What is going on in Mali?

Mali is a country in Africa. It used not to make the news much. If people heard anything about it, it was usually to do with the surprising number of Malian musicians who have acquired some popularity in the western world - Tinariwen, Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabaté and so on. The country is also known to some as home of the Dogon people, who have strange folk practices some suggest indicate that they have had past contact with extra terrestrial civilisations. And it also has the town of Timbuktu, sometimes seen as the epitome of places that are far away from anywhere (people who live in Timbuktu probably do not see things like this).

Mali is also very poor but for a while anyway had a reputation as being fairly functional. It was something of a poster child for the idea that representative democracy can work in countries that are very poor and also predominantly Muslim. And the combination of its interesting music and desert location (partly combined in the hip Festival In The Desert) meant that it attracted a fair amount of tourism.

But, sadly, things have gone very wrong for Mali. In the north of the country, largely inhabited by the Touareg people, a separatist revolt sprung into being. Then the separatists were joined by a bunch of Muslim extremists allegedly sympathetic to al-Qaeda. The Islamists are led by one Iyad ag-Ghaly, a shady customer who in the past staged several Touareg particularist revolts in the north of Mali (revolts that typically ended with Mr ag-Ghaly being made a member of Mali's government). He seems now to have switched effortlessly from Touareg separatism to Islamic extremism.

The Islamists largely swallowed up their Touareg separatist allies, establishing a zone in the north where they could apply their particular no-fun variety of Islam. Back in Bamako, Mali's capital, members of the Malian army staged a coup. The coup was ostensibly a protest against the government's weak response to the northern revolt, but its main effect was to paralyse the Malian state and lead to the rebels further expanding their area of control.

These days military regimes are very much out of fashion and foreign intervention (by Mali's neighbours) was threatened to crush the putschists in the capital. That was averted when they agreed to hand over power to an interim president, pending elections, but that still left the rebels in control of the north.

The rebels then proceeded to display their badass no-fun credentials by attacking and destroying the shrines and graves of various Muslim saints in their zone of control. Islamists destroying Muslim shrines might seem strange to western readers, but the rebels seem to be inspired by the kind of austere Islam popular in Saudi Arabia, where shrines and saints are seen as unacceptably pagan and contrary to "real Islam". One might see them as Muslim equivalents of those Calvinists in 16th century Europe who went around smashing up stained glass windows and Catholic religious iconography.

This might have chugged along as one of those conflicts you read about in faraway countries were it not for the fear some people have that if the rebels were to take over Mali they would turn the country into a giant al-Qaeda training camp. Or maybe even if they did not take over the whole country, they would turn the huge zone they control into an al-Qaeda camp larger than metropolitan France. There was also the fear that the rebels might spread Islamic extremism to Mali's neighbours. None of this seemed like an appealing prospect. Mali's west African neighbours started gearing up for intervention at some point in the future, as Mali's own military did not seem to be up to the job of crushing the rebels. The French government also gave the impression that it might be interesting in helping to defeat the rebels, albeit also at some indeterminate point in the future.

That was the situation just a week or two back, but now suddenly France is at war in Mali. Its air force is attacking the rebels in the north of the country and French troops have started arriving in Bamako. This sudden intervention seems to have been triggered by a new rebel advance that made it look like they were about to overrun the south of the country. The French intervention looks like it was almost a panicked response to stop that happening.

The situation now is a bit unclear. Although French aeroplanes have been pounding the rebels, they still managed to capture the town of Diabaly, leaving them 250 miles from the Malian capital. That makes it look like they could just possibly overrun the capital before enough French troops arrive to stop them. That is probably unlikely - the combination of air power and the superior training and equipment of French ground troops will block the rebels, but it does leave France stuck in what could be an ongoing conflict with no obvious end in sight.

More:

Hollande’s War Aims Remain Unclear (Irish Times)

Malian rebels overrun garrison town and advance towards capital (Guardian)

Mali Crisis: Who’s Who (BBC)

Iyad Ag Ghaly - Mali's Islamist leader (BBC)

The Islamists - our new friends?

I posted over on the Dublin School about something I read in an online newsletter, which was relevant to both the Spy School course on Political Islam some of us are taking and also, by extension, my last post. I suspect that even less people read the Dublin School than read Hunting Monsters, so I am going to redo the post here.

