Crime, Coping, and Resistance in the Mali-Sahel Periphery

ABSTRACT

The Mali-Sahel periphery is not an “ungoverned space” captured and preyed on by the transnational forces of global “crime-terrorism” nexuses but an area of overlapping and competing networks of informal governance. Some have an agenda of resistance, others are more aligned with coping and criminality. What they share is that they are neither entirely state nor nonstate but somewhere in between. Different competing “big men” vie for the role of nodal points in different networks of informal governance: some mainly profit-driven, others combining income-generating strategies with social and political objectives, and yet others simply aiming to cope (and hopefully thrive in the future).

KEYWORDS:

• Big men politics
• crime
• jihadism
• Mali
• networks
• resistance
• Sahel

Notes

1. The exact amount be it of drugs, weapons, or people passing through this area is uncertain, but estimates indicates that as much as 45 to 50 tons of cocaine could pass through this region annually, representing about 30 percent of the cocaine consumed every year in Europe. The area is also full of small arms and of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from the Libyan coast to get to Europe; a substantial number comes from West Africa and therefore also passes through the Mali-Sahel periphery. See, for example, Martin Shaw and Peter Tinti, Organized Crime and Illicit Trafficking in Northern Mali (Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, January 2014).

2. White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: U.S. Government, 2002); European Union, The European Security Strategy—A Secure Europe in a Better World (Brussels, Belgium: European Union, 2003).

3. United States Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism 2011 (Washington, DC: U.S. State Department, 2012).

4. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Sahara Conundrum,” New York Times, New York, NY, February 15, 2009.

5. See Clionadh Raleigh and Caitriona Dowd, “Governance and Conflict in the Sahel’s Ungoverned Space,” Stability 2, no. 2 (2013): 1–17, for a similar critique of how these concepts are (mis)used in the case of the Sahel. For a more general critique see Morten Bøås and Kathleen M. Jennings, “Insecurity and Development: the Rhetoric of the Failed State,” European Journal of Development Research 17, no. 3 (2005): 385–395.

6. Raleigh and Dowd, “Governance and Conflict”; Francesco Strazzari, “Captured or Capturing? Narcotics and Political Instability along the ‘African Route’ to Europe,” European Review of Organized Crime 1, no. 2 (2014): 5–34.

7. Marshall D. Sahlins, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 285–303, 289.

8. See also Morten Bøås, The Politics of Conflict Economies: Miners, Merchants and Warriors in the African Borderland (London, UK: Routledge, 2015).

9. See Janine R. Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009). For an approach to the same concept more in line with a “big man” logic applied here see for example, Yvan Guichaoua, “Circumstantial Alliances and Loose Loyalties in Rebellion Making: The Case of Tuareg Insurgency in Northern Niger (2007–2009),” in Understanding Collective Political Violence, ed. Yvan Guichaoua (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 246–266; Marielle Debois, Porous Borders and Fluid Loyalties: Patterns of Conflict in Darfur, Chad and the CAR (New York, NY: CSIS, 2009); William Reno, “Crisis and (No)Reform in Nigeria’s Politics,” African Studies Review 42, no. 1 (1999): 105–124.

10. Morten Bøås, “Castles in the Sand: Informal Networks and Power Brokers in the Northern Mali Periphery,” in African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, ed. Mats Utas (London, UK: Zed Books, 2012), 119–134; Judith Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

11. Jenifer Seely, “A Political Analysis of Decentralization: Co-Opting the Tuareg Threat in Mali,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 3 (2001): 499–524.

12. Gunvor Berge, “In Defence of Pastoralism: Form and Flux among the Tuareg in Northern Mali” (PhD thesis, Oslo, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 2002).

13. Morten Bøås, “Castles in the Sand.”

14. The term Azawad traditionally referred to the vast plain between Timbuktu and Gao but gradually expanded to mean the entirety of northern Mali by the rebels fighting there in the first half of the 1990s. See D. H. Flood, “Between Islamization and Secession: The Contest for Northern Mali,” CTC Sentinel 5, no. 7 (2012).

