Brutal jihadists still have the hearts and minds of Mali’s forgotten towns
It should have been a straightforward enough question to answer: would you rather live under Mali’s democratically elected, Un-backed government or the jihadists who have brought terror to great swathes of the country?
Worryingly, for the Western effort to curtail an Islamist insurgency rapidly spreading through Africa’s Sahel region, the response from the stevedores on the bank of the Niger near Timbuktu was at best equivocal.
Granted, they said, the jihadists had been brutal in 2012 after they hijacked a separatist rebellion to seize Mali’s most well-known town. A time when it was too dangerous to smoke, let alone talk to a girl, in public, the younger men recalled. Bocar Osman, who was 18 at the time, remembered being given 100 lashes for brawling.
Yet there were upsides. Unlike the police, Mohammed Cissé said, the jihadists weren’t greedy: they almost never shook you down. There was almost no crime; chopping off hands is an effective deterrent against theft.
“Now there are bandits everywhere,” Mr Cissé grumbled, as the men around him sucked their teeth and nodded their heads.
In 2013, a French-led military force drove jihadists affiliated to al Qaeda from Timbuktu and other towns.
Seven years later, however, the jihadists still roam freely through northern Mali and have expanded their reach into other regions.
Despite the presence of 4,500 French troops – with 600 more on the way – and a separate, 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force known as Minusma, militant groups have also spread their insurgency into other states of the Sahel, a vast region on the southern fringe of the Sahara.
Even without direct control of a single significant town, the militants have managed to convince many people in northern Mali that they better represent their interests than the government in far-off Bamako, Mali’s capital, 600 miles to the south.
Communities in northern Mali argue they have been marginalised by successive governments in Bamako for decades. Where the state has not been absent entirely, it has been predatory. Policemen, soldiers, judges and officials are accused of being more interested in what they can take out of northern Mali than in benefiting locals, either through bribery and extortion or involvement in Saharan drugs, weapons and people-smuggling networks that cross the area.
The jihadists have also engaged in smuggling but have used the proceeds to invest in building Koranic schools and sharia courts that help to entrench their ideology and present themselves as legitimate alternatives to the state.
The sharia courts are popular, according to Drissa Traore, who heads the Bamako office of the International Federation for Human Rights.
“People think that sharia is more rapid, less corrupt and delivered in a manner that people can understand,” he said. “It is also less costly.”
While trying to fend off repeated attacks on its bases and mount a dangerous operation to protect civilians, Minusma – to be bolstered by the arrival of 250 British soldiers in the
‘They want things like roads and education. The battle will never be won through military means’
coming months – has done what it can to replace the void left by the state. It has re-tarred the road from the Niger to Timbuktu, for example, while in Gao, another former jihadist town, 200 miles to the east, it helps to fund women’s agricultural collectives.
Such efforts, says Riccardo Maia, Minusma’s head of office in Timbuktu, will prove more important than winning battles in ending the crisis.
“The jihadists have gained the hearts and minds of many people,” he said. “But what people are asking for are basic social services; they are not asking for jihadist services. They want things like roads and education. The battle will never be won through military means.”
Yet Minusma cannot supplant the state, it can only complement it. Even now, neither Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, Mali’s president, nor other Sahelian leaders are making a serious effort to address frustrations in marginalised parts of their states, analysts say.
“In all countries in the region, you can see economic and social progress in capitals and other cities, but not when you leave the cities,” said Gilles Yabi, the director of Wathi, a West African think tank. “If you go to more remote areas, nothing has changed for 20 or 30 years. You don’t have leaders in the region who seem genuinely to appreciate the stakes.”