Basically, I read the latest issue of the CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch newsletter, put out by the Centre for European Policy Studies. The editorial discusses an emerging dialogue between Europe and Islamists of the Middle East & North Africa. On both sides the governments are being bypassed, with oppositional Islamist groups from the Arab world talking to think tanks and policy oriented NGOs. The discussions seem interesting, partly because they are happening at all, indicating that in coming years the Arab authoritarians will find it harder to prop themselves up with European support. At the same time, it is striking how frank the parties to this dialogue are about the fundamental differences in outlook that divide them.

The article also reproduces a piece by Dr. Saad el-Deen al-Katany, the parliamentary leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in which he sets forth the need for dialogue between Islamists and the West. I found this interesting because Dr. Al-Katany is attempting to drive a wedge between the West and the Arab world dictators it backs, calling on us prove we are not lying when we say we love democracy. Again, it looks like the Islamists are seeing the advantages of talking our language back to us.

There is also a reprinted interview with Belarus President, Alexander Lukashenko, one of the world's great scary leaders.

You can download the newsletter or subscribe to updates here: CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch

Arab World Despotism

So these days I am taking this course on Political Islam, with the course focussing on Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa, an arc stretching from Morocco to Iran*. Thus far it seems quite interesting. I am doing it more because I am interested in the politics of the Arab World rather than in Islamism as such.

One thing that came up in the last class was the subject of how undemocratic the regimes in the region are. If you look at the area covered, almost all of the countries are places where ultimate political power resides with unaccountable elites. This is in contrast with the world generally, where democratic politics of some sort or another is considerably more common. In the world generally there is an association between rising national income levels and democratic regimes, but the Middle East and North Africa is far less democratic than its income levels would predict, with the richest countries in the region being as comedically undemocratic as the poorest.

There are, of course, a couple of regimes with democratic elements. The Palestinian Authority seems to run elections that meet the highest international standards and see turnover of office holding, but it is not a state and its elected leaders do not actually rule anything of substance. Lebanon has elections all the time, but its consociational setup means that the same clique of family bosses are always in power. Turkey in many ways looks like it has democratic politics, though there is the unfortunate question of Kurdish oppression and the fact that the army still sees itself as having the right to sack the government, even if it has not chose to do so for a while. Israel has a lot of the features one expects for a democratic regime - parties, elections, free press, robust political argument, etc. - but it has its own democratic problems: firstly, the country rules over a huge subject population to whom it gives no political rights, and secondly, within its own citizenry those not from the dominant ethnic-religious group are subject to degrees of discrimination and marginalisation.

It is interesting to consider why the Middle East and North Africa seem so prone to authoritarian rule. One has to be careful of lazy explanations, particularly when you consider the differences between the countries (oil rich Qatar with its tiny population, oil poor Egypt with its teeming masses) and the different regimes that rule the countries. One possible cause can be discounted - there does not seem to be in practice a general Muslim problem with democracy. If you exclude the Middle East and North Africa the countries of the Islamic world are apparently more democratic than their income levels would suggest.

So, what has kept the authoritarian regimes in power, in a world where since 1989 there has been considerable pressure to move to democracy? Our lecturer suggests that the regimes have maintained themselves by playing their opponents off against each other. Some oppositional figures are simply bought off with plush government jobs or hard cash, but more subtly the regimes can throw minor concessions to their more old-school liberal-secular-nationalist opponents as a way of turning them into allies against the Islamists. Meanwhile, with the Islamists the main opposition forces, the regimes can always face down Western pressure to democratise by scaring the West with the prospect of democratic elections leading to mad bearded clerics occupying the Presidential palace and organising the country for Jihad against Israel, Europe, the USA, and anyone they take a dislike to.

I find this theory interesting, as it suggests that it is Western disdain for the region's main oppositional force that keeps the authoritarians in power. Certainly, when the generals in Algeria annulled their country's last free election and banned the party that won it, the world community somehow managed to see the election winners, and not the generals, as the enemies of democracy.

I am curious as to how this kind of thing will progress in the future. Maybe the mainstream Islamists will try to create a new friendly image for themselves and to cultivate alliances with the secular opposition while trying to reassure the West that they are not maniacs. Or maybe they will continue to grow their popularity in society at large to such an extent that the authoritarian regimes simply cannot sustain themselves any longer and collapse in a manner reminiscent of the Shah's. Or maybe the current situation is indefinitely sustainable. Time will tell.

*as you and I know, Arab countries do not make up all of those in the Middle East and North Africa. Iran is not an Arab country (though it has a small Arab minority). Neither is Turkey. Israel and the territory it rules has a large Arab population but a (declining) non-Arab majority.