15. Iklan is the Tuareg name for this group, whereas Bella is the Songhay term. The latter is much more commonly known in Mali. The Bella is therefore not a separate ethnic category but a collective term for people of slave descent. See Jon Pedersen and Tor Arve Benjaminsen, “One Leg or Two? Pastoralism and Food Security in the Northern Sahel,” Human Ecology 36, no. 1 (2008): 43–57.

16. Bas Lecocq, “Unemployed Intellectuals in the Sahara: The Teshumara Nationalist Movement and the Revolutions In Tuareg Society,” International Review of Social History 49, no. S12 (2004): 87–109.

17. Kalifa Keita, Conflict and Conflict Resolution in the Sahel: The Tuareg Insurgency in Mali (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1989).

18. See Gunther Baechler, Violence through Environmental Discrimination: Causes, Arenas and Conflict Models (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1998); Colin Kahl, States, Scarcity and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

19. Tor Arve Benjaminsen, “Does Supply-induced Scarcity Drive Violent Conflicts in the African Sahel? The Case of the Tuareg Rebellion in Northern Mali,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 6 (2008): 831–848.

20. See also Morten Bøås and Ksevin C. Dunn, Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship and Conflict (London, UK: Zed Books, 2013).

21. See Bøås, “Castles in the Sand.”

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Author interviews in Bamako (February–March 2013 and October 2014) with a number of people who had lived in northern Mali during the period of Islamist control. See also See also Morten Bøås and Liv Elin Torheim, “The Trouble in Mali—Corruption, Collusion, Resistance,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 7 (2013): 1279–1292.

25. Agadez is another important hub for this type of crossings.

26. The Air Cocaine incident refers to a burned-out Boing 727 that was found in the desert in Northern Mali. It is believed that it carried more than ten tons of cocaine, had flown in from Venezuela, and had been unloaded before it was torched. At least two prominent Malians were named in relation to the flight—Mohamed Ould Awainatt and Baba Ould Cheikh—but none of them has been sentenced for their involvement in this affair. The latter was also involved in the negotiation concerning the release from Jihadist captivity of UN diplomat Robert Fowler. In this regard, it is reportd that then President Touré referred to Cheikh as mon bandite. See Andrew Lebovich, “Mali’s Bad Trip,” Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/15/malis-bad-trip/, accessed March 15, 2013.

27. The type of narcotics smuggled and their respective quantities is a much discussed topic but of less importance for the arguments made in this article. For a detailed account of this debate and the different figures that are circulated see Strazzari, “Captured or Capturing.”

28. As the street value of crack cocaine is less than the similar value of ordinary cocaine, this is the preferred in-kind payment. This is very similar to how Nigerian drug runners in the 1980s and 1990s created a local user market in Sierra Leone for so-called “brown-brown,” the heroin of such low quality that it cannot be injected, only smoked; see Morten Bøås and Anne Hatløy, Living in a Material World: Children and Youth in Alluvial Diamond Mining in Kono District, Sierra Leone (Oslo, Norway: Fafo, Fafo-report 515, 2006).

29. See also Jeremy Keenan, “The Banana Theory of Terrorism: Alternative Truths and the Collapse of the Second (Saharan) Front in the War on Terror,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 25, no. 1 (2007): 32–58. This is in some contrast to Judith Scheele’s finding based on fieldwork in southern Algeria, which argues that the people of Sahara make a distinction between lawful smuggling (e.g. cigarettes) and unlawful smuggling (narcotics). The reason for this apparent difference may be that how local people view this may depend on where they are and in what circumstances they live. Kidal is in many ways very different from the Tamanrasset region of southern Algeria. See Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara.

30. See also Francesco Strazzari, Azawad and the Rights of Passage: The Role of Illicit Trade in the Logic of Armed Group Formation in Northern Mali (Oslo, Norway: Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre, Report January 2015).

