The dynamics that have seen the emergence of jihadist groups in the north and centre of Mali are deep-rooted, notably in the military response to the Tuareg rebellions of 1963 and 1990.
Taken together, these military and governance failings have been pivotal to the emergence, proliferation and persistence of armed groups across the Sahel, a pattern that is perhaps most deeply entrenched in Mali. The Malian military has played a key role in the development of jihadist groups in the north and centre of the country by failing to protect civilians, who were then forced to accept the presence of armed groups alongside their communities, or by committing abuses that pushed some into joining the insurgency. These dynamics have deep roots in Malian history, most notably in the Tuareg rebellions of 1963 and 1990.
In 1963, a simple theft of arms degenerated into insurrection because of the disproportionate response of local auxiliaries – the so-called goumiers. At the time, more than half of the young Malian army was mobilized in the north: up to 2,200 soldiers with armoured vehicles were sent to fight some 250 rebels. Unlike the French colonizers who had recruited Tuaregs to patrol the desert, the Malian government sent as reinforcements southern Bambara who saw the Tuaregs, whom they called peaux rouges (‘red skins’), as enemies, and who did not understand either their rivals or the reality on the ground. Military operations caused hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths, and up to 40 per cent of the livestock herds in the area were lost, including through deliberate slaughter. One army commander, Captain Diby Sillas Diarra, came to be known as the ‘Butcher of Kidal’ after carrying out summary executions of civilians around Kidal, Telabit and Aguelhoc in February 1964. Wells were poisoned, and women, children and Muslim clerics were killed, imprisoned or driven into forced labour.
Such practices horrified not only the local population, but also the goumiers, some of whom joined the ranks of the insurgents, and even a former sergeant in the Malian army testified to these atrocities in his memoirs. ‘The brutal repression of the Malian army’, as the historian Pierre Boilley has summed it up, transformed ‘an isolated protest into a real rebellion’. It was ‘the best supplier of rebellion in men, by the hatred that it engendered’.
The uprising of 1963 was suppressed quickly, but it left indelible traces. Politically, the Tuaregs felt completely excluded from power in Bamako. Economically, the slaughter of their livestock, the poisoning of wells and the destruction of trees to flush out the rebels and deprive them of critical resources and supply lines, exacerbated by the impact of the drought of the 1970s, pushed many into exile in revolutionary Algeria and Libya, where their radicalization laid the foundations for the rebellions of the 1990s and 2000s.
The second Tuareg revolt, of 1990, was thus collectively perceived as a continuation of the first, in order – among other things – to avenge the deaths of 1963. Initially, the region’s nomads were rather wary of ‘Westernized’ exiles who had returned from Libya with modern and revolutionary ideas that set them against the local chieftaincy. The insurgents therefore had to pay attention to the needs of the population. Unlike in the 1963 uprising, when they had retreated to rear bases in Algeria, they decided in 1990 to stay within Mali to try to protect civilians from the security forces’ excesses. Instead of cutting the guerrillas off from their surrounding environment, the brutality of the repression again legitimized the revolt.
The operations of the Malian army were intended to terrorize and humiliate the Tuareg and Moorish communities. Likened to a campaign of ethnic cleansing – and called Kokadjè (‘cleansing’) in the Bamanakan language of the southern Bambara – they led young people to join the ranks of the insurgents. Intercepted radio communications at the time showed that the authorities had given express orders to shoot suspects in public ‘without any other form of trial’. At I-n-Abalan near Ti-n-Essako, on 29 July 1990, soldiers were to execute some unarmed 94 nomads, who were first forced to dig their own graves. Over the period from June to December 1990, it is estimated that the security forces killed between 200 and 500 civilians, including at least 125 in the first two months of the insurgency.
The conflict then escalated when the rebels began to attack sedentary communities in retaliation, which in turn drew in militias from the affected ethnic community, the Songhaï, from May 1994, further worsening the situation of civilians caught in the crossfire. Nomadic Tuaregs probably suffered 10 times more casualties than the sedentary communities. An estimated 2,500 to 3,500 civilians were killed in fighting and extrajudicial executions, with their deaths being officially attributed to rebels, militias or ‘uncontrolled military elements’.
Despite demands for justice from victims’ families, however, the authorities did not attempt to investigate these cases in order to prosecute the culprits. Instead, entire communities were stigmatized and pushed into the arms of insurgents. The so-called ‘peaux rouges’ and ‘peaux blanches’ (Tuaregs and Moors, respectively) were easy to recognize and were automatically suspected of having sympathy for the rebellion. They could no longer prove their allegiance to the government by showing identity cards or tax receipts. Young men were targeted and imprisoned simply because they were wearing turbans or, more specifically, underpants, a practice that was uncommon in the region and was therefore supposed to prove residence abroad – in this case in Libya. In order to restrict the movement of insurgents, the authorities also poisoned wells, blocked roads and prohibited the civilian use of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Such repressive measures had terrible consequences for residents, and it is no surprise that surveys show that levels of trust in the Malian security forces are still lowest among the Tuaregs of Kidal.
Militias and the spiral of violence
Mali has repeatedly compensated for state weakness by resorting to use of informal militias who are even less accountable to the central government than the regular military. In May 1994 Songhaï elements of the Malian army contributed to the creation of the Ganda Koy (‘Masters of the Land’) patriotic movement, which was led by the ‘red berets’ of an airborne unit who may have been encouraged to desert in order to have a free hand in repressing Tuareg civilians, while still operating in uniform and equipped with weapons from the Malian military.
Mali has repeatedly compensated for state weakness by resorting to use of informal militias who are even less accountable to the central government than the regular military.
Instead of attacking Tuareg combatants much further north, the Ganda Koy mainly targeted the ‘peaux blanches’ in the Inner Niger Delta. Barely a month after their establishment, they had already killed some 500 civilians. The insurgents retaliated by starting their own campaign of terror against sedentary communities in July 1994, polarizing the conflict around ethnically motivated clashes. Since then, the Ganda Koy spirit has never really disappeared. Officially dissolved in March 1996, the movement re-emerged under the name Ganda Iso (‘Sons of the Land’), and announced their intention to resume fighting when the Tuaregs declared the independence of Azawad (as they called northern Mali) in April 2012. One of Ganda Iso’s former commanders, a Dozo hunter called Youssouf Toloba, formed the armed branch of a Dogon self-defence group, Dan Na Amba Sagou (‘Hunters who Trust in God’), in December 2016.
The Malian army has continued to rely on militias to fight groups it regards as ‘terrorists’, jihadists or separatists. When it was forced to withdraw from the city of Kidal in May 2014, it supported the formation of a Tuareg Imghad and Allied Self-Defence Group (GATIA), which mobilized Tuareg, Moorish and Songhaï loyalists to defend the territorial integrity of the country. At the time, the Malian military turned a blind eye to the looting of their arsenals by these militias, and often directly supplied them with weapons, ammunition, vehicles and motor fuel. Similarly, they used Dozo hunters as scouts, informers or auxiliaries to take part in the fighting when jihadist groups began to descend further south into the Inner Niger Delta and the central region of Mopti, outside the French army’s areas of operation.
As in the past, the proliferation of self-defence groups then led to communal violence. Fulani farmers from Koro and Djenné responded to the establishment of Dan Na Amba Sagou by forming their own group, the Alliance for the Salvation of the Sahel (ASS), in January 2018. And in August 2019, another movement called Dana Atèm (‘Guardians of the Tradition’) emerged to try to bring Dogon and Fulani together against jihadi insurgents. All of these groups are still active today.
