Mali-- Is France Freeing The Slaves? I Don't Think So

This month, the army of the quasi-legitimate Malian government-- with the help of French fighters and cheers from a few African neighbors-- turned back the Islamists' drive on Mopti (the landlocked country's biggest river port, Mali's Chicago) and Bamako (the capital) and then retook the only two big towns that had been in rebel hands, the legendary Sahara trading cities of Gao and Timbuktu. I tried explaining the significance of this to a friend yesterday and he thought I was telling him about a version of speed-cum-ecstasy that club goers are using these days and asked me if I knew the difference between Blue Mollies and Black Mollies. I don't.

But I do know the difference between the Tuaregs, who started the trouble in Mali this go-round and the Islamists (some of whom are Tuaregs as well) who decided to take advantage of it to push their own, very separate agenda. The Tuareg agenda is an independent state that takes in the vast wastelands of the Sahara, centering on northern Mali but including large swathes of-- at least-- Mauritania and Niger. They call it Azawad and declared it an independent state in April after they captured Timbuktu and Gao from Mali's U.S.-trained army. The unique lifestyle they seek to preserve includes their right to hold the darker-skinned Malians in slavery. There are hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Mali, Niger and Mauritania who are Tuareg slaves. One would think that would be a big story in the coverage of a country few Americans had even heard of before this year, right?

But the West has had a reason for playing down the slavery aspect of the Mali civil war. From the very beginning they hoped to exploit the tensions between the Tuaregs and the Islamists and their two divergent agendas. So, no one wanted to play up painting the Tuaregs as slave-holding villains. The media is too stupid and lazy to report anything much more than what they're spoon-fed, especially from such a remote and physically inhospitable location as northern Mali. So, basically, there has been no coverage of slavery even from the most well-meaning news sources.

Tuesday, I noticed AP trumpeting how the Tuaregs had "liberated" Kidal, the third biggest town in northern Mali, from the Islamists. When the Tuaregs first captured Kidal it was, basically, reigniting a decades on-and-off again civil war. This time the Tuaregs are the "liberators."

As French and Malian soldiers held control of the fabled desert city of Timbuktu following the retreat of Islamist extremists, Tuareg fighters claimed Tuesday that they seized the strategic city of Kidal and other northern towns.

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad-- the Tuareg group's name for northern Mali-- appears to have taken advantage of a French-led bombing and ground campaign to dislodge al-Qaida-linked Islamist fighters from the towns in northern Mali. Phone lines were down in Kidal, making it difficult to independently confirm the group's claim.

The Tuareg movement said on its website that it was ready to work with French troops and fight terror organizations.

However, it said it would refuse to allow Malian soldiers in Kidal, and the other towns under its control in northeastern Mali, following allegations that the troops killed civilians suspected of having links to the Islamists.

It said it "decided to retake these localities with all urgency to assure the security of the belongings, and more particularly of people, because of the grave danger their lives faced with the return of the Malian army, marching in the footsteps of the French army."

While the group known as NMLA was an important player in the early days of the Malian conflict last April, it had been ousted from power in northern Mali by the al-Qaida-linked extremists known as Ansar Dine.

The media coverage I've seen lately has tended to paint the Tuaregs as the poor, helpless victims of the brutal Malian army. I'm not condoning killing ethnic groups for any reason... but it's not inconsequential to remember that the Tuareg lifestyle is barbaric beyond anything I've ever experienced anywhere in the world and that barbarism includes holding Malians in the most brutal slavery you can possibly imagine. Now that Britain has sent troops to Mali they, along with France, have a moral responsibility for ending the Tuareg "right" to hold the Bella people in slave bondage for real and forever.

This typical media report (below) pretty much gets everything wrong, starting with the map, which mislocates Konna, Algeria and Mauritania for starters. The clueless Al Jazeera host, who may think "this all seems to be going a little bit too easy at the moment," is just pathetic and certainly Al Jazeera has no interest in talking about the Tuaregs' penchant for slavery.

Timbuktu, Gao And Kidal Fall To Tuareg Rebels

Here I am in downtown Timbuktu, 4 years ago

When I would tell people I was going to Mali or I had gone to Mali they would look at me incomprehensibly. Maui? Bali? I almost never met an American who knew where Mali was. But when I would mention Timbuktu there was at least some comprehension that I wasn't taking about Hawaii. Four years ago, a topper of a month Roland and I spent in Mali, we finally made it to fabled Timbuktu. I had imagined it as the city in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which it isn't, but we discovered a unique and fascinating, hospitable if remote town on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

This week Timbuktu fell to Tuareg rebels, savage desert nomads who fervently believe in slavery. Hundreds of thousands of Malians have fled south, as the Tuaregs captured Gao, Kidal and now Timbuktu, the entire northern two-thirds of the country.

