The gap is widening between Bamako and Kidal, bastion of the former Tuareg rebellion, threatening the fragile peace process launched in 2015. The former rebels of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), meeting on July 16 and 17 2022, “denounce with concern the abandonment of the implementation of the Agreement (from Algiers) especially since the advent of the transitional government”. The CMA, continues the press release issued on July 17, “reserves the right to draw all the consequences”.
The CMA, an alliance of Tuareg and Arab nationalist groups from northern Mali in rebellion against the central power, already regretted in March 2022 ” ‘the total lack of progress in the implementation of the Algiers agreement’, after the two military coups of August 2020 and May 2021.
This is the first time that the ex-rebels of the CMA have not reaffirmed their attachment to the Algiers peace agreement signed in 2015. It provides for the integration of ex-rebels into the Malian defense forces as well as greater autonomy of the regions. The application of the agreement remains at a standstill while it is considered crucial for the stabilization of Mali, caught in the turmoil for more than ten years.
Another sign of concern, the Kidal meeting recorded a change at the head of the CMA, where Bilal Ag Acherif was replaced by Alghabas Ag Intalla, presented as close to the Malian Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghaly, leader of the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM). An appointment, fraught with threats, which could announce a possible rapprochement of former Tuareg rebels with jihadist groups. The GSIM (or Jnim in Arabic) is the main jihadist alliance in the Sahel, linked to Al-Qaeda. The organization is responsible for hundreds of attacks against Malian soldiers and civilian populations in recent years.
One certainty: the Tuareg separatists and the most radical are gaining ground within the CMA and are proposing to leave the peace process. The political history of the Tuaregs has been marked since French colonization by this internal debate between partisans of negotiation and those of armed resistance.
However, the CMA has “condemned all forms of violence and terror exerted on the civilian population” and “deplores the absence of an appropriate response to this dramatic situation”, in his press release. The political crisis in Mali goes hand in hand with a serious ongoing security crisis since the outbreak, in 2012, of separatist and jihadist insurgencies in the north.
This violence, which reached the center as well as neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, left thousands of civilian and military dead as well as hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Mali.