Ceasefire breaks in Mali?

From Associated Press:

Insurgents attacked an army convoy in northern Mali Saturday, violating a cease-fire and sparking a fire fight that left five people dead, military sources and area residents said.

It was the first major clash since the ethnic Tuareg rebels and the government signed a cease-fire a month ago. Libya had brokered that deal in an attempt to restore peace to a region that has been plagued by raids, kidnappings and clashes for more than a year.

On Saturday morning, a group of armed men attacked an army supply vehicle outside of the town of Tessalit, a regional army official said. He said four attackers and one soldier died in the fighting. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The negatives of false positives: Misdiagnosing malaria leads to fevered complications

“When people are sick in Mali, the doctor will usually tell them they have malaria whether or not they test for it,” Fatou Faye, an infectious diseases researcher and trainer at a privately funded medical laboratory, the Charles Merieux Centre in Bamako recently told IRIN.

“The patients then buy anti-malarial drugs in the street and build up a resistance to treatment.”

Dr. Imelda Bates of the Malaria Knowledge Project says that when doctors misdiagnose malaria, patients may miss real treatments for other serious illnesses like pneumonia and meningitis. Most rural health clinics lack the proper equipment to make a full malaria diagnosis, leaving many patients uncertain what is causing their fevers. Because the potency of malaria strengthens after each fever cycle, many patients simply take anti-malarial drugs as a precaution.

The problem with most blood smears is that most patients already have a considerable amount of the malaria parasite in their bodies, which is picked up by the test, leading to a false-positive test and overdiagnosis.

Health professionals are calling for more funds going towards diagnosis, which would allow those health clinics away from population centers to purchase microscopy equipment that properly count the amount of parasites in blood, a more certain way of diagnosing the illness. This equipment, called rapid diagnosis tests, are inexpensive and can be used by untrained technicians.

The Banana Theory: Are Tuareg rebels in Mali (and Niger) in cahoots with Al-Qaida?

A recurring theme has sprung up regarding the up tick in violence in northern Mali: Are Taureg rebels connected to some broader terror movement? More worrying, are they somehow aligned with Al-Qaida? It’s a theory that has been debunked many times before, but continues to crop up every few months.

In a recent report from VOA, London based human rights activist Ibrahima Kane, says that with instability in the northern lands growing, you cannot miss the parallels.

"There are many rebel groups in that part of Africa. Some of them are supposed to have very strong links with al-Qaida, and there is lots of arms trafficking, many traffics in that part of the region," said Kane.

It’s true that Al-Qaida's north African wing, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, is believed to be holding two Austrian tourists they nabbed in Tunisia at a hideout in northern Mali (or Niger or Algeria).

On the other hand, Anthropologist Jeremy Keenan has long played down the idea of any fruitful relationship between Malian rebels and al-Qaida. He’s brought on to VOA to do the same:

"This is connected geographically but that is totally separate from this rebellion. In other words, the Tuareg rebellion and the Austrian hostage situation are not connected in any way. They just happen to be in the same area, but that is coincidental," he said.

He says links between different armed groups in the region do exist, such as between the Malian and Niger rebels, but they are difficult to define.

"The linkages are very, very complicated.... They involve a lot of history and quite detailed micro-politics and micro-sociology, and so forth but one thing I think I will probably say is the situation in Niger up until these last couple of weeks by and large has been worse than in Mali," he said.

Keenan says he believes the situation in both Mali and Niger has been aggravated by raids by government militaries on civilian areas. The two militaries have been receiving U.S. aid and training to combat terrorism and trafficking in the area.

(He gets so much time airtime compared to Ibrahima Kane that one get’s the idea the “London based human rights activist” was solely contacted for his role to start an empty debate, only to have it debunked. Nonetheless, he was kind enough to oblige.)