Mali's army is reported to have deserted the military base of Timbuktu, the last town in the north under government control, as Tuareg separatists pounded it with heavy weapons. Coup leaders have reinstated the constitution after pressure from neighbouring countries.

Shells could be heard exploding at the base even though it was deserted, local residents told news agencies by phone Sunday.

The soldiers had fled, some shedding their uniforms, leaving Arab militias from the Bérabish community to defend the town, they said.

Al Jazeera television reported that the town, whose population is mainly ethnic Arab, had fallen to the rebel National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which wants a Tuareg homeland in the north of the country.

On Saturday the army quit the largest town in the north, Gao, leaving it to the MNLA which has already captured Kidal.

The Tuareg rebels have been strengthened by the arrival of well armed fighters previously employed by deposed and murdered Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.

The military claims that they have links to armed groups connected to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operate in the Sahara.

Timbuktu, a historic city that is on the Unesco World Heritage list, is 800 km north of Bamako and 300 km west of Gao.

Republican Tuaregs

Bandits McConnell, DeMint and Vitter

I just returned from a trip to Mali. On my travel blog I talked about my first encounter with the Tuaregs, a vicious, ignorant and primitive warlike tribe from the wastes of the Sahara-- sort of the GOP of Mali. Although Tuaregs still hold slaves in neighboring Mauritania, they gave up on slavery in Mali in 1973. For unfettered free-marketeers like Republicans and Tuaregs, slavery-- or, at worst, feudalism-- is the ideal relationship between capital and labor.

Here in the U.S. neither serfdom nor slavery is condoned any longer, not even in the most backward and ignorant parts of South Carolina or Alabama. So Republicans have been doing all they can to destroy the progress working families have made by attacking labor unions, the vehicles for their success and the engine of a vibrant middle class, bane of right-wing reactionaries. Right now the focus of that battle is the desperate GOP attempt to torpedo EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which Republican extremists in the Senate managed to filibuster in 2008. Each of the GOP senators leaving that body after the November election-- Ted Stevens (AK), Pete Domenici (NM), Norm Coleman (MN), Gordon Smith (OR), Wayne Allard (CO), John Warner (VA), John Sununu (NH), Elizabeth Dole (NC) was an EFCA opponent and each was replaced by the voters with an EFCA supporter.

Right wing propagandists insist that the battle against EFCA is a battle to save the secret ballot, sheer nonsense. But today's latest blast from the Republican Party's Wall Street Journal editorial page is on full attack-- and claiming that their latest battle against labor unions will be won because of the connivance of reactionary Democrats. They point to EFCA ex-sponsor Mark Pryor, who just won another 6 year term with no opposition from either a real Democrat or a real Republican. Pryor is arguably the dumbest and most right-wing-- not that those two characteristics don't ever stack up behind each other-- member of the Democratic caucus. (You doubt me? Watch this. Yes, he thinks it's funny that really ignorant throwbacks from the Bronze Age, like himself, are in the Senate.)

Rightists are using Pryor's pathetic "wobbly" position on EFCA as an indication that Senate Democrats are cooling on the bill.

[T]he political ground is already shifting under Big Labor's card-check initiative. The unions poured unprecedented money and manpower into getting Democrats elected; their payoff was supposed to be a bill that would allow them to intimidate more workers into joining unions. The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama and an unfettered Democratic majority would write that check, lickety-split.

Instead, union leaders now say they are being told card check won't happen soon. It seems the Obama team plans to devote its opening months to important issues, like the economy, and has no intention of jumping straight into the mother of all labor brawls. It also seems Majority Leader Harry Reid, even with his new numbers, might not have what it takes to overcome a filibuster. It's a case study in how quickly a political landscape can change, and how frequently the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Are they correct? Other than Blanche Lincoln, who is up for re-election in 2010 and who is as right-wing and cowardly as Pryor, it isn't likely any Democrat will actually oppose EFCA, although the worst of the lot will want to work with the Chamber of Commerce and the GOP extremists to shorten it. I wonder if they'll eventually try to abolish weekends too.