A few more impressions and thoughts in the wake of the attack.
The armed gangs that emerged from the civil war in Algeria were pretty hardcore Islamic extremists, although even there it has been argued that some of the worst throat-slitting atrocities in the 1990s were actually army-led false flag operations designed to put the Armed Islamic Group (GIA in French) in a bad light. Be that as it may, the agenda appeared pretty clear. The anti-government groups were eventually ejected into the desert and resurfaced as cigarette smugglers and common criminals. You need to eat, right?
Muamar Ghadaffi, the slain Libyan leader, used Arab, Islam and African identities in his geopolitical poker games that gave luxury hotels and monuments to Bamako and Ouagadougou, wars to Chad, Liberia and Sierra Leone and hard-to-match political showmanship to the world. The armed groups in the Sahara/Sahel are equally adept at alternating. They can be Quran-wielding fanatics on Friday, people smugglers at the weekend, kidnappers on Monday, drug traffickers on Wednesday and rebel fighters on Thursday. Some will use Islam as a smokescreen to justify murder or hide their other activities; others may be sufficiently brainwashed to believe that shooting dead people having a drink on a terrace is the Good Fight for a Good Cause. The three terminally misguided young lads who attacked Ouagadougou on January 15 fall in this category, I would say. They went to pray in a nearby Sunni mosque before they tore their bloody trail through the city centre. The imam of the same mosque has condemned the attack in the strongest possible words. And we must take him at his word. This is West Africa, where words are heavy and mean serious things.
But how deep does that fanatical Islam really go? Judging from my partner’s commentary on the fully veiled women…not very deep. Interestingly, the number of full veils diminished significantly in the wake of the attacks. This, to be perfectly honest, is to be welcomed: closed-up, walled-in Islam has no place in West Africa, which – by and large – is an open, tolerant, cosmopolitan and life-affirming part of the world.
Burkinabè press coverage of the events
Ouagadougou represents, in the final analysis, more fallout from the catastrophic Western intervention in Libya, the main protagonist of which was the clueless but very noisy Nicholas Sarkozy who is making another presidential bid, followed closely by the deeply disturbing and utterly cynical Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be the next president of the United States. The fallout of “Libya” is basically a gang war over turf on an absolutely gigantic scale, from the Mediterranean coast through the Libyan desert, throughout Mali and pushing ever further south. In this gang warfare, faith and business interests collide; blind ideological adherents works for calculating warlords like Iyad ag Ghali and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who has claimed the Ouagadougou attack.
Will it stop in Burkina Faso? Perhaps. There is a phrase you hear a lot here: ‘C’est mal nous connaître.’ The Burkinabè have a well-earned reputation for being workers and warriors in equal measure. There is a sense of belonging, of national unity, which is stronger here than in many of its neighbours and for that you can thank, once again, the revolutionary captain Thomas Sankara. Whether that will be enough remains to be seen. But if truth must be told, Burkina Faso’s people are pretty well equipped for the job.
The other thing you hear all the time in these parts is: C’est pas simple.’ And that’s true. Nothing is simple around here, a fact that is often lost on colleagues who come flying in looking for a Goodies vs Baddies story because that is what the editors want and that will sell papers and magazines and generate clicks on the website back home, even when it seriously violates realities on the ground. There is opportunity for deeper analysis, for instance on the ZAM website, which is currently running a series called No Hearts No Minds. In part, it explains that the War on Terror on the African continent is as doomed as the War on Drugs across the pond in Latin America. ZAM is here and I will be on it shortly.
Bram Posthumus - Yoff Tales 