Here’s a take from author Sharon Chada (admittedly from September, the last time the Tuareg = Al-Quaida connection was made):

[I]t is the Tuareg, after all, who host the Festival of the Desert every year. And I have to say, I could never quite square reports about them being allied with Al Qaeda with all the music they make, their lifestyle (the men veil, the women don't), not to mention their fierce independence (they've run the desert caravans across the Sahara since Biblical times). I could never quite imagine Bin Laden and company suddenly being enthroned in Tuareg lands…

Anyway, the Iraqi Sunnis get it, and it appears the Tuareg do too: that this, that these Al Qaeda people are never happy just being offered refuge, or someplace to live and educate their kids in safety and prosperity, what they also want is to rule, and in their particularly obnoxious way.

Isn't there something else at work here? It’s the responsibility of any government to secure its borders – however hazy they may be – and insure the respect of its territorial sovereignty. Tuareg rebels may not be terrorists. Fine. But what is their knowledge or connection with the smugglers moving drugs, weapons and people (and cigarettes!) through the desert? In Niger, at least from what they say, a lot. (“…not even a mouse could get through the desert without their knowledge…”) A Tuareg rebel leader from Niger told another VOA reporter that for information regarding smugglers, governments have to come clean with Tuaregs and other nomads and bring them on board as partners.

So far, this isn’t happening. Perhaps that’s the debate we should be having.

Double shot of instability: Mali and Cote d’Ivoire

Who says West Africa can still be mildly instable?

Mali has mostly avoided the issues with Tuaregs that has recently plagued the government of Niger. That may be due to the government’s more conciliatory approach to the situation. Have things taken a decidedly worse turn?

From IRIN:

Citizens are divided on what should be the next steps following the latest round of violence between Tuareg rebels and Malian army officers, which has led to the kidnapping of up to 30 Malian soldiers and the deaths of three soldiers and five civilians in Mali’s northern Kidal region.

Fighting broke out on 20 March 18 km from the town of Tin-Zaouatene when rebels ambushed a government military supply convoy capturing soldiers and seizing as many as eight vehicles.

"We do not know what to do. When the shooting began between the rebels and the army, the entire population had to hide out at home,” said Amadou Koné a government official in Kidal.

He continued, “people stop trusting each other because they don’t know who is who. It is like being in Iraq or Palestine.”

The fighting came two weeks after the Northern Mali Tuareg Alliance for Change (ATNMC) released 22 military hostages from the nearby town of Kidal, 1,200 km from Bamako.

Recently, western Cote d’Ivoire has seemed to be the most lawless area of the country. The reasons are plentiful: The number of internally displaced persons habituating this area along with the large number of Liberian refugees who sought safety there; or, perhaps it’s the former Liberian soldiers living in that part of the country and continuing to look for work.

Again, IRIN:

Two towns in western Cote d’Ivoire have been shut off by two days of riots by disgruntled Ivorian soldiers.

Troops started rampaging through the town of Duékoué, 400 km north west of the commercial capital Abidjan, on the morning of 24 March, protesting the murder of a low-ranking soldier by robbers the night before, Commandant Vazoumana, a gendarme in Duékoué told IRIN.

“We have been unable to leave our houses,” Flora Gbazé, a civilian in Duékoué, said on 24 March. “Since the morning soldiers have been shooting in the air.” Later the same day riots broke out in nearby Guiglo, army sources in the town told IRIN.

According to a humanitarian source in the region, one civilian death has been confirmed by stray gunfire.

Rioting continued in Guiglo on 25 March, however in Duékoué the soldiers spent the day in negotiations with government officials, a humanitarian official familiar with the situation told IRIN.

The soldiers were demanding the resignation of the governor in the region, the source told IRIN.

“The signals coming from both the government and military leaders are not at all clear,” the source said, noting that Ivorian soldiers had been petitioning the regional authorities to improve their security arrangements for some weeks.

Tuareg rebels allegedly ambush convoy in Mali

From Reuters:

Mali's military said suspected Tuareg rebels ambushed one of its convoys in the northeast of the country early on Thursday, wounding at least four soldiers.

