Regional Conditions in the Central Sahelian States of Mali, Niger, & Burkina Faso

Regional Conditions in the Central Sahelian States of Mali, Niger, & Burkina Faso.

The Republics of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have become failed states that are no longer recognised as being legitimately governed by the African Union, ECOWAS1 the European Union, and NATO. These three Central Sahelian Republics have been taken over by low ranking military officers who have deposed their elected civilian leadership, dismantled their institutions of governance and the rule of law, and suspended or invalidated their national constitutions. The UNSC sanctions against the illegitimate military junta in Bamako were interrupted by the Russian Federation, which used its permanent seat on the UNSC to veto the UN’s continuing sanctions. Under threat from ECOWAS, the UN, AU, and the EU, the three military juntas, with advisory and training assistance from Russia and Iran, have created a mutual defence alliance against outside interference in controlling their various states as depicted in figure 1.

This has not prevented the USA, EU, ECOWAS, and the AU from sanctioning these three military juntas and their collective leadership. The new Alliance of the Sahel States have ejected the United Nations Mission in Mali, as well as all other countries from missions under the African Union, European Union’s Capacity Building Program, the Sahel G5 Counterterrorism Consortium, France’s Operation Barkhane, and the US’ Operation Juniper Shield. The cadres of officers and sergeants that I and my teams had been training to follow and support the rule of law and civilian constitutional governance have either gone into exile or were killed by the Russian backed Juntas. Mass atrocities against civilians are being reported in each of the three states by both violent extremist organisations and by the respective militaries backed by Russian military forces. In Mali and Niger, northern tribes have refused to accept the military juntas and have formed armed resistance movements against the Russian supported military forces from Bamako and Niamey, respectively. This resistance has begun to restrict the military junta’s ability to take control of the petroleum and national gas wells in Mali and the Gold and Uranium mines in Niger, access to which, has already been purchased by Moscow and Tehran. The fall of these three democratically elected governments has also resulted in a renewed offensive against the peoples of the Central Sahelian regions of northern Mali and Niger, who are now in an open civil war against these three military regimes and their Alliance of the Sahel States (AES).

The country conditions of Mali are deeply intertwined with those of Niger and Burkina Faso which requires substantial regional context to understand the factors that exacerbate the underlying conditions of violent conflicts, civil wars, and extremist religious terror. Social life in the central Sahel regions revolves around family in the largest sense of the term:

immediate, extended, and tribal. Family life, in turn, revolves around ethnic and social identity, complex ideas that drive all motivation of state and non-state actors. Ethnic identity means “bloodlines” and ‘language’ which together, carry historical narratives that memorialise individuals and their families. Ethnic identity in this region competes with social identity, based on religion, hereditary occupation, wealth, and political power. Most humans and their families in the central Sahel find themselves caught between their ethnic and social identities, as the rest of this subsection describes. Without comprehending this internal struggle, it is nearly impossible to understand the underlying motivations of individuals and families who chose to ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ intrusions into their once peaceful existence. Family life begins with parents establishing a home and occupation, often following hereditary lines of generational belonging. As parents become grandparents, their family normatively grows physically around them in shared, but delineated spaces. Most African families follow a similar pattern. Deviations are often signs of internal family distress caused by emic or etic aspects of life. Usually, the etic precedes the emic.

For example, in mixed religious areas, the evangelization and conversion of a family member from Sufi to Salafi; or from Salafi to Christianity; or from indigenous animist to monotheism, would be an etic event that creates a violent emotional emic response within the family. Religious conversion is often an emotionally explosive event, as is ethnic defection, and both are normative reasons for deviations in the family unit, affecting physical, security, and psychosocial health. In constructed-developed countries such as Europe, public funding is allocated to study, intervene, and resolve many of the deviations in healthy family life, but in the Sahel, all of this is left up to the family – immediate, extended, tribal. This is an important aspect of this country-of-origin report because these vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited as part of a process of transforming otherwise healthy civil populations into weapons against each other and against the recognised government.