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Islamists’ Harsh Rule Awakened Ethnic Tensions in Timbuktu
(about 7 hours later)
TIMBUKTU, Mali — When the Islamist militants came to town, Dr. Ibrahim Maiga made a reluctant deal. He would do whatever they asked — treat their wounded, heal their fevers, bandage up without complaint the women they thrashed in the street for failing to cover their heads and faces. In return, they would allow him to keep the hospital running as he wished.
TIMBUKTU, Mali — Zahby Ould Ibrahim’s general store was looted to the studs this week. The horde that descended upon it took not just the shop’s stock of pots, pans and bedding but the electric sockets, the light bulbs and the doorframe, too.
Then, one day in October, the militants called him with some unusual instructions. Put together a team, they said, bring an ambulance and come to a sun-baked public square by sand dunes.
A few shops away, Mahamane Dguitteye’s grocery store, its shelves lined with packets of spaghetti, bottles of olive oil and bars of soap, was completely untouched.
There, before a stunned crowd, the Islamist fighters carried out what they claimed was the only just sentence for theft: cutting off the thief’s hand. As one of the fighters hacked away at the wrist of a terrified, screaming young man strapped to a chair, Dr. Maiga, a veteran of grisly emergency room scenes, looked away.
The main difference between the men? Mr. Ibrahim is an Arab. Mr. Dguitteye is a black African of the Songhai ethnic group.
“I was shocked,” he said, holding his head in his hands. “But I was powerless. My job is to heal people. What could I do?”
“They bypassed my shop because I am not an Islamist, I am not an Arab, I am not light skinned,” Mr. Dguitteye said. “So they let me be.”
After nearly 10 months of occupation by Islamists fighters, many of them linked with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the people of this ancient mud-walled city recounted how they survived the upending of their tranquil lives in a place so remote that its name has become a synonym for the middle of nowhere.
The looting that took place here, along with reports of army executions of suspected Islamists and their allies, has raised fears that Mali, after two decades of peace among its many ethnic groups, is headed for a period of deep ethnic tension. That prospect is dampening the celebrations over the retaking of Timbuktu on Monday by French and Malian soldiers from the Islamist militants who occupied it.
“Our lives were turned upside down,” Dr. Maiga said. “They had guns, so whatever they asked, we did. It was useless to resist.”
The rebellion in Mali started with disgruntled members of the Tuareg ethnic group, who have risen up three times since Mali won its independence from France in 1960 to demand a state of their own. But Islamists with links to an extremist group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, quickly overran the secular rebels. They planned to turn northern Mali into an Islamic state, and some ethnic Arabs and black Africans joined their cause.
It has been only a few days since French and Malian troops marched into Timbuktu after heavy airstrikes chased the militants away, part of a surprisingly rapid campaign to retake northern Mali from the militants who held it captive for months. On Thursday, France’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told French radio that the intervention had “succeeded” and reached “a point of change.”
These alliances have driven deep wedges in this crossroads city, where the two ancient superhighways of the Sahara meet, the fabled caravan route and the Niger River, bringing travelers from far and wide who have long found ways to live together in relative peace.
President François Hollande of France will depart Friday evening for Mali, where he will visit Bamako and Timbuktu, a press officer at the French presidency said Friday. He is to return to France on Saturday evening.
“Before, we were friends,” said Dramane Cissé, the imam of one of the city’s most important mosques. “But this is not the first time the Tuaregs have made trouble. They brought calamity on us. After this, the relationship will not be the same.”
While the Islamist militants have retreated to the desert, there are no illusions that they have ceased to be a threat. As American officials praised the speed of the French-led operation to recapture northern cities, they also cautioned that a lengthy campaign would be needed to root out the militants from their desert redoubts — and that it was not immediately clear who would carry out the daunting task.
These tensions could be exacerbated by calls to negotiate with the secular Tuareg rebels whose uprising in January 2012 started the crisis.
“This is all being done very much on the fly,” one American official said of the intervention. “The challenge will be to keep up the pressure when the sense is to declare victory and go home.”
France, whose troops helped push the Islamists from the northern towns they held, are pressing for African troops to come garrison the cities of northern Mali before the rains arrive in March, and they are pressing President Dioncounda Traoré to start negotiations quickly with Tuareg rebels in the north, most of whom do not hold radical Islamist views.