The attack, which triggered a fierce gunbattle, was in the northern sector of the Kidal region close to the Algerian border, where al Qaeda kidnappers are reported to be holding two Austrian tourists seized last month in Tunisia.

The supply convoy was ambushed 18 km (11 miles) from the remote border garrison town of Tin-Zaouatene, which was briefly besieged in September by fighters led by Malian Tuareg leader Ibrahima Bahanga.

"A first vehicle hit a mine, seriously wounding four (soldiers), and then the rest of the convoy was fired on. Our men fired back and there were intense exchanges of fire," a Malian officer, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

While cheap, cotton oil comes at a high cost in Mali

In Mali, cotton oil sells for half the price of imported cooking oils. However, there’s a stitch for one of West Africa’s largest cotton producers: It’s been found that local oil processors lack the equipment to remove a toxin gossypol from the oil. The BBC reported that government has temporarily shuttered 80 small-scale cotton pressers, leaving only 16 in business. They also launched a public information campaign on the present dangers of cotton oil.

The government has also been working on a new system to better track where and when locally produced oil is made.

From BBC:

"What we're working towards is that all producers in Mali will have a certain transparency, so you can see the date it was made, the factory it was made in, and with what sort of water they made it.

"With these rules I can give you a guarantee," says [Head of Ministry of Industry, Adama] Konate.

"So it's necessary that the consumer demands that the products they buy have a degree of transparency."

The real solution, Mr Konate feels, would be for Mali to start refining sunflower, sesame and groundnut seeds to make cheap cooking oil at home without the dangers of cotton seed oil.

The choice is yours
Gossypol, according to a paper by Matt Poore and Glenn M. Rogers at the North Carolina State University, is a natural toxin used to protect the cotton plants by slowing down reproduction rates of insects. Cattle, which can detoxify gossypol much more effectively than poultry, will develop heart damage and heart failure if they overeat cotton meal over a long period of time.

But we’re talking humans here. According to a story in MaleContraceptives.org, Chinese researchers have been on to the effects of cotton (really, gossypol) on male fertility since the 1920s. Five decades later, they conducted a ten-year study involving 8,000 men that found that those taking a daily gossypol pill had regular contraception along the lines of female contractive pills without a change in libido.

But side effects were found. Low levels of potassium, a disease called hypoklemia, were found between 1 and 10 percent of the subjects. This disease is mostly found with people with very poor functioning kidneys. (However, one Brazilian scientist argued that the Chinese diet is naturally poor in potassium.) Nonetheless, gossypol is a known toxin and its chances at becoming an “herbal” substitute for vasectomy are very slim.

It has also tumor inhibitors capabilities, making gossypol a candidate as a cancer drug. It also contains anti-malarial properties.

So, what needs to happen?
People have long heated cotton seeds to extremely high temperatures (about 230 – 260 Fahrenheit) and added hexane and two other solvents, which extracts the gossypol. The story doesn't say, but either the producers weren't bringing the cotton seed up to proper temperatures or they didn't have the proper chemicals to do the extraction.

Remaining Mali hostages freed

From The Times:

Tuareg rebels in northern Mali have released the last 22 government soldiers they took hostage in August, President Amadou Toumani Toure’s office said yesterday.

"The presidency is pleased to announce to the nation that the last 22 soldiers taken in the northeast were released on the night of March 7," a statement said.

The statement highlighted the "great contribution" played by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, who wields considerable influence with the nomadic Tuareg people, as well as the "precious help" of Algeria, which brokered the peace accord between the main rebel group and Bamako.

In total, some 50 hostages including other civilians were taken by a breakaway rebel faction led by Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, whose men clashed with the army earlier this year following the mainstream group’s signing of peace pacts with the government.

In September, Ag Bahanga released a first hostage group of five civilians and two soldiers following Algerian mediation.

Mali begins to re-evaluate, fix its democratic model

Mali’s President Amadou Toumani Touré recently appointed a 15-person task force to investigate the state of the country’s democracy. The underlying motivation of the group will be to evaluate and strengthen the country’s democratic model, which means making changes.

