The Malian flag flies again in Kidal ”. Quite a symbol, because for nine years, this is the first time that the national flag of Mali has flown over the governorate of the city of northern Mali. And for good reason, Kidal is the stronghold of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), the main coalition of former Tuareg independence rebels who fought the Malian forces in the North from 2012. The CMA signed in 2015 with the government of Bamako and pro-government armed groups a peace accord, says Algiers. But there are many delays in its implementation. This is the first time in five years that the agreement monitoring committee has met in this city, after many postponements. For Bamako’s international partners, the implementation of this peace agreement is the essential condition for ending the crisis in Mali and the Sahel. Because Kidal still remains under the control of the old rebellion. And the Malian state had hardly set foot between May 2014 and February 2020 after the army was driven out with heavy losses.
Move the lines
A few days before Thursday’s meeting, the CMA had sown trouble by announcing the creation of a defense zone under its headquarters in northern Mali. Since 2012 and the outbreak of independence and then jihadist rebellions in the North, Mali has been plunged into a multifaceted turmoil that has left thousands dead, civilians and combatants, despite the support of the international community and the intervention of forces from the UN, African and French. Despite the signing of this agreement by the ex-rebels, Mali remains plagued by the actions of groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) organization, intercommunal violence and trafficking of all kinds. This violence has spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. But that was without counting on the determination of the transitional authorities. From the beginning they have tried to move the lines regarding the Algiers peace agreement. Beyond the political or technical blockages, the government of President Bah N’Daw has shown its willingness to mark Kidal’s membership in the national group. At the end of January, a ministerial delegation went there for the first time since the putsch that overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta on August 18.
Blockages on both sides
Concretely, much remains to be done, because the signatory parties do not agree on certain provisions, in particular on the issues of the integration of ex-rebels into the defense forces and that of greater autonomy for the regions while that the flags of Azawad, named after the state claimed by the separatists before the signing of the peace agreement, regularly float in the city. While it does not evoke federalism, much less autonomy, the agreement, negotiated by Algiers, leader of the international mediation of the process, nonetheless recognizes Azawad as “a human, sociocultural and memorial reality. symbolism shared by different populations of the North ”. In all cases, these objectives are considered as the indispensable corollary to the military response. By sitting in Kidal, the monitoring committee sends the message that Malian sovereignty must also apply here while two thirds of this vast country escape the authority of the central state. During the meeting, the Malian Minister of Reconciliation, Colonel Ismaël Wagué, gave some possible solutions to the problem of DDR (Disarmament-demobilization-reintegration). He said that several ex-combatants from the northern regions of Mali were being trained to integrate the reconstituted Malian armed forces when the time came. The head of the UN mission also spoke of the deployment, next according to him in Kidal, of the battalion incorporating former rebels, as well as the construction of a dam to constitute water reserves in this city which does not also has no access to electricity.
A Western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity in Bamako warned against the fact that this committee should not constitute a “trompe-l’oeil where form takes precedence over substantive progress”. he says, quoted by Agence France-Presse. Attaye Ag Mohamed, a representative in this body of the Coordination of Azawad Movements, expressed the desire to go “beyond the symbol”. “For the first time at a [comité de suivi], there were concrete proposals ”, he said, in the fields of education, health or even in the involvement of women in the follow-up of the agreement.
In an obvious desire to demonstrate the rallying behind the agreement, the committee brought together not only the signatory parties, including the former rebel and pro-government armed groups and Algerian mediators including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of mediation, Sabri Boukadoum, but also representatives of the five permanent member countries of the UN Security Council, several Malian ministers and the head of the UN mission (Minusma) Mahamat Saleh Annadif. “This is the first time I see a (monitoring committee) where the entire international community is represented. It is an important symbol and we do it under the flag of Mali, ”said Mr. Annadif. He said he believed in “a dynamic” that he attributes to international mediation, but also to the Malian transitional authorities set up after the August 2020 putsch and still dominated by the military. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, speaking by videoconference, saw “quite a symbol” in this meeting in Kidal, that of a “positive dynamic” observed in his eyes in recent months
In the wake of the next G5 Sahel summit
The holding of this meeting in a city like Kidal must materialize progress on the political level, while the horizon of an end to the crisis in the Sahel remains very distant and doubts persist about the capacities of States to assume their task in this way. as the questions about the French military engagement in the region. For France, this meeting is the illustration of the diplomatic, political and development leap that Minister Le Drian called for in the perspective of the next N’Djamena summit, which is to be held on February 15 and 16 to make update on the situation in the sub-region.
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