NEW LEFT REVIEW talks to OUSMANE SIDIBE
One of the most striking, yet under-remarked, consequences of the nato intervention in Libya has been the turbulence it precipitated on the other side of the Sahara. In the wake of Gaddafi’s fall, heavily armed Tuareg émigrés returned from Libya to the north of Mali, sparking an insurgency in early 2012. A succession of crises ensued: the toppling of the government in Bamako by a military coup in April was followed by the seizure of the country’s vast northern half by a combination of Tuareg nationalist and Islamist forces. In January 2013, François Hollande launched Operation Serval, supposedly targeting ‘terrorists’ in the north of the former French colony. In July a un ‘stabilization mission’, drawn largely from other West African countries, also deployed to Mali to provide security for hastily organized presidential elections—held in July and August, while some 500,000 Malians remained displaced, more than a third of whom had fled the country’s borders. Although triggered by the overturn in Libya, this dramatic sequence of events—traumatic, for a proudly sovereign country once in the vanguard of pan-Africanism—testifies to a deeper fragility of the post-colonial state in Mali. Here, legal scholar Ousmane Sidibe discusses his country’s trajectory since independence in 1960, characterizing the legacies of its rulers, the outcomes of structural adjustment in the 1980s and of democratization since the 1990s. In Sidibe’s diagnosis, a number of damaging dynamics—spreading corruption, moral and material corrosion of the armed forces, malfunctioning of public institutions—led to a profound internal decay of the Malian state, leaving it vulnerable to external shocks. With the installation of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in the Koulouba presidential palace in September 2013, and the election of a new parliament in November–December, the ‘post-conflict transition’ envisaged by Paris and the Malian elite seemed to be proceeding as planned—even as France launched a second military intervention in its ex-colonial bailiwick, in the Central African Republic. Yet fighting between French and Salafist forces continues in the northeast of Mali, and serious inter-ethnic tensions persist, under the guns of minusma and Tuareg nationalists alike. If the crisis that exploded so visibly in Mali in 2012 had a long fuse, its after-effects are likely to be no less durable. (Eds. New Left Review)
Can you tell us something about your background and formation?
I was born in 1954 in the town of Kirchamba in the north of Mali, around sixty kilometres from Timbuktu. My family were pastoralists by tradition, from the Fulani ethnic group. I completed my schooling in Timbuktu, and then went to the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in the capital, Bamako, specializing in law. After graduating in the late 1970s I went to Bordeaux for my doctorate, before returning to Mali, where I initially spent two years working on a rural development project near the border with Mauritania, and ultimately went back to the ena to teach. I was director of studies there for six years, in 1985–91, and then after the democratization of Mali in the early 1990s, I twice served as Minister of Labour under President Konaré: the first time in 1994—I resigned after a massive devaluation of the currency brought a political crisis—and again in 1997–2000. Since then I’ve served as Commissioner for Institutional Development, working to coordinate reforms to public policy and institutions across a variety of spheres.
How does the ethnic make-up of your home region compare to that of Mali as a whole?
In the north, in Timbuktu and Gao, the majority is Songhai, with a large Fulani minority, and smaller numbers of Tuaregs and Arabs. The further south you go, towards Mopti, the larger the proportion of Fulani. In the country as a whole, though, the largest ethnic group is the Bambara, who make up perhaps 35 per cent of the total, which is around 14 million. Together with the Soninke and Malinke, also part of the Mande language family, they account for more than half the population. The Fulani are around 15 per cent, then there are the Senufo, the Dogon and the Songhai, each between 7 and 9 per cent, and a number of smaller ethnic groups. The Tuaregs and Moors each contribute between 1 and 2 per cent.
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