According to a story by the Nation (of Nairobi), the task force will be addressing the issues of electoral fraud, low citizen participation, how to fund political parties, voter registration and education. It should be noted that Toumani Touré, known as ATT, ended the one party after toppling the government of Moussa Traoré in 1991. Elections were called in 1992, but ATT did not take part. Since then, the country has seen 3 other presidential and parliamentary elections, where two incumbents have handed over power to a successor. Toumani Touré retired from the military and returned to politics in 2002, running for president (and winning) as an independent. He won a second (and final) term in 2007.

Mali has long been considered one of the most politically stable, democratically progressive countries in West Africa. It currently enjoys a ranking of 20 out of 45 states in the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, compiling such indicators as rule of law, citizen participation, human rights and sustainable economic opportunity.

From the Nation:

The decision comes at a time when Mali itself is not facing any trouble, nor heading to any immediate election which could have been a source of suspicion or tension.

Across Africa, the democratic achievements of the early and mid 90s - which have generalised the practice of multi-party politics and regular elections in several countries - are being seriously questioned by some and challenged by the facts.

In Mali, "the institutional practices of the past 15 years have shown a certain number of flaws and shortcomings which constitute matters of concern for the political class as well as for the civil society organisations", President Touré said when addressing the newly formed 15-member committee, headed by Mr [Former minister Daba] Diawara and comprising lawyers, university professors and civil society leaders.

The Malian ruler also noted that despite "the many amendments to the electoral Act and the Political parties Charter', the electoral process and financing the political parties" remain problematic in his country, as has been shown by the different polls organised since 1992, when the country entered the democratic era under the leadership of ATT.

… "We need to launch an in-depth debate on those issues", Mr Ousmane Issoufi Maïga who was the then Prime Minister said over the July 2007 parliamentary elections. He expressed the wish that "all sections" of the country needed to be consulted to see what was wrong with Mali's democracy. For the former prime minister, "it was important for the youth, the women, the political parties, the civil society organisations, opinion leaders, for everybody to meet to address these issues".

The True Cynics’ choice: Which is a more fearful event for Mali?

Number one: Oil discovered? A third international oil company has been granted rights to hunt for crude oil near the Gao region.

"I maintain that there is oil in Mali, because for foreign firms to invest so much money in exploration, you would think they were doing so with full knowledge of the facts," Mali's President Amadou Toure said on state television this week.

A true cynic would say: Here come the parasites that make up the international oil cartel to wreak havoc, cause instability and propel a steadily growing economy (and increasingly democratic) country over the edge. (These views do not necessarily represent the editorial outlook of Africa Flak.)

Number two: AFRICOM visit? U.S. Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward, commander of U.S. Africa Command, spent three days in Bamako, Mali to meet with government officials, review bilateral relations and to “explain the overall mission of AFRICOM.”

"This trip allows us all to build working relationships, trust and confidence between AFRICOM and partners...it's important to create and foster personal connections," Ward said. "I want to personally thank the country of Mali for their work in regional peace and security. Our common goal is to enhance the capacity of Africans to care for their stability so that development can take place and Africans can prosper."

A true cynic would say: Here comes the team that hires the mercenaries that makes up the fight against terror to wreak havoc, cause instability and propel a steadily growing economy (and increasingly democratic) country over the edge. (These views do not necessarily represent the editorial outlook of Africa Flak.)

Bonus question: What’s the relationship between choice number one and choice number two?

Mali seeks help from Algeria on border issues and Taureg hostages

From Reuters:

Mali wants neighbouring Algeria to tighten security on their Sahara desert border and help get Tuareg rebels to free 26 hostages, Mali's parliament speaker said in remarks published on Tuesday.

Tuareg fighters took dozens of Malian government soldiers hostage in a violent campaign that began in August 2007 and saw some of its heaviest fighting around the remote Malian garrison at Tin-Zaouatene on the Algerian border.

