Malians are donating money to their military’s costly war against armed Islamic groups that have occupied the north of this impoverished nation. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Soumaila T. Diarra
BAMAKO , Feb 1 2013 (IPS)

Malians, including students and businesses owners, are donating money to their military’s costly war against armed Islamic groups that have occupied the north of this impoverished West African country and committed atrocities against local populations.

In an apparent drive to get citizens to open their wallets, the ruling Malian military announced on Jan. 23 that over 800,000 dollars had been received from private donors. The Malian army ousted the democratically elected civilian government last March. A deal was later brokered that allowed the head of the national assembly, Dioncounda Traoré, to be appointed as Mali’s interim president until new elections could be held.

Various fundraising drives have been underway across the country since Jan. 11 when Traoré launched a public appeal for financial support following the Islamists’ capture of Konna, a town in central Mali.

Since April 2012, northern Mali has been occupied by a coalition of armed groups composed of Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, and Ansar Dine, a Tuareg Islamist group.

The capture of Konna, a key strategic point for the Malian forces, resulted in the French Air Force’s intervention at Traoré’s request. The air assault enabled the Malian army to halt the Islamists’ advance into the south of the country. Konna has since been liberated and is under control of the Malian army. The French-led offensive has driven out AQIM and its allies from two other key towns in northeastern Mali.

“The day Konna was captured Malian school children and students were up all night,” Ibrahim Traoré, secretary general of the Mali Association for Pupils and Students, known by its French acronym as AEEM, told IPS.

Some AEEM members volunteered for military service, but after several hours of discussion the leaders of the association decided to fundraise, instead. The students unanimously agreed that two dollars should be levied from the grant that each student receives from the state.

A further dollar would be levied from the government’s book subsidy. To date, students have collected about 800,000 dollars, matching the amount the state received from private donors.

“The money will be deposited directly into the Malian army’s account by the National University Office for Students Allocations,” Ibrahim Traoré said.

The war has broken out against the backdrop of Mali’s harsh economic climate, the country is among the poorest countries in the world. In 2011, Mali ranked 175^th out of 187 countries on the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index.

The economic situation worsened after the suspension of donor aid following the March 2012 coup d’état. But many say that Mali can count on the support of its people.

Kassim Traoré, secretary general of the Organisation of Young Malian Reporters, told IPS that local journalists had contributed to the fundraising effort. “Journalists who make donations get registered on an open list at the Press Association; people have shown interest and are coming forward.”

Mali’s large diaspora have also been contributing. On Jan. 18, Habib Sylla, the president of the High Council for Malians Living Abroad, handed a 200,000-dollar cheque to the government.

“This is only the start of contributions from expatriate Malians, who will respond positively to the interim president’s national appeal following the capture of Konna,” Sylla told local journalists.

Similarly, businesses are also supporting the military. The Mali Textile Development Company handed in a cheque for 120,000 dollars.

“The company has also agreed to make three four-wheel-drive vehicles available to the army and 3,500 workers will donate blood for war casualties,” Salif Cissokho, the president of the company, told IPS.

In the southern Senegal village of Kael Bessel, female genital mutilation is no longer a taboo subject. Sexagenarian Fatoumata Sabaly speaks freely about female circumcision and girls’ rights with her friends.

“We’ve found it necessary to abandon cutting – abandoning the practice has advantages for women,” she told IPS. “Female circumcision has consequences such as haemorrhaging and it can even lead to death.”

In Senegal, like other West African countries, grandmothers like Sabaly are generally the ones who decide girls should be circumcised. A 2008 survey in Vélingara, also in the south of Senegal, found nearly 60 percent of older women supported female genital mutilation. But a 2011 survey carried out by the Grandmother Project found fully 93 percent of the same group are now against FGM.

The Grandmother Project, an international non-governmental organisation which promotes community dialogue about cultural issues, has helped organise regular meetings in thirty-odd villages around Vélingara, to enable people to discuss questions relating to local traditions and values, particularly “koyan” – the rite of passage associated with FGM.

Religious leaders, traditional chiefs, local officials, youth and elders all take part. The public debates allow people to talk openly about the pros and cons of their cultural practices.

“Since excision has more disadvantages than advantages, people are slowly abandoning the practice,” said Falilou Cissé, a community development advisor at the Grandmother Project in Vélingara.

“People have stopped the practice themselves. We have never asked people to stop it,” she stressed.

The meetings emphasise the educational role of grandmothers in African societies, but beyond that they help break the silence around taboo subjects like FGM.

“I was for excision, personally, like many people, but the public discussions have helped me to change my position, to accept that in our culture, there are some values to preserve and others to abandon,” Abdoulaye Baldé, the imam of a mosque in Vélingara, told IPS.

Today, thanks to Baldé’s participation in the meetings, people around Vélingara know that FGM is not a religious obligation for Muslims. The involvement of opinion leaders has had a huge impact on changing the outlook on excision among grandmothers.

Fatoumata Baldé, a nurse-midwife in Kandia, a village near Vélingara, told IPS that she couldn’t remember coming across a case of excision in the area since 2010.

