Soldiers seize two leaders in strife-torn Mali
President had faced months of ouster calls
BAMAKO, Mali — Soldiers detained Mali’s president and prime minister Tuesday after surrounding a residence and firing into the air in a possible coup attempt after several months of demonstrations calling for President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s ouster.
The soldiers moved freely through the streets of Bamako, making it clear that they were in control of the capital city. There was no comment from the troops, who hailed from the same military barracks in Kati where an earlier coup originated more than eight years ago.
African Union chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat condemned the “forced detention” of Malian leaders and called for their immediate release. He rejected “any attempt at the unconstitutional change of government.”
The developments were condemned by the United States, the United Nations, the regional bloc known as ECOWAS and former colonizer France, which with a U.N. peacekeeping mission has worked since 2013 to stabilize the West African nation.
U.N. Secretary-general Antonio Guterres sought “the immediate restoration of constitutional order and rule of law,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
Tuesday’s political upheaval threatened to jeopardize security in Mali, where the 2012 coup allowed an Islamic insurgency to take hold amid a power vacuum.
But news of Keita’s detention was met with celebration throughout the capital by anti-government protesters who took to the streets in June to demand that the president step down three years before the end of his final term.
The detention was a dramatic change of fortune for Keita, who sev
en years earlier emerged from a field of more than two dozen candidates to win Mali’s first democratic election post-coup in a landslide with more than 77 percent of the vote.
Regional mediators from ECOWAS failed to bridge the impasse between Keita’s government and opposition leaders, creating anxiety about another military-led change of power.
Then on Tuesday, soldiers in the garrison town of Kati took weapons from the armory at the barracks and detained senior military officers. Anti-government protesters cheered the soldiers’ actions, some even setting fire to a building that belongs to Mali’s justice minister in the capital.
Hours earlier, Prime Minister Boubou Cisse urged the soldiers to put down their arms.
“There is no problem whose solution cannot be found through dialogue,” he said in a communique.
But armed men began detaining people in the capital of Bamako too, including the country’s finance minister, Abdoulaye Daffe.
Keita, who has tried to meet protesters’ demands through a series of concessions since the demonstrations began, has also enjoyed support from France and other Western allies.
“The U.S. is opposed to all unconstitutional changes of government whether in the streets or by security forces,” tweeted J. Peter Pham, the State Department’s special envoy for the Sahel region.
Keita has faced criticism of his government’s handling of the Islamic insurgency engulfing the country once praised as a model of democracy in the region. A wave of deadly attacks in the north last year prompted the government to close its most vulnerable outposts as part of a reorganization aimed at stemming the losses.
Regional mediators have urged Keita to share power in a unity government, but those overtures were rejected by opposition leaders who said they would not stop short of Keita’s ouster.