Malian parliament speaker Dioncounda Traore asked Algerian President Abdleaziz Bouteflika in a meeting this week to "influence" the rebels to free the detainees, top-selling Arabic-language daily El Khabar quoted him as saying in an interview on a visit to Algiers.

"We spoke of the problems of security and development in the frontier regions which are disturbed from time to time," Traore was quoted as saying.

For second time in five months, shots fired at U.S. plane in Mali

From the Associated Press:

Gunmen fired on a U.S. military aircraft flying food supplies to Malian troops in the far north of the country, but no one was injured in the attack and the plane landed safely, officials said Thursday.

U.S. Maj. Pam Cook, a spokeswoman for the U.S. military command in Stuttgart, Germany that covers Africa, confirmed the plane was shot at late Tuesday or early Wednesday over Tin-Zawatine, a desert village on Mali’s border with Algeria. The U.S. has provided military training to Mali and other African nations for years.

The plane was dropping food supplies to Malian soldiers, who have battled a nascent Tuareg rebellion in the northeast for months, according to a senior Malian military official who declined to be named because he is unauthorized to speak to the press.

The gunmen used AK-47s to fire on the plane, just after it had finished its final drop, the Malian official said. Cook declined to speculate on who fired on the plane and there was no claim of responsibility.

It was not the first time U.S. military aircraft was fired on in Mali. In September, Malian officials claimed – and U.S. officials acknowledged – that Tuareg rebels fired on an American military plane as it was dropping supplies.

Will the real Europe to Africa road rally please stand up?

It’s hard to keep a good road rally down. The Budapest-Bamako, Trans-Saharan Rally will begin as planned this weekend. The story is not the same for the Paris-Dakar rally, which was cancelled due to security concerns.

From PR Web:

The capital of Hungary will host the starting ceremonies of the third annual Budapest-Bamako, Great African Run on January 12, 2008. The 148 cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses will have to travel 8896 kilometers from Budapest before they reach the capital of Mali.

This year's event has a tense start due to security concerns in Mauritania. The 2008 Budapest-Bamako will spend 5 days in the troubled North African country. "The Bamako will go ahead as planned, however we have asked all participants to carefully evaluate the security situation before Saturday," said Andrew G. Szabo director of the event.

The event is a zero assistance, extreme endurance rally where teams have to rely on their own resources in case of emergencies. The event was originally created for those who have always dreamt of joining the Dakar, but never had the proper funding. The Budapest-Bamako offers all the thrills and spills of a true African driving adventure.

Speaking of those security concerns, a few weeks after four French tourists were shot in Mauritania, and a subsequent warning from Western governments to avoid the country, tourism is back on the front burner (so to speak).

From Afriquenligne:

Despite the threat of terrorism in Mauritania and the travel warning issued to their citizens by some countries, including France, tourists have continued to flock to the country, official sources told PANA here Monday.

"A group comprising 111 tourists arrived in the Adrar region in the country on Monday and another one was expected (later in the day),'' Crafts and Tourism Minister Ba Madine told the Parliament.

Finally, nine people appeared in a Mauritanian court in connection with the killing of four French tourists, the BBC reports.

Prosecutors in Mauritania alleged the suspects are linked to a group allied to al-Qaeda.

The tourists - apparently members of the same family - were shot by gunmen as they stopped for a roadside picnic.

A fifth person, said to be the father of the family, survived and has been transferred to Senegal for treatment.
…
The victims were initially reported to have been robbed, though the interior ministry now says they were not, the Associated Press news agency reports.

In their statement, prosecutors in Nouakchott said murder suspects were thought to belong to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb - a group formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

She don't lie: Mali seizes cocaine on northern border

Malian officials claimed that have seized 750 kilos of cocaine after a two-hour gun battle with smugglers near the country’s northern border. The cocaine, worth $45 million, was found in two abandoned 4x4s.

From the BBC:

“The seizure took place... following a car chase and gun fight, or a battle, you could say, as they had military weapons," a senior Territorial Administration Ministry official told Reuters news agency.

