’, First wrote, ‘are equalled by the inanity of their aims, at least
as many choose to state them’. There is no indicator that the current coup
leaders in Mali have such an orientation; regardless of their own character
and their own external backers, they will have to face a population that is
once more eager for a break from the colonial past and from the miseries of
poverty.

Imperialism marks the living history of the global south, as does the
persistent resistance against it. Our third call for the Anti-Imperialist
Poster Exhibitions  <https://antiimperialistweek.org/en/posters/>is on the
theme of ‘Imperialism’. The exhibition will be launched in conjunction with
the International Week <https://antiimperialistweek.org/en/> of
Anti-Imperialist Struggle’s actions planned in October 2020. We invite you
to share the call or to submit art to it.

Also please read the review of the *Neoliberalism* exhibition
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/review-of-anti-imperialist-poster-exhibition-ii-neoliberalism>
written
by the curatorial collective of the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition.

‘We paint because screaming is not enough and
neither crying nor rage is enough.
We paint because we believe in the people and
because we will conquer defeat’
(adapted from the poem, *Why we sing*, by Mario Benedetti).

Warmly, Vijay.
*I am Tricontinental:* Pindiga Ambedkar (*@ambhisden
<https://twitter.com/ambhisden>*), researcher. Delhi Office:

I have completed the field work part of a research project, for a trade
union, on garment workers in India’s export zones. I am also working on
developing the dossier on People’s Polyclinics
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-25-polyclinics/> into a short
book that will cover the health initiatives taken up by the communist
movement in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
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