“Previously, we were used to handling lots of cases of cutting gone bad at the clinic, because it’s done without medical assistance,” explained the nurse, also a regular participant in the debates.

Boubacar Bocoum, a Malian consultant who has studied FGM in several countries, sees in the Vélingara experience grounds for hope that the practice could be definitively abandoned across West Africa.

“The projects fighting against this practice generally target excisors, while it’s really a community problem,” he said. “If only one part of the community abandons it, the practice persists because the rest of the people are not engaged.”

According to a study published by the NGO Plan International in 2006, FGM is practiced throughout the West Africa region.

“In Guinea, in Sierra Leone and in Mali, practically all women are excised,” said the report. “In Niger and Ghana, the practice is limited to particular geographic areas and the national prevalence is less than 10 percent.”

Nearly 270,000 refugees have had to flee their homes since January, when conflict erupted in northern Mali. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Soumaila T. Diarra
BAMAKO, Nov 13 2012 (IPS)

West African heads of state have restated their determination that no member of Mali’s transitional government will be allowed to stand in the country’s next presidential election. Their statement has fed a growing debate over who should be allowed to run.

Mali is expected to hold presidential elections in 2013, following the recapturing of the north of the country, which is currently occupied by armed Islamist groups. To regain control of the north, the Economic Community of West African States, whose leaders met most recently on Nov. 11 in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, have made an initial commitment to deploy a 3,000-strong military force to Mali for a year.

The decision to make members of the interim government of Mali ineligible to contest next year’s election was reached during a meeting of the ECOWAS contact group on Mali, held on Jul. 7 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and forwarded to a process of national consultations in Mali for confirmation.  Earlier discussions by Malian political forces had already arrived at the same decision in April.

But during a cabinet meeting on Oct. 31, Mali’s interim prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, announced his intention to run for president, and blocked the release of a communique forbidding members of the transitional administration from presenting themselves as candidates. Questioned about this on national television on Nov. 10, he did not deny his intention to contest the election, saying only that it was too early to talk about it.

Malians are divided on whether the prime minister, the interim president, and other members of the transitional administration should be eligible. News of Diarra’s intention to run for president is a hot topic in the streets of Bamako, with a debate raging in the local press over whether he would need to resign his current post if he wants to stand.

“The prime minister is a citizen like all the others, so he has the right to present himself in the next elections,” Cheick Koné, an English teacher in a Bamako school, told IPS.

Many ordinary Malians feel those who don’t want the prime minister to stand are being unfair. “It’s not normal, because the prime minister is fighting hard against corruption,” Koné added. “And that’s why he must run for president.”

Oumou Berthé, a member of the National Civil Society Forum, believes that ECOWAS’s statement will help to clarify matters. “The fact that the heads of state of ECOWAS are repeating that members of the transitional government should not contest the next elections has relaunched the debate at the international level. And I think that the prime minister will have to take into account the concerns of the international community,” she told IPS.

The Malian prime minister is in charge of organising national consultations among the country’s political actors to resolve this question. But he is suspected by some political figures of manoeuvring with an eye to authorising his candidacy at the end of these meetings.

“The prime minister has realised that he loves power,” said Boubacar Diarra, an activist with the United Front to Safeguard Democracy and the Republic. “He wants to run for president, while those who supported him – like the members of the former junta – are not supportive of his candidacy.”

The United Front is a political coalition that opposed the Mar. 22 coup d’état which toppled the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré, and which has declined to participate in the consultations organised by the interim prime minister.

Dissatisfaction – both within the army and in the wider population – with the Touré government’s response to a January uprising in the north of the country was a key factor leading up to the coup, but an expanding cast of factions then took advantage of the instability and seized the northern part of the country.

Modibo Diarra, a 60-year-old astrophysicist who planned to run in presidential elections originally scheduled for April 2012, was appointed interim prime minister on Apr. 6 in a deal brokered between the coup plotters and ECOWAS.

The prime minister’s desire to stand for election appears to have created a crisis at the heart of the interim government. At the start of November, the minister for territorial administration, Moussa Sinko Coulibaly, who is in charge of organising the elections and is reputedly close to the former junta, told representatives of political parties he opposed Diarra’s candidacy.

“One can’t be part of this transitional government and have political ambitions. That won’t work, because in accepting that members of the transitional government can be in the race, we run the risk of distorting the game,” he said.

Responding to questions about the legitimacy of ruling that members of the transitional administration are ineligible, Mahamadou Sangaré, a political scientist at the University of Bamako, recalled the situation in 1992.

“There is a legal precedent from the transition organised by Amadou Toumani Touré in 1992, after the fall of the government of General Moussa Traoré. The president of that transition and his prime minister, Soumana Sacko, were not candidates in any election at the time,” he said.

“At the end of the day,” Sangaré continued, “the prime minister is in a difficult position, because he has convinced the United Front to participate in consultations on the one hand, while on the other, he has to achieve cohesion in the heart of the government on the question of ineligibility of members of the transition.”