Another military coup in Mali. Yawn? Nothing new? Move along?
After all, the biggest story almost everywhere, aside from Donald Trump, remains COVID-19.
Such opinions are understandable. Except for perhaps Paris, Mali and its neighbours remains largely out of sight and out of mind.
But what happens in Mali does matter, especially as it becomes a global hot spot for Islamic terrorism.
Despite producing more gold than all but two other African countries, it is an indescribably impoverished nation. Bigger than Ontario and with at least five million more people, Mali mostly consists of gritty orange sand and scrub.
The Malian desert is beautiful in its own way, but it has been particularly hard hit by desertification. As the Sahara creeps south, so have jihadis from the Middle East who are intent on creating Islamic caliphates across the heart of Africa and who play upon historic tribal differences and rivalries between the north and south of Mali.
The country has arguably become the centre of the deadliest jihadi conflict in the world and is at high risk of disintegrating into two or more parts.
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The West, led by the old colonial power, France, has chosen to make a somewhat halfhearted stand against groups like ISIS in the Greater Sahara and the Sahara Branch of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and half a dozen other like-minded groups who, perhaps only momentarily, have lost much of their momentum and power to disrupt life in the Middle East.
After reversals in countries such as Iraq and Syria, northern and more recently central Mali is the jihadis’ new kindergarten. From there, their disrupter tentacles reach into drought-plagued Mauritania, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso and are clearly aimed at points even further south and west into the patchwork of small English and French-speaking countries in the Bulge of Africa that may be a bit wealthier but already have enough grave problems of their own.
Arrayed against them are about 5,000 French combat troops, a relatively small number of special forces commandos and military trainers from other western countries, and about 13,000 soldiers from the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). Though more than 200 of them have been killed by jihadis, they are mostly poorly equipped, seldom fight and have done little to relieve a humanitarian crisis triggered by the war in the north that caused thousands of civilian deaths last year and chased millions from their homes.
WATCH BELOW: (September 2018) Inside Canada’s military mission in Mali
After a lot of huffing and puffing during the 2015 election campaign by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about Canada being a nation of peacekeepers and the importance of UN peacekeeping, and then about doing something important in Mali, Canada’s contribution to peace in the Sahel ended up being ephemeral.
After putting its hand up to help in Africa, Ottawa contrived to do as little as possible for the nation while somehow pretending to honour that empty pledge. After wringing its hands for more than two years, Ottawa finally dispatched a couple of hundred superbly trained military doctors, nurses, medics and support staff who got around the immense country on impressive, bus-sized Chinook medevac helicopters.
It was my privilege to visit these troops briefly in the summer of 2018 at their home within a German-run UN base on the outskirts of the town of Gao. To the extreme disappointment of those Canadians, the UN and the Malian government — which love that the Canadians can speak French but are not French — the Canadians barely stayed a year and only briefly got anywhere near the fighting a couple of times.
Though Canada has about 12,000 combat troops at home who since leaving Afghanistan in 2001 have been waiting for a new mission, Ottawa only mustered a couple of dozen infantrymen for Mali. Their sole duty was to protect the Canadian Forces’ medical teams tasked with aiding wounded blue berets. Given their small numbers and their narrow mission, it was undoubtedly a good thing that they did not engage the jihadis.
So, unfortunately, despite spending tens of millions of dollars there and in Senegal, where the Canadian Forces set up a logistical hub, what Canada achieved in Mali does not even rate an asterisk in the history of that perpetually struggling nation.
Following months of street demonstrations in the capital, Bamako, the mutinous soldiers who ousted Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita this week said pretty much what another group of soldiers said in 2012 after they ousted the government of Amadou Toumani Touré in a coup. The group doing the overthrowing this time, which grandly styled itself the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, said it had been forced to act because Keita’s regime was corrupt. But the latest junta was fuzzy about whether it supported the fractured political opposition or any other group or groups.
Everyone from France, the U.S., the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations denounced the latest coup d’etat. Canada added its small voice of outrage to this international cacophony, too. But no country or international organization offered military support to throw out the usurpers, or the kind of economic support required to make the country a serious bulwark against the alphabet soup of jihadi groups, causing havoc especially near the fabled northern Malian town of legend, romance and intrigue, Timbuktu, which was wrested by French troops in 2013 from the clutches of an offshoot of al-Qaeda.
As for the elections being promised by the mutineers, it is hard to see how they could be held given the growing jihadist insurrection, the COVID-19 menace and the West’s lack of interest in providing the enormous amount of money and the large number of combat troops that would be required to make this possible.
COMMENTARY: Canada needs a foreign policy review, Matthew Fisher says
As for Canada, despite its alleged interest in the UN, in peacekeeping and in Africa, it can only be expected to offer high-minded words of solidarity with the Malian people.
Absent a Marshall Plan-like international effort for Mali and neighbouring countries — which was proposed this week by two retired senior American diplomats writing in Foreign Policy magazine — the entire region may be doomed.
If it falls further into chaos, watch out. Islamic terrorists will have free reign across the heart of Africa from which they would have a base to regroup to resume their brutal fight in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Matthew Fisher is an international affairs columnist and foreign correspondent who has worked abroad for 35 years. You can follow him on Twitter at @mfisheroverseas
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