Here in Timbuktu, life is certainly a long way from returning to normal. Shops owned by Arab tradesmen have been looted. Some residents have fled, a foretaste of ethnic strife that many fear will roil Mali for years to come. Electricity and running water are available only a few hours a day. The cellphone network remains down.
The majority of Tuaregs, the French contend, will agree to remain in a sovereign Mali with more guarantees of political autonomy, and the French hope that a deal will lead to early national elections. The Foreign Ministry has called on the Malian government to open talks with “legitimate representatives” and “non-terrorist armed groups” in the north, a clear reference to the more secular Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, known as the M.N.L.A.
Many of the residents who left — first to escape the occupation, then to escape the French airstrikes — have no way to return. Always remote, the city remains dangerously isolated: the dusty tracks and rivers leading here wind through forbidding scrubland territory that could still provide refuge for the Islamist fighters who melted away from the cities.
That is a message that President François Hollande of France is likely to reiterate when he meets with Mr. Traoré in the central town of Sévaré on Saturday and then travels with him to meet with French and Malian forces stationed here.
Those who remained told stories of how they survived the long occupation: by hiding away treasured manuscripts and amulets forbidden by the Islamists, burying crates of beer in the desert, standing by as the tombs of saints they venerated were reduced to rubble, silencing their radios to the city’s famous but now forbidden music.
The Malian government has said it is open to talks with the rebel movement, which has dissociated itself from the Islamists, so long as it gives up its demand for full Tuareg independence. But the government has ruled out talks with Islamist groups, including Ansar Dine.
“They tried to take away everything that made Timbuktu Timbuktu,” said Mahalmoudou Tandina, a marabout, or Islamic preacher, whose ancestors first settled in Timbuktu from Morocco in the 13th century. “They almost succeeded.”
Several days after the looting ended, a group of young men had gathered, shiftless and bored in front of Mr. Ibrahim’s shop, Boutique Najat. They explained why they had taken part in the spree.
The occupation of Timbuktu, a center of learning for centuries, was the latest in a long historical list of conquests — by Arab nations, by the Songhai and Maasina empires, by France. Once again, powerful global forces were in play in this fabled city: a network of Islamic extremists, the armies of France and West Africa, and to a lesser extent the United States, which has flown in French forces and refueled French warplanes during the campaign.
“We are punishing them for what they did to us,” said Aboukarime, a 17-year-old student who would give only his first name. “We suffered under the Islamists. They beat our mothers. They must pay.”
Through it all, the city’s residents, whose ancestors endured such ravages for the better part of a millennium, have adapted as best they could.
His friend Mohammed chimed in.
On April 1, the day rebels arrived in this city, Mr. Tandina had just returned from the first, predawn prayer of the day. He made bittersweet tea to the murmur of a French radio broadcast. The news was bad: Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, had fallen to Tuareg rebels, the nomadic fighters who had been battling the Malian state for decades.
“After what they have done we cannot forgive that,” he said. “They can never come back here.”
His hometown was almost certainly their next target. When shots rang out in Independence Square, just behind Mr. Tandina’s house, he knew that Timbuktu’s latest conquerors had arrived.
Such sentiments were painful to Siolina Cissé, a tall, pale-skinned man with light brown eyes whose lineage is a mix of Arab and Songhai.
“The barbarians were at our gate,” he said with a sigh. “And not for the first time.”
“Our religion is one of tolerance,” said Mr. Cissé, a Koranic scholar whose family has been teaching Arabic and the Koran to the children of Timbuktu for centuries. “We forget things quickly. But the trust has been broken.”
The Tuareg fighters took control of the city, and for two days they looted its sprawling markets, raped women, stole cars and killed anyone who stood in their way.
Asked if he worried that his light skin might make him a target of ethnic violence, Mr. Cissé laughed.
“Then the man with the big beard came,” Mr. Tandina said.
“There is scarcely a child in this village that I have not taught to read the Koran,” he said. “I am well known as a son of Timbuktu.”
Barrel-chested and dressed in a blue tunic, the leader of Ansar Dine, an Islamist group with links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, arrived with several truckloads of fighters. The new rebels called the city’s people to a public square and made an announcement.
But there are good reasons to be concerned about reprisals against people of ethnic groups associated with the Islamist and Tuareg rebels, human rights groups warned.
“They said, ‘We are Muslims. We came here to impose Shariah,’ ” Mr. Tandina said.
