President resigns after coup in Mali
BAMAKO — Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita announced his resignation late Tuesday on state television, hours after mutinous soldiers fired shots into the air outside his home before detaining him and the prime minister.
The dramatic development comes after several months of regular demonstrations calling for Keita to step down from power three years before his final term was due to end.
Speaking on national broadcaster ORTM just before midnight, a distressed Keita said his resignation was effective immediately. A banner across the bottom of the television screen referred to him as the “outgoing president.”
“I wish no blood to be shed to keep me in power,” Keita said. “I have decided to step down from office.”
He also announced that his government and the National Assembly would be dissolved, certain to further the country’s turmoil amid an eight-year Islamic insurgency and the growing coronavirus pandemic.
Keita, who was democratically elected in 2013 and re-elected five years later, was left with few choices after the soldiers earlier in the day seized weapons from the armory in the garrison town of Kati and then advanced on the capital of Bamako.
There was no immediate comment from the troops early Wednesday.
Keita’s support had tumbled amid criticism of his government’s handling of an Islamic insurgency that has engulfed the country once praised as a model of democracy in the region.
The military has taken a beating over the past year from Islamic State and al-Qaida-linked groups. A wave of particularly deadly attacks in the north in 2019 prompted the government to close its most vulnerable outposts as part of a reorganization aimed at stemming the losses.
Tuesday’s developments already had been condemned by the African Union, the United States, and the regional bloc known as ECOWAS that had been trying to mediate Mali’s political crisis. Former colonizer France and the United Nations, which has maintained a peacekeeping mission in Mali since 2013, also had expressed alarm ahead of Keita’s speech.
But news of Keita’s detention was met with celebration throughout the capital by antigovernment protesters who first took to the streets back in June to demand that the president step down three years before the end of his final term.
“All the Malian people are tired — we have had enough,” one demonstrator said.
Regional mediators from ECOWAS
had failed in recent weeks to bridge the impasse between Keita’s government and opposition leaders, creating mounting anxiety about another militaryled change of power.
Then on Tuesday, soldiers Kati took weapons from the armory at the barracks and detained senior military officers.
It marked a repeat of the events leading up to the 2012 coup, which unleashed years of chaos when the ensuing power vacuum allowed Islamic extremists to seize control of northern towns. Ultimately a French-led military operation ousted the jihadists, but they merely regrouped and expanded their reach during Keita’s presidency into central Mali.