"After two hours of fighting, the smugglers, who were driving three Algerian-registered off-roaders, abandoned two of them, loaded their wounded into the third vehicle and fled over the border," he said.

West Africa has long been thought of a transfer point for South African cocaine entering Europe. In fact, large drug seizures have taken place in Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Tuaregs and Mali come closer to reconciliation; some soldiers freed

From Agence France Presse:

Taureg rebels in northern Mali have agreed to free 10 of 36 soldiers they took hostage in August, a Malian official said Thursday in the wake of an announcement from the president's office.

"Ten of the 36 Malian hostages will be handed over on Friday from Algeria at an official ceremony in Tinzaoutene," in the Kidal region near Mali's northern desert border with Algeria, the official in a committee that monitors accords between the government and ex-rebels told AFP.

"The release of the other hostages will take place soon, thanks to mediation by Libya," added the official, who asked not to be named.

Algeria and Mali step up cooperation border security

As a means to finding a political solution to growing lawlessness along their common border, the governments of Algeria and Mali agreed to set aside a €1.75 million fund to bolster security.

The English edition of Echorouk online reported the two countries met in Algiers in an attempt to ward off cross-border attacks, cut down on illegal immigrants passing through the region and stamp out smuggling from either side of the border. This was the tenth time the two countries met since 1995.

“The two sides agreed to step up security notably between the southern Algerian towns of Tamanrasset, Adrar and Illizi and the northern Malian towns of Kidal, Gao and Tomboctou, on the other side of the border,” the paper said.

In a recent interview with the newspaper, Hadj Ibrahim Ghouma, a Tuareg leader in southern Algeria, pressed the governments to expand armed security forces of locals on the increasingly lawless border region.

In view of the instability in the region, it has become more than necessary to involve directly the local residents, that is, the Touaregs themselves in the protection of the country’s southern borders with the setting up of armed vigilante groups operating, of course, under the close supervision of the National Popular Army.

Such armed vigilante groups will be in charge of combing every inch of the southern areas of Illizi province without any respite to ward off any cross-border terrorist attack.

These vigilante groups should be made up of local Touaregs whose advantage is to know every nook and corner of the Algerian south.

I should remind you that such armed self-defence groups called “Maharrissat” did exist in the 60’s and 70’s and did a rather good job by clearing the southern areas of all banditry before being dissolved abruptly by the Authorities in the 80’s.

Their reinstatement at this juncture will be, I guess, a good thing in view of the unpredictable situation now prevailing in the south.

Press freedom in West Africa?

One month, four journalists detained in West Africa.

On October 8, the government of democratic hot-shot Senegal had an editor abducted, beaten and jailed for insulting the president, according to Reporters Without Borders.

In Nigeria, members of the State Security Service beat and arrested an editor on October 10 for accusing the State Governor of “corruption,” the Paris-based press group says.

It’s already October 22 and journalist Moussa Kaka begins his second month in prison in Niger. The government claimed the journalist for Radio France Internationale was conspiring with Tuareg rebels. In other news: The government arrested Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, a independent bi-monthly in Agadez, on October 9. Diallo was boarding a plane to France in Niamey when he was arrested. Authorities interrogated him throughout the night and then transported him to Agadez, where a state of emergency is in force.

State of emergency
In August, the area of the northern Sahara saw an increase in Tuareg violence, which is due to the failed implementation of the 1995 peace agreements between the Governments of Mali and Niger and the Tuaregs. Complaints stem from underrepresentation for the Tuareg people in the respective capitals of Bamako and Niamey; and, severe economic hardship. At least one observer claims the violence also stems from Tuareg concerns over the sharing of resources, such as gold, oil and uranium. The governments of Niger and Mali claim the rebels are not representative of regular people, but groups linked drug smugglers and other criminal activities which profit from instability.

In Niger, the state of emergency powers allow the government to forbid the broadcasting of any stories on the situation in the north.