If the intervention in the West African country of Mali shows us anything, it’s that colonialism is still alive and well, though its form has changed somewhat. Its old colonial ruler, France, has directly intervened in Mali in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” claiming that if they do not, Mali will degenerate into some form of a Islamic republic.
Shamefully, even much of the French left has assented to the deployment of the French military. In a phrase eerily reminiscent of the colonial quest to “civilize” the rest of the world, Deputy Francois Asensi of the main left parliamentary coalition in France said that “to abandon the people of Mali to the barbarism of fanatics would be a political error and a moral failing.” This kind of talk is not new — it is usually what leaders say before sending in the bombs, the drones and the troops.
To make the narrative of “humanitarian intervention” work, you must ignore the nature of the rebel groups, the Malian government and the very causes of the civil war. First off, the rebels. Yes, some of them are Islamists who want to impose some form of Sharia law. But the rebels are a divided group. There are also the Tuareg nationalist rebels who are fighting for independence of the area known as Azawad. In fact, Tuareg nationalists are arguably the dominant group — though information from the area is sketchy at best — and their goal is simply self-determination. They also have particular interest in creating an Islamic republic.
The Western-backed Malian government is not a model government. It was installed by a military coup in March 2012 and its army has been continually cited for human rights abuses. A confidential United Nations report argues that intervention will make things worse, leading to 400,000 more people being displaced, after 500,000 were displaced last year.
What is usually ignored in these conflicts are the causes. Masses of people don’t just take up arms and risk death or torture for the thrill of it. The main reason for the uprising in Azawad is the Malian government’s continual repression of the Tuaregs, as well as of the peoples in the north more generally. And if we trace this cause back one step we again end up at French colonialism. The borders of most African countries were drawn without any correspondence to ethnicity. The Tuaregs were a nomadic people that historically interacted much more with northern Africa than with Mali. Not to mention that large parts of the Tuareg community are not in Mali at all, but in neighboring Niger. They are one of the very many peoples in Africa that are without a state or divided into different states. They are also one of the many peoples in Africa that are being oppressed because the government is dominated by another ethnic group.
The practicality of this setup for Western dominance indicates that there is more than mere carelessness at play. The borders set up by the colonial powers left the Malian government facing a perpetual threat of rebellion that it is unable to handle on its own. In order to brutally maintain control, the government has to turn to Europe or the United States to receive military aid, weapons and in some cases, direct military intervention. Mali is thus dependent on the support of the West, which means that the West can make demands. These demands include opening up countries to the effects of free international trade, which are devastating for countries that have very little domestic capital or industry. The demands also include allowing Western companies free rein to extract the vast wealth of resources in these countries. Mali has huge gold deposits, making gold one of its main exports. France also has an economic interest in Mali, but its main reason for intervention is its own extraction in neighboring countries that would be affected if the Malian uprising were to spread. In Niger — one of the poorest countries on Earth and home to another large Tuareg minority — the French energy company Areva is currently building the second-largest uranium mine in the world.
This is why there is a “resource curse” — why countries with such great wealths of resources end up as underdeveloped dictatorships. The West will use what it can to make sure the western capitalist class is the one making money off of these resources instead of the peoples whose territories these resources are in. It has no qualms about setting peoples against each other or propping up oppressive dictatorial regimes like the one in Mali or the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Colonialism has not ended, it just looks a little different.
Luke Lattanzi-Silveus ’14 is a member of the International Socialist Organization and can be contacted at
luke_lattanzi-silveus@brown.edu
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