31. For example, before fleeing Gao ahead of advancing French troops in early 2013, Abou Zeid reportedly took the trouble to repay his outstanding debts to local merchants; see Radio France International, “Aqmi : la face cachée du chef terroriste Abou Zeïd,” February 24, 2013, http://www.rfi.fr/afrique/20130224-aqmi-est-reellement-le-chef-terroriste-abdelhmid-abou-zeid-mali-islam-jihadistes). On local perceptions of the Malian state, see Jaimie Bleck and Kristen Michelitch, “The 2012 Crisis in Mali: Ongoing Empirical State Failure,” African Affairs (2015), doi:10.1093/afraf/adv038.

32. On the Algerian civil war and the immense violence it unleashed see Stathis Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of the Massacres In Algeria,” Rationality and Society 11, no. 3 (1999): 243–286. For a critique of Kalyvas argument see Jacob Mundy, “Wanton and Senseless Revisited: The Study if Warfare in Civil Conflicts and the Historiography of the Algerian Massacres,” African Studies Review 56, no. 3 (2013): 25–55.

33. ICG, Understanding Islamism (Brussels, Belgium: ICG, 2005).

34. Morten Bøås and Liv Elin Torheim, “The trouble in Mali.”

35. ICG, Islamist Terrorism in the Sahel; Fact or Fiction (Brussels, Belgium: ICG, 2005).

36. See John Rollins, Al Qaeda and Affiliates: Historical Perspective, Global Presence and Implications for U.S. Policy (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010).

37. According to ICG, Islamism, Violence and Reform in Algeria: Turning the Page (Brussels, Belgium: ICG, 2004), the German government paid a ransom of five million euro to secure the release of the German tourists. The government has flatly denied that it ever paid any ransom money, but according to local sources, the Salafists had a lot of money to spend after the tourists had been released.

38. Due to a combination of external shocks such as increased climatic variability and the penetration of the modern state, the traditional systems of governance is less useful than they used to be. However, even if the modern state is more present in people’s daily life it is most often perceived as a nuance and a negative factor as it has failed to respond adequately to people’s needs.

39. ICG, Understanding Islamism.

40. Author interviews in Bamako (February–March 2013 and October 2014) with a number of people who had lived in northern Mali when the Islamists controlled the area. See also Bøås and Torheim, “The Trouble in Mali.”

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. See, for example, Stephen D. Krasner and Thomas Risse, “External Actors, State-building and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood: Introduction,” Governance 27, no. 4 (2014): 545–567.

44. Ibid.

45. Luca Raineri, “MOJWA: Complex Dynamics between Armed Groups and Organized Crime in Northern Mali” (unpublished draft manuscript, 2014). Raineri’s interviews conducted in Gao in November 2013 corroborates previous interviews made by this author.

46. See also Ould Idoumou Raby, “Al-Qaeda Splinter Group Reveals Internal Erosion,” Magharabia, December 30, 2011.

47. In this regard, it is important to note that AQIM in northern Mali and the Sahel has always consisted of and hosted semi-independent groups under the AQIM banner. These have included in addition to Belmokhtar’s group also Yahya Abou al-Hamam’s al-Furqan squadron, al-Ansar (headed by Abdelkarim Le Targui, who is Iyad ag Ghali’s cousin), and the Youssef Ibn Tachfin (headed by Abdelhakimal-Kidali). See also Raineri “MOJWA: Complex Dynamics between Armed Groups and Organized Crime in Northern Mali.”

48. See also Oumar Jemal, “In Aménas attack magnifies Belmokhtar, AQIM rift,” Magharebia, February 7, 2013.

49. For example, quite similar to the process Strazzari and Kamphuis have coined as an “extra-legal” field—a site where informal and criminal activities are fused with different nuances of social legitimacy. See Francesco Strazzari and Bertine Kamphuis, “Hybrid Economies and Statebuilding: On the Resilience of the Extralegal,” Global Governance 18, no. 1 (2012): 57–72.