Niger, too, has a long history of insurrection and violence, but it has taken specific policy steps to guarantee minority groups political representation and some level of access to power.
The recent experience of Niger shows that Sahelian states are not doomed to repeat their history. Mali and Niger share many characteristics in terms of poverty, vulnerability to climate change, common Saharan borders, physical geography and colonial military history. Like northern Mali, Niger was ruled for a very long time by uniformed officers. The country experienced its own ‘Malian momentum’ under successive military dictatorships; it has suffered from corruption and a weak security sector, and, like Mali, has a long history of internal insurrection and violence.
Relations between the authorities and the Tuareg began to deteriorate under General Seyni Kountché, who came to power in Niger in April 1974. His regime abolished the Ministry of Saharan Affairs, which the first post-independence president, Diori Hamani, had created as part of efforts to reach an accommodation with nomads, and purged the army of its Tuareg elements after an attempted coup involving northerners in March 1976. As in Mali, the drought in the Sahel also pushed some unemployed youth into exile – the so-called Ishumar (from the French ‘chômeur’, meaning an unemployed person), who sometimes undertook military training in Libya. In May 1985, for instance, clashes occurred between the army and refugees returning to the small locality of Tchintabaraden in northern Niger, which became emblematic for the insurgency to come.
In May 1990, as in Mali, small-scale incidents degenerated into full rebellion due to the brutality of military repression. Residents stormed the prison and gendarmerie of Tchintabaraden to force the release of Tuareg youths who had been arbitrarily arrested some time earlier. The demonstrators, who were unarmed, seized weapons. In retaliation, the Nigerien government deployed parachutists who, under the command of Captain Maliki Boureima, destroyed nomadic camps, killed civilians, hanged prisoners, hacked suspects to pieces and burned or buried people alive. The official death toll was 19 summary executions and 50 deaths by torture or abuse. The real number of victims was most likely higher: up to 600, according to testimonies collected by international organizations, and perhaps as many as 1,000 according to the rebels.
Delegates attending Niger’s National Conference, which was established to organize the country’s democratic transition, condemned the Tchintabaraden massacre. Meeting in Niamey in July–November 1991, the conference deplored the ‘excess’ of the army, ‘both in the use of force and in a command that transformed a law enforcement operation into a punitive expedition’. As in Mali, however, impunity prevailed. There was no judicial inquiry or trial. Even though the perpetrators were identified, and some arrested and detained, they were released in February 1992 under pressure from the rank and file, when the transitional government was facing mutiny. This outcome reinforced the Tuaregs’ conviction that only violence could avenge the dead. As in Mali, the rebellion was fuelled by the mistakes of a civilian government that did not dare to punish their armed forces for fear of provoking a coup.
Indeed, abuses continued with impunity. In August 1992, for example, the Nigerien army acted to round up some 200 Tuareg officials from Agadez who were accused of complicity with the rebels and detained without trial. The operation was concealed by the Nigerien authorities. Again in Agadez, in September 1994, soldiers attempted to sabotage peace negotiations with the rebels, killing four people in a grenade attack on a meeting of a Tuareg political party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). The insurgents targeted were accused of being ‘terrorists’.
Positive lessons?
Since the 1990s, however, there have been some positive developments in Niger. Despite the established pattern of violence between Tuareg communities and the Nigerien state, when Tuareg exiles left Libya in 2011 they passed through Niger without stopping to settle old scores with the country’s authorities, instead moving on to Mali. In part, progress has been possible because of structural demographic and economic factors. Tuareg communities are more mixed and more widely distributed throughout Niger, whereas in Mali they are highly concentrated around Kidal. Furthermore, unlike northern Mali, the northern part of Niger has its own sources of income, notably from uranium mining, and its capital Agadez is easily accessible from Niamey, being situated at the crossroads of very old trading routes, with the city of Zinder to its south. Kidal, in Mali, is difficult to reach from Bamako, and its trade has mainly been directed towards the north – to the extent that, by some estimates, more than half of its population has Algerian nationality.
Much of Niger’s relative progress has been due to deliberate policy decisions. First, all of Niger’s minority groups, including the Tuaregs, have been guaranteed political representation and some level of access to power. In the three decades following independence in 1960, the Tuaregs, who make up less than 10 per cent of Niger’s population, could count an average of two ministers in the government in Niamey, while the Hausa, five times more numerous, had four. Moreover, the government decentralized some administrative functions and allowed local authorities to spend 15 per cent of locally generated mining revenues, a process which helped to consolidate a Tuareg ‘elite’ thanks to uranium extraction in the north.
Much of Niger’s relative progress has been due to deliberate policy decisions. All of Niger’s minority groups, including the Tuaregs, have been guaranteed political representation and some level of access to power.
Second, the Nigerien government has taken greater care to integrate rebels into the state and security apparatus. The state, which returned to a parliamentary regime under an elected president in 2011, has also been more proactive in its dealings with insurgents and has tried to stop the spiral of ethnic reprisals. In contrast with Mali, Niger was one of the few Sahel countries – along with Chad and Mauritania – that really sought to to contain localized responses that could risk compromising the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. In particular, the Nigerien government was quick to disband the Fulani and Arab militias it had briefly supported in Diffa, N’Guigmi and Tassara to counter the onslaught made by Tuareg and Tubu rebels in 1991. Similarly, from 2017, it dissuaded the Fulani and Tubu from setting up self-defence groups to drive Kanuri and Buduma Boko Haram fighters out of the Lake Chad region.
Niger has not entirely avoided the stigmatization of elements of the country’s population in the name of security. For instance, during the period of emergency rule in Diffa in early 2015, when (as in Mali, with the aforementioned ‘underpants test’) the authorities systematically arrested young people who had long and dirty fingernails, seen as evidence of a guerrilla life in the bush, or burn marks, which could equally have been caused by the use of firearms or by a defective kitchen stove. But unlike its Malian counterpart, the government of Niger has shown commitment to republican ideals of national unity. To date, it has remained careful not to deploy ethnic militias that risk provoking communal violence.
