Short-sighted Tuareg leadership dooms independence quest

An aside: These uranium operations became famous when President George W. Bush, in January 2003, accused Iraq of purchasing uranium from Niger for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Niger, was sent in 2002 to investigate the issue, and reported that there was no such purchase of uranium. CIA director George Tenet then persuaded President Bush to remove a reference to Niger’s uranium in a speech Bush made in Cincinnati in October 2002, but the charge that Iraq was buying “yellow cake” from Niger resurfaced in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message. Subsequent investigations established that there was never any Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger.

Back to the Tuareg. This past spring, the Tuareg appeared finally to achieve their dream of independence. Bolstered by thousands of armed Tuareg fighters who fled Libya after to collapse of the Qaddafi regime, and facing a weak and divided Mali government after a 22 March military coup that toppled the civilian government, a coalition consisting of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, known as the MNLA, and a much smaller Islamic fundamentalist group called Ansar Dine, easily handled the dispirited Mali military and in April declared the independence of Azawad. The break-away region, two-thirds of the territory of Mali, is the size of France, but is sparsely populated (between 1.6 and two million people).

No sooner had independence been announced that the coalition fell apart. There were two reasons for the break-up.

• The MNLA is a secular force, representing the traditionally moderate and religiously tolerant Tuareg people. Ansar Dine, on the other hand, is a fundamentalist al Qaeda affiliate intent on imposing strict Sharia law anywhere it can.
• The second divide has to do with goals. The MNLA wanted to break away from Mali and create an independent, Tuareg-dominated state. Ansar Dine opposed the division of Mali: they wanted to use Azawad as a base of operations from which to unify Mali under Islamic rule. Their vision then calls for cooperating with Islamic fundamentalists in neighboring state to impose harsh Sharia rule there as well.

The Islamists have won, at least so far. They have taken control of Azawad and imposed a strict Islamic law there. About 400,000 people – a fourth of the population – has already fled to south Mali as a result. As importantly, thousands of MNLA fighters have escaped to Mauritania.

The takeover of Azawad by Islamic fundamentalists has caused alarm in neighboring states – and in France and the United States. A coalition of Mali neighbors, led by Niger, has drawn up plans for a military intervention to dislodge the Islamists from Azawad. The plan has received the blessing of the African Union, and pledges of logistical support from France and the United States. The Niger-led group is now in behind-the-scenes negotiations at the UN Security Council for a vote authorizing the invasion (the condition France and the United States set for supporting the operation).

Mali, on whose behalf the intervention in Azawad will be launched, is largely a by-stander. The civilian Mali government is back in power after the short coup, but it is not yet functioning. The Mali military has largely disintegrated after the coup.

The big question, though, is: Where does the MNLA stand? What about its thousands of fighters, many of whom are now in Mauritania? Will they be part of the operation against the Islamists?

The answer appears to be a disappointing “No.”

The New York Times reports that in interviews over the weekend, several MNLA leaders said that despite considerable military assets at their disposal (the organization is said to have about 10,000 fighters) and familiarity with the challenging desert terrain, the Tuareg would not take up arms against the Islamists unless they – the Tuareg — received guarantees from outside powers that the operation to remove the Islamists from Azawd will not aim to reunify Mali, but rather to maintain Azawad’s independence as a separate, Tuareg-controlled nation.

The MNLA clarification of its position came as the pace of preparations for a military operation has quickened. Over the weekend, African leaders met in Ethiopia to discuss the issue, and on Sunday the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, traveled to Algeria for discussions on Mali. The New York Times notes that last week, Fabius told reporters in Paris that the use of force in northern Mali was likely “sooner or later.”

The MNLA officials are resentful of the fact that their April independence proclamation was universally ignored. One rebel official, Habaye Ag Ansari, said the rebels would take on the Islamists when “the international community accords a minimum of legitimacy to us.”

The MNLA leadership is short-sighted in the extreme, for three reasons:

• The neighboring states do not need the MNLA to remove Ansar Dine from Azawad. The Algerian military is a modern, formidable force in itself, and when joined with forces from Niger and Mauritania, the Islamists stand no chance. The Tuareg, by standing on the side-lines and letting others do the fighting, do not exactly endear themselves, or their cause, to their neighbors.
• Moreover, in the post-9/11 world, the last thing a national liberation movement – and the MNLA, with all its flaws, is a liberation movement – wants is to appear indifferent to the risk of al Qaeda-inspired terrorism. Ansar Dine, many of whose fighters come from Pakistan and Afghanistan, does not hide its goal of turning Azawad into a forward base for al Qaeda. At the African leaders’ meeting in Ethiopia this weekend, some leaders warned about Azawad turning into “Africanistan” (their word). What the MNLA leaders should have done instead was say that they will join with anyone to make sure the disputed territory does not become a haven for terrorists, telling the world that the future of the region will be discussed after the Islamists are defeated. The MNLA, by conditioning its support for an operation to rid Azawad of terrorists on guarantees that the operation will  not aim to reunify Mali, has practically guaranteed that this will be the end reslt of the invasion.
• As was the case with the Taliban in 2002, Ansar Dine has launched a campaign of cultural destruction, dismantling and defacing shrines and other sites, some hundreds of years old, which are central to Tuarge history and tradition. The cause of Azawad independence is not popular among the Tuareg populace in any event, and one way to make sure it loses whatever support it does have is for the MNLA to say nothing and do nothing in the face of a systematic destruction of cultural and historical sites so dear to the Tuareg people.

The MNLA coalition with Ansar Dine was the initial mistake. The inability of MNLA fighters to stand up to the Islamists was the second nail in the coffin of Tuareg independence. Now, the MNLA refusal to cooperate in removing the Islamists from Azawad in the face of hundreds of thousands of fleeing Tuareg refugees, and a campaign of cultural destruction against everything the Tuareg hold dear, will alienate the MNLA even more from the people it claims to represent, draining whatever support it did have for the cause of independence.

Viewing fifty years of Tuareg struggle for a measure of independence, culminating in this latest chapter, we may apply Eban’s adage to them: The Tuareg never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire