Twin tragedies in North Africa: Reading between the lines

Why the people in Mali and Algeria and the truth about Western engagement there are casualties of the latest developments

(First published in Foreign Policy Journal on January 30, 2013)

The brazen attack on the Amenas gas field in Algeria by the militants has come to a bloody end. Meanwhile the French adventure to crush the allegedly Jihadist rebellion in the neighboring Mali is in full swing. An effort to pursue and eliminate the culprits behind each of the troubles can only be welcome because, after all, lives and property are dear to everyone. So, we should pray for the success of the Algerian regime and the French-Malian marriage so that the culprits in both countries can be crushed and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what the worldwide coverage of the two developments suggests.

 

But is that all that matters in each case? More specifically, who is the real culprit behind the tragic developments? At first glance, the armed rebels in both countries look to be the incontrovertible culprits. The bulk of coverage across the world reinforces this view. The trouble is, even a small attempt to read between the lines of the coverage in each case makes us question the whole narrative of letting French-Malian-Algerian regimes sort out the issues.

 

You are deaf and illiterate if you didn’t hear or read about the tragedy that unfolded in Amenas where scores of foreign workers were brutally killed by the rebels. But what you most likely missed is the tragic suffering of millions of Malians resulting from the renewed wave of violence that has become the excuse for brazen military intervention by the former colonists. What even fewer of us are aware of is the fact that the avalanche of disasters in Mali was triggered by the March 22 coup led by US-trained army captain Amadou Sanogo. As early as in August 2, well before the current French adventure in Mali, the reputed analyst Ramzy Baroud has impeccably argued how the chain of events in Mali were likely to culminate in foreign (American or French) military intervention.

 

Coming to the real motive of the French intervention in Mali, Seumas Milne makes convincing arguments in this article in The Guardian:

 

France is in any case the last country to sort out Mali’s problems, having created quite a few of them in the first place as the former colonial power, including the legacy of ethnic schism within artificial borders – as Britain did elsewhere. The French may have been invited in by the Malian government. But it’s a government brought to power by military coup last year, not one elected by Malians – and whose troops are now trading atrocities and human rights abuses with the rebels.

Further, the statement of the French president Hollande that his country will be in Mali as long as it takes to “defeat terrorism in that part of Africa” is also worth reading between the lines. Even the analysts in the mainstream media who have not lost touch with reality agree that most other military interventions in the past, while rhetorically aimed to annihilate the terrorists, have only yielded the opposite results. The phrase ‘as long as it takes’ in the sentence assumes even more significance in the present context. If the triumph of feuding rebel groups in Malian cities and villages (many of which are ragtag compared to well-equipped French army and the whole insurgency in the region was catalyzed by the French-led ouster of Gaddhafi in Libya through ‘humanitarian bombing’) can open the conduit for long term military presence in this strategically important continent, how could the French resist the temptation to stay there as long as possible?