Mali: Between Islamist Militancy and African Chaos

J. Peter Pham

Is democracy compatible with Islam? Not likely, if one goes by Freedom House’s highly respected indices for political and civil liberties. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), only five qualified for classification as “free” and two of these, Guyana and Suriname, are Latin American countries. Among the remaining three fully free members of the OIC, according to Freedom in the World 2004, the highest combined average rating is enjoyed by a sub-Saharan African country—a paradox doubly enriched by the fact that the latter region is the world’s other great desert for democratic politics.

The oasis in question is Mali, a sprawling West African land between the rich Niger valley and the sands of the Sahara that covers a land mass larger than California and Texas combined. By any of the conventional indicators, Mali would be expected to be either misruled by a despot, failed as a state, or regressed into sectarian religious fanaticism—or all three. That apparent contraindication to liberal politics, Islam, has been the faith of the majority of the country’s inhabitants for over a millennium; 90 percent of today’s eleven million Malians are Muslim, most adherents of the Sunni tradition. Malians are extremely poor—per capita income is less than $250—and poverty and freedom almost never go together. They also hail from a plethora of ethnic groups with different lifestyles—including Mande (Malinké) traders, Moorish townsmen, Peul herdsmen, Songhai farmers, Tuereg  nomads and some dozen-and-a-half other groups—and the woes that tribal conflicts have caused throughout Africa are well known. And yet, Mali boasts a thriving democratic polity, one that is simultaneously a hopeful sign as well as a full measure of the challenges that the United States faces as it seeks to promote transformative change in the two regions that will be of strategic importance in the coming years, the greater Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

Long a center of regional commerce—the fabled city Timbuktu prospered for centuries as an entrepôt for goods coming up the Niger river from the African heartland and trans-Saharan caravans headed for the Mediterranean—Mali knew a succession of multi-ethnic empires characterized by religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Such communitarian conflicts that arose were patched up by the creation of kinship bonds between the victor and the vanquished which are still celebrated in folk songs and epic tales. This history contributed over time to the creation of a nascent national consciousness—a characteristic uncommon in both Africa and the Middle East.

After somewhat less than a century of colonial rule as the French Sudan, Mali achieved independence in 1960. Unfortunately, the country’s first post-independence president, Modibo Keita, was a Marxist-Leninist theoretician and a leading advocate of what he termed “the socialist option” for Africa. While the dogmatic Keita was overthrown in 1968, his military successors, led by Lieutenant (later self-promoted to General) Moussa Traoré, maintained the one-party state he founded and aligned it with the Soviet Union. The result was, predictably, economic stagnation, famine, and general misery. In 1991, after four days of anti-government rioting, a group of seventeen military officers, led by the then-Lieutenant Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré, arrested president Traoré and suspended the constitution. Amazingly, before returning to their barracks a year later, the putschists organized free and peaceful elections which sent archaeologist Alpha Oumar Konaré to the presidential palace. Re-elected in 1997, Konaré stood down in 2002, respecting the two-term limit that was written into the constitution after the overthrow of the dictatorship (he was subsequently tapped to serve as the chairman of the Commission of the African Union). Konaré was succeeded by that remarkably democratic putschist, Touré, who was elected as an independent candidate with over 60 percent of the vote in a poll that international observers declared to be free and fair.

Touré, the current president of Mali, presides over a multi-party democracy, where the only restriction is a prohibition against parties based on ethnic, religious, regional, or gender lines. After his election in 2002, Touré was careful to include representatives of all the major parties in his government—a wise move given that no party held a clear majority in the National Assembly. The government has been generally respectful of the citizenry’s rights—Amnesty International found no serious abuses to document in its International Report 2004. While the government controls the country’s only television station, Mali boasts one of the freest media markets in the Islamic and African worlds: there are forty-two private newspapers and journals, published in French, Arabic, and local languages; of the 125 radio stations operating across the country, only one is government-owned; and a number of foreign broadcasters—including Radio France Internationale, the BBC and Voice of America—have local FM affiliates.  There is an independent judiciary and the government itself is regularly taken to task before judges operating a system of administrative courts.

