MINUSMA, a post mortem

Part Three: departure

So the vote is in: MINUSMA will depart and the drawdown will begin immediately. Departure procedure will end on December 31 this year. 

Let’s be blunt. MINUSMA has been a disaster, not seen since the doomed UNAVEM II mission that sent Angola back to civil war. UNAVEM II was the mission during which the late Dame Margaret Anstee, its leader, famously quipped that she had been asked to fly a 747 (the UNSC resolution number that established UNAVEM II) with only enough fuel for a DC3, given the gigantic task UNAVEM had to perform with the resources available. In the end, MINUSMA was more like a Volkswagen Beetle that had been given the engines and enough fuel to power an Airbus. It just had nowhere to land the damn thing. 

To the Bamako junta MINUSMA was, to paraphrase its populist parlance, “the last enemy of Mali”. For the reasons explained in the previous part the colonels want it out because they detest the prying human rights eyes of these UN busybodies. We want to kill people in peace, thank you very much. Couple that with the just-adopted new constitution, which will concentrate even more power in the hands of the president (Macron must be green with envy) and we have the contours of a fully-fledged military dictatorship, ostensibly put in place with the full consent of the Malian people – at least those of the 39% that bothered to show up for the constitutional referendum vote.

The junta has thus removed the last bulwark standing between the Malian populations, especially in the Centre and the North – and the armed gangs stalking the land: jihadists, self-defence militias, the army, Wagner, other bandits, proxies, rebels. None of these groups portend anything good for the ordinary men, women and children who are trying to survive and stay out of harm’s way. Which will be even more difficult for them now than it was before. As the Dakar-based Timbuktu institute Bakary Sambe says, and I paraphrase: “To those safe, relatively well-off and internet-connected people in Bamako, MINUSMA has always meant something totally different compared to people those in Gao, Ménaka and Timbuktu, where it meant at least some protection.” Insecurity is something a Bamakois rarely has to worry about, even when the armed gang menace has been crawling ever closer to the capital. 

_{UNSG Guterres; he won’t be back in Bamako any time soon}

The Mission’s departure will inevitably mean serious job losses. This is of no concern to the junta, as we could already glean from an earlier one of their actions, when they prohibited any and all activity of NGOs financed from France. Late one February night this year, in one of Badalabougou’s watering holes (a dépôt), I got talking to a very dejected elderly man who had been working for one of those NGOs. He told me that he had been fired as a result of this petty vindictiveness on the part of the junta and was just floating from one informal job to another, barely making enough to survive. He knew of others, who had been returning to their lands and hoped to survive that way. Multiply this by a couple of thousands and you’ll have an idea of what this will mean to the economy. 

Of course, just like the development circuit, these are all artificial economies with vastly inflated salaries that bear little connection to the actual economy out on the streets. But the shock will nevertheless be significant as those salaries end, spending ends, kids may well drop out of schools because their parents can no longer afford the tuition fees. Supermarkets will see their revenues fall, no so much Bamako’s wonderful and ubiquitous we-sell-everything corner shops, which will continue as before. 

But the larger picture goes beyond that of a violent vindictive military junta hell-bent on maintaining itself in power. It is the entirety of the UN mission model that is in urgent need of a fundamental re-think. The ones I witnessed that were successful were Mozambique (1992-94), Sierra Leone up to an extent (1999 – 2005) and ditto for Liberia (2003 – 2018). And even then serious question should have been asked about the purpose and the effectiveness of these colossal and costly missions. And Angola should have been a wake-up call: when the conditions for a peace mission are absent, don’t send one. But as we saw earlier: conditions obtaining on the ground rarely if at all inform the ones making decisions about such missions. 

At its most fundamental level, then, this is about the yawning disconnect between what missions like MINUSMA are supposed to be doing on the ground and what the air-conditioned policy makers say they should be doing. It’s like organising a workshop about the correct use of fire extinguishers – and tweeting about it – while studiously ignoring the fact that the meeting place has already been doused with gasoline and there’s someone on the way carrying matches. Carayol quotes the French researcher Thierry Vircoulon, who puts it well: “UN missions no longer solve conflicts and bring peace. They stabilise conflicts.” And thus help make them go on forever. MINUSMA’s departure is bad news for the communities where it provided a modicum of protection. But for the dynamics conflicts themselves, the difference will be negligible. To the extent that it is allowed through, there will be more bad news from Mali. 

