Policymakers fear the latest disaster in the Sahel may expose Europe to attack as al-Qaida seeks to extend its operations
Not so long ago, the chaotic army coup that overthrew Mali's elected president would have received scant international attention. But attitudes change as the world shrinks. What happens next in the impoverished, landlocked west African country worries policymakers from Washington to Beijing to Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the African Union. For that matter, it concerns travellers on the London tube, too.
It is important not to mince words. Despite a surprisingly sympathetic suggestion by a senior US state department official that the army's grievances were justified, the coup is a catastrophe for a country that had been doing relatively well in an unequal struggle with nature and poverty.
The coup leaders fully deserve the international condemnation that has, for the most part, enveloped them. Not for the first time, the US risks confusing anti-terror priorities with the need to uphold democratic principles.
Robert Fowler, a former UN regional envoy, says Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali's deposed president, was the kind of enlightened, freely elected leader that is still too rare in Africa. "He made his country the darling of aid agencies and thinktanks alike," Fowler said. "His overthrow by a motley crew of disgruntled junior army officers is not only deeply disappointing, it is a disgrace and a disaster for the 15 million people of Mali, and, indeed, for the entire Sahel region."
This view is shared by neighbouring countries comprising Ecowas, the west African economic community, which this week imposed trade and diplomatic sanctions after the US-trained coup leader, Captain Amadou Sanogo, ignored demands to return to barracks. "What our leaders are doing, I believe, is right. In this day and age, coups are no longer acceptable," the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo told Voice of America.
And, by and large, Obasanjo is correct. Peer pressure has made armed takeovers in Africa much rarer than they used to be, and often short-lived. But a familiar, awkward question now looms amid the rhetoric about the imperatives of good governance: are African leaders prepared to accept the UN-defined "responsibility to protect", and intervene militarily if all else fails? It is unlikely (and undesirable) that the French or other western countries will do so.
Even if Sanogo backs down, the damage is already considerable and may be hard to repair. Reports on Tuesday spoke of 200,000 people displaced in the north by the accelerating Tuareg rebellion, which exploited the confusion caused by the coup. Amid growing food and fuel shortages, UN refugee officials spoke of mayhem in northern towns overrun by separatist fighters of the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). They appear to be allied, in what is probably a temporary marriage of convenience, to the hardline Islamists of Ansar ud-Din, who, in turn, are linked to al-Qaida in the Maghreb.
US and British security officials have warned for some time of the rising threat posed by al-Qaida and its affiliates across the "ungoverned spaces" of the Sahel. These concerns extend to Niger, Chad, southern Algeria and Mauritania, deemed risky for western travellers. The Pentagon's Africa Command has voiced fears that al-Qaida is increasingly switching its training and logistics focus to this region, away from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is intent on building a continental chain of terror from west Africa all the way to Somalia and Yemen.
This development, so the argument goes, potentially exposes Europe's soft underbelly to terrorist attack, facilitated by illegal migration, people-smuggling, and the trafficking of arms and drug. Hence the relevance of anarchy in Mali to the security of Londoners and foreign tourists taking the tube to the Olympics this summer.
Obasanjo and Fowler both point to additional international linkages. The nomadic Tuareg, who straddle Libya, Algeria, Mali and Niger, want, in theory, to create their own state. Past Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger were supported by Libya's late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who employed Tuareg fighters. When Gaddafi fell, these formidable soldiers came west and south, bearing Libyan arms.
"We knew that at the end of the Libya operations, there would be fallouts. And the fallout would be, where would all the weapons go? Part of what is happening in Mali is part of the fallout from Libya and we should not expect that Mali will be the last," Obasanjo said.
Fowler said: "The core of Gaddafi's 'African mercenaries' were Tuareg, a desert people who, in the 70s, formed the vast bulk of his 'Islamic Legion'. These ruthless warriors have now returned to northern Mali and Niger – flush with cash, armed to the teeth and with significant experience and very bloody hands. All this does not augur well for peace and stability in the region.
"Whatever the motivation of the principal Nato belligerents [in ousting Gaddafi], the law of unintended consequences is exacting a heavy toll in Mali today and will continue to do so throughout the Sahel as the vast store of Libyan weapons spreads across this, one of the most unstable regions of the world."
As if all this were not serious enough, Mali is on the sharp end of climate change-related desertification, failing crops, dwindling rainfall and rising food prices, factors that are expected to affect 12 million people in the Sahel this year. Oxfam and other aid agencies say. Even if it had a functioning government, the coming humanitarian crisis would be hard to contain. Sanogo and his motley crew have made it significantly harder.