Unlike many OIC member states, Mali has no restrictions, legal or otherwise, on the full participation of women and non-Muslims in public life. Christian and other missionaries work freely and there are no legal obstacles to conversion from one religion to another. In an interview with Le Monde in 1993, then-president Konaré asserted that “the path of religious fundamentalism is the negation of the very identity of African culture, which is rooted in diversity.” As for women, there are four female members of the cabinet, fifteen female parliamentary deputies, five female justices on the Supreme Court and three female justices on the Constitutional Court. While culturally-linked discrimination still persists, the government has done its best to respect legal equality between the sexes in practice and, as the country’s largest employer, helps to influence market conditions by consistently paying women the same as men for similar work.

While Mali’s per capita GDP places it in the ranks of the world’s ten poorest countries and agriculture still occupies over 70 percent of the workforce, its market-based economic policies and growing middle class bode well for the future. After the 1991 coup, export taxes were dropped and the commercial code was revised to remove impediments to investment. As a result of large private investments in mining from multi-nationals in recent years, this sector will take on increasing importance in the future. In 2002, gold became the country’s largest export, edging out cotton and livestock. Bauxite, iron, and uranium may join it in the future.

The country is an island of relative tranquility in one of the world’s most violent subregions. To its north is Algeria, which has been wracked by a decade-old Islamist insurgency that has cost the lives of over 100,000 persons and decimated entire sectors of society. To its south is Côte d’Ivoire, where an ethnic and religious civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian south has, since its inception in September 2002, killed an estimated 12,000 people and displaced anywhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 persons, as well as destroyed the economy that was once one of the most prosperous in Africa. To its east is uranium-rich Niger, long plagued by a succession of civilian dictatorships, tribal insurrections, and military coups. To its southwest is Guinea, where the imminent demise of the ailing septuagenarian president-for-life, Lansana Conté, is likely to unleash a three-way conflict between the Malinké kinfolk of founding despot Ahmed Sékou Touré, the Sousou clansmen of the current ruler, and the long-repressed Peul, who represent the country’s largest ethnic group.

Despite all of its impressive achievements, Mali has long been neglected by Westerners other than the Lonely Planet backpacking set drawn to the monuments of Timbuktu and the haunting cliff dwellings of the Dogon people. This all changed last year when thirty-two European tourists in neighboring Algeria were kidnapped by Islamist terrorists of the Al-Qaeda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). The successful mediation of Malian president Touré led to the release of the hostages after a six-month ordeal. This diplomatic coup finally brought Mali to the attention of Western countries, including the U.S., which responded by sending a Special Forces unit to help train the Malian military, now designated an ally in America’s global war on terrorism (it had previously benefited from occasional civilian aid through the Pentagon).

Mali is also nowadays an integral part of the U.S. State Department-led Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). PSI aims at bolstering two U.S. national security interests in Africa, waging war on terrorism and enhancing regional security, by assisting participating countries in responding to movements of suspicious persons and goods across their porous frontiers. Earlier this year, as part of PSI, the U.S. Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) provided basic training and equipment to the 7,000-man Malian military. Last year direct U.S. aid to Mali amounted to $44.2 million, including $40.7 million in sector support made available through U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs; a Peace Corps program budget of $2.8 million for 190 volunteers serving in Mali; Self-Help and the Democracy Funds of $153,000; and State Department Public Diplomacy Funds of $300,000 for educational opportunities and local projects. Military assistance includes $100,000 for the International Military Education Training (IMET) program, and $200,000 for the Regional Defense Counter Terrorism Fellowship (RDCTF) program. The Bush Administration has also included Mali among the beneficiaries of the new “Millennium Challenge” program for poor countries that meet standards for good governance.

Nonetheless, U.S. aid to Mali remains extremely modest, especially in contrast to vast sums expended on authoritarian regimes in both the Middle East and Africa. This stinginess is a bit short-sighted. While the Mali’s escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of Islamist radicalism and African tribalism is nothing less than remarkable, it is also precarious. With its endemic poverty and overall underdevelopment—the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report 2004 ranks Mali in the unenviable position of fourth from the bottom, ahead only of Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra Leone—Mali should be a textbook case of state failure. And with barely one-fifth of its people illiterate, an ominous chain of Quranic schools, many funded by Gulf-based Wahhabi sectarians, have sprouted throughout the country, threatening the native balance of pacific co-existence. If the U.S. is increasingly taxed by the challenge of state-building around the world, especially in the energy-rich and geopolitically important Middle Eastern and Africa regions, it might find that a small investment in a functional democratic experiment, one rooted in local history and tradition rather than foreign imposition, might pay a handsome strategic dividend over the long-term.

J. Peter Pham, who served as an international diplomat in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, is the author, most recently, of Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press), and recently joined the faculty of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.