MINUSMA, a post mortem

Part Two: shifting mandates, human rights

Today, June 30, will see some final horse trading about MINUSMA and this time it is about when it should actually leave. This part deals with MINUSMA’s shifting positions and mandates – and why the Bamako junta hates it with a passion. 

One of the many things often forgotten when discussing these missions is what they can and cannot do. In the case of UN missions, everything hinges on The Mandate and that’s discussed in the UN Security Council, prior to the vote. MINUSMA’s mandate was essentially to protect the civilian population and assist the state in Mali to extend its authority to the entirety of the country. So here you already have the first conundrum: extending state authority inevitably implies the use of violence and thus instability. Non-state armed groups are not known for their propensity to willingly give up areas they control. And non-state armed groups already controlled large chunks of Malian territory when MINUSMA came in. However, MINUSMA never had an offensive mandate, even when it said in its original mandate of 2013 that one of its tasks was to prevent armed elements to return to areas from where they had been removed. Contradictions were built in from the start. 

Going after the b*st*rds that were killing and raping civilians, burning their homes and stealing their stuff was always going to be the work of the Malian Army or the new regional French anti-terrorism force, Barkhane, headquartered in the Chadian capital N’Djamena. MINUSMA was not allowed to do this. Barkhane, meanwhile, quickly morphed from a liberating force into a neo-colonial occupation force, both in terms of behaviour and public perception. Worst of all: security never got any better. It is, of course, easy to see how any and all foreign intervention, French or multilateral, was going to be seen as part of the problem. 

_{The memorial shrine dedicated to those who fell while on MINUSMA duty, Bamako, 2018.}

Meanwhile, a lot of the Dutch MINUSMA troops supposed to do all manner of things (from gathering intel and patrolling dangerous areas to helping the people living in these areas), shared a pervasive sentiment: boredom. Partly because The Mission took forever to take shape* and party because the situation had already started to deteriorate, with violence spreading to other parts of the country, prompting the UN Security Council to change MINUSMA’s mandate on several occasions. And that was a sure sign that the mission was bound for failure. 

*This is in no small part owing to the UN’s absolutely maddening bureaucracy. I got an early glimpse of that in Mozambique, during the fairly successful ONUMOZ operation. A small Dutch contingent was building a school in the central town of Beira, which was going to train landmine clearing personnel, landmines probably being the most evil deposit of guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency in places like Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Afghanistan, Somalia and many more. It prompted me to get involved with the admirable International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which has been remarkably successful. The reason, according the engineers, why things were going so terribly slowly was “Bureaucrats. Even if you need a box of nails you need to send a memo to New York…”. They told me that at times and in complete and utter frustration they’d end up buying these things around the corner, from their own money. 

Some of the other things The Mission managed to do successfully, especially in Bamako, was to drive up house prices, make the Lebanese-owned supermarkets a ton of money and create a thriving prostitution industry. As one of my Bamako friends, a taxi driver, put it (slightly differently from what I’m telling you here): “When night falls, all I take to these MINUSMA hotels are girls, all the time…”. 

_{A Bamako sunset}

As security deteriorated and human rights abuses multiplied on all sides, the one part of The Mission that proved resilient was the way it consistently reported on human rights abuses, until the current lot in power made that impossible. 

Let us be extremely clear about one thing: all participating sides in this conflict have committed human rights abuses. None excepted. Carayol documents French excesses in their secret prison at their base near Gao. The French-led bombardment at Bounty on January 3 2021, which killed 22, was widely reported and it was MINUSMA’s Human Rights Division that pointed the finger at the French for bombing a wedding party. The French Ministry of Defence has always shrilly and stridently denied this, using the exact same arguments as the Malian junta in order to delegitimise the findings. 

