Attacks on U.N. Force Add to Unrest in Mali

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/world/africa/attacks-on-un-force-add-to-unrest-in-mali.html

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DAKAR, Senegal — Armed groups in the north of Mali have, over the last week, attacked each other as well as United Nations peacekeepers and Malian soldiers — underscoring the country’s fragility as it tries to emerge from several years of political instability and jihadist revolt.

Hopes that a recent tenuous peace deal and cease-fire would pacify Mali’s restive, separatist-minded north have diminished as rival ethnic factions clashed in the town of Menaka on Monday; other fighters of the Tuareg ethnic group attacked government forces in the town of Léré on Wednesday; separatists attacked the town of Goundam; and United Nations vehicles were fired on in Timbuktu. The attacks resulted in the deaths of at least nine soldiers and several civilians.

Months of laborious negotiations in Algiers between the government and northern rebels produced a peace deal on March 1, but that is now in danger, diplomats say. Mongi Hamdi, the top representative of the United Nations in Mali — the agency maintains a peacekeeping operation of more than 10,000 soldiers in the country — called the episodes “extremely worrying because they are putting the peace process in jeopardy.”

Mali’s largely desert north is home to less than 10 percent of its population of 15 million but most of its problems. Separatist movements and lawlessness have characterized the region — neglected by the weak central government in the distant capital, Bamako — since the country’s independence from France. It was from the north that a Tuareg-jihadist rebellion emerged in early 2012, inflicting defeat upon defeat on the corruption-ridden army. The rebels eventually overran the entire region, imposing a harsh Qaeda-linked version of Islamic law that included amputations and execution by stoning.

With Mali’s army in collapse, the rebels were pushed out by French and Chadian troops in the first months of 2013, and elections that summer produced a shaky democratic government run by Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister and foreign minister who had been touched by allegations of lavish, questionable spending in an old inquiry. The north was unpacified and neighboring Algeria — its security threatened by the turmoil on its borders — forced through peace negotiations between the listless government in Bamako and rebel factions, culminating in the March 1 deal.

The agreement proved shaky from the start as one of the main rebel groups, known as the C.M.A. or Coordination for the Movements of Azawad — the name by which the Tuareg call the north — had refused to sign off with a May 15 deadline and a ceremony in Bamako looming. The C.M.A. demands even greater autonomy and political recognition for the northern region than was granted under the Algiers agreement.

Now, with the north overrun by armed factions, and still preyed on by jihadists ostensibly defeated in the 2013 French military operation, Mali risks the same sort of disintegration it faced three years ago when Islamists overran much of it.

Some diplomats in Bamako caution, however, that the latest fighting may simply be “maneuvering,” as one put it, before May 15, with the various factions seeking the most advantageous toehold before a deal is signed.

The “cease-fire” was largely fictitious anyway. In the north, “large swaths of territory” are “devoid of state authority in which Tuareg separatists, Islamist armed groups, pro-government militias and bandits have committed abuses with impunity,” Human Rights Watch said in a report two weeks ago.

A disastrous defeat of government troops by separatists in the main northern town of Kidal last May has left the government on the defensive, diplomats say.

“The government botched its return to the north, and has now largely pulled out of it,” the International Crisis Group said in a report last November.

The United Nations peacekeeping operation has sustained 79 attacks since its creation in July 2013, and 35 peacekeepers have been killed, Human Rights Watch said, with Islamists often taking credit; even humanitarian convoys have been attacked; and the Islamists have extended their attacks from the north into central Mali, forcing local government officials to flee.