“Over a dozen witnesses told Human Rights Watch that pro-government militias and youth groups have prepared lists of those who would be targeted for retaliation if government forces retake the north,” Human Rights Watch said in a report released in December.
At first, Timbuktu’s people were relieved, he said. Beginning a hearts-and-minds campaign, the group garrisoned the fearsome Tuareg nationalists outside of town, which stopped the raping and pillaging.
The Malian army has been accused to executing suspected militants, and has faced accusations of torture and other mistreatment.
They did not charge for electricity or collect taxes. Commerce went on more or less as usual, he said.
Three men suspected of being Islamist militants who were arrested near the town of Léré told The Associated Press that they had been subjected to a form of waterboarding.
Then a mysterious group of visitors came from Gao, heavily armed men riding in pickup trucks, trailing desert dust.
“To force me to talk they poured 40 liters of water in my mouth and over my nostrils which made it so that I could not breathe anymore,” one of the men, who gave his name as Ali Guindo, told the A.P. “For a moment I thought I was even going to die.”
“They told us they were here to establish an Islamic republic,” Mr. Tandina said.
In Timbuktu, residents said it would take a long time for the old ways of coexistence to return.
It started with the women. If they showed their faces in the market they would be whipped. The local men grew angry at attacks on their wives, so they organized a march to the headquarters of the Islamic police, who had installed themselves in a bank branch.
“In Timbuktu, we are not racists,” Mr. Dguitteye said. “But people are angry. They feel betrayed. The trust is lost.”
The Islamists greeted the protesters by shooting in the air. Many fled, but a small group, including Mr. Tandina, insisted that they be heard.
Steven
Erlanger contributed reporting from Munich, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Scott Sayare from Paris.
A young, bearded man came out to meet them. Much to Mr. Tandina’s surprise, he recognized the Islamic police official. His name was Hassan Ag, and before the fighting began he had been a lab technician at the local hospital.
“When I knew him he was cleanshaven, and he wore ordinary clothes of a bureaucrat,” Mr. Tandina said.
Now he was dressed in the uniform of the Islamist rebellion: a tunic, loose trousers cut well above the ankle, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and a machine gun slung across his shoulder.
“I told him our women were being harmed,” he said.
Mr. Ag was unmoved.
“This is Islamic law,” he said, according to Mr. Tandina. “There is nothing I can do. And the worst is yet to come.”
Soon it came. They began destroying tombs of the saints venerated by Timbuktu’s Muslims. Armed with pickaxes and sledgehammers, they reduced to rubble the tomb of Sidi Mahmoud, a saint who, according to legend, protected the city from invaders.
Venerating saints, an ancient practice here, was considered un-Islamic in the austere version of the faith proclaimed by the occupiers.
Mr. Tandina said he tried to use his decades of Koranic education to argue with the Islamists, citing verses about respecting the burial places. They would not listen.
Before long, he said, amputations started. Then came the executions. Again he said he tried to intervene, going to the Islamic court with stacks of Islamic law books under his arm.
“Islam was whatever they said it was,” he said. “They did not respect the holy book. They respected nothing but their own desires.”
For hundreds of years, Timbuktu was one of the world’s most important centers of Islamic learning. The city has dozens of mosques, and it is famous for the ancient, handwritten manuscripts that city residents have collected for generations, preserving them against waves of invaders and creating a priceless trove of knowledge about the Islamic world and beyond. Many families have long traditions of Islamic learning, passed from father to son.
So many here bristled when the Islamists called the population to lecture them about the proper practice of the religion in which they had been raised.
“What they call Islam is not what we know is Islam,” said Dramane Cissé, the 78-year-old imam at one of the city’s biggest and oldest mosques. “They are arrogant bullies who use religion as a veil for their true desires.”
But like many Muslims here, he hid away his amulets, prayer beads and other banned religious items. In his mind his faith remained the same.
“I was born in my religion and I will die in my religion,” Mr. Cissé said. “I know what I believe and nothing can change that.”
The compromises Dr. Maiga made to keep his hospital going continue to haunt him.
After the young man’s hand was cut off, the Islamists held it aloft and shouted “God is great” over and over, he said.
Dr. Maiga and his team hustled the young man into the ambulance and rushed him into the operating room to cauterize the wound, giving him powerful painkillers.
“I did what I had to do,” he said. “God help us.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Scott Sayare from Paris.