The non-state actors in this conflict, all those marauding armed gangs that rain terror on the populations who flee in large numbers have committed terrible crimes against innocent unarmed Malians. They have had their loved ones killed, their homes burnt down, their possessions stolen, their cattle taken, their fields destroyed and nowhere to go. And then there are the exactions carried out by the Malian armed forces, something they have been doing since the 1960s, when they violently put down the first post-Independence Tuareg rebellion. Now with their Russian ‘partners’, essentially consisting of an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 thugs belonging to the private military outfit Wagner, they have been involved in extended killing sprees, the worst of which occurred in Moura late March 2022, where 500 men, women and children were murdered in cold blood. The point of sending MINUSMA packing is that these killings must continue without anybody looking. 

_{PIC: acotonou.com}

There were of course enough indications that the colonels who took power through two coups (August 2020, May 2021) and are in absolute charge of politico-military proceedings had MINUSMA in their crosshairs. Nothing says “I want you to leave” more clearly than when you commit crimes against those you want to depart. This was one of the objectives behind their act of taking 49 Ivorian blue helmets hostage on July 10 last year. Sure, the UN’s mind-boggling bureaucracy in tandem with the neo-liberal idiocy of sub-contracting out certain tasks (air transporting the troops in this case) previously performed by the UN were all contributing to this perfect sh*t storm. But the main culprits are of course the colonels in Bamako, who cooked up a nonsense story about 49 ‘mercenaries’, in order to send the signal to MINUSMA that they were no longer wanted. 

The two other objectives were to cock a snook at the Ivorian president Ouattara for his leading role in applying heavy sanctions to Mali in the wake of the coups, even when his own continuation in power is highly controversial and very questionable. And the last objective was a classic Mafia move: taking hostages to get what you want. In the old days, when criminal gangs were taking hostages in Mali’s deserts the point was money. This time, their kindred spirits in the comfort of their air-conditioned offices wanted two ministers (including the former defense minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly) but most of all Karim Keita, the despised, venal, violent and corrupt son of the president they had deposed in August 2020, who is said to be “sipping champagne in Assinie”, a high end resort area just outside Abidjan where only the rich and the privileged go. 

When it became clear that their methods would not yield what they wanted, the Bamako colonels ended the whole farce by staging a show trial and then wheeling out transitional president Assimi Goïta to ‘pardon’ the remaining 46 (three female blue helmets had been released earlier) and send them all home. It is to the credit of the Ivorian authorities that this has not escalated. Ivorian social media, highly notorious for their inflammatory rhetoric, had already started circulating calls to attack Malian citizens (“chacun son malien”) who work in Côte d’ivoire and send money home. In any case, this was the clearest indication yet that time was running out for MINUSMA and its annoying emphasis on human rights. 

The vote at the UNSC is expected later. Once it’s out I will publish the conclusion of this MINUSMA saga.

MINUSMA, a post mortem

Part One: horse trading

Today, June 30, the United Nations Security Council will vote to end – and I will say this only once – the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, a name that was as bloated as its size, budget and remit. It’s MINUSMA (using the French acronym) for the rest of this piece. Or simply: ”The Mission”. I will offer you a three-part post mortem as the day goes on and the vote seals The Mission’s fate.

MINUSMA’s departure, though earlier than expected, is not a surprise. It was the latest in a geopolitical scuffle between – roughly – the world’s autocracies under the ideological aegis of a brutal violent rogue state (Russia) and a group of ageing democracies that have no idea how to deal with the brutal new world order and whose own track record is far from stellar – and that’s putting it very mildly. Mali’s military leaders have chosen the former camp, by helping the French anti-terrorist force Barkhane and a similar but much smaller European effort (Takuba) leave the country, blowing up the doomed regional (and France-sponsored) G5 Force Sahel and now by ejecting one of the worst large-scale missions in United Nations history. 

_{MINUSMA fanfare, their instruments. UN Day, Bamako, 2018}

Compared to previous UN missions I visited, the one in Mali was difficult. No more “Here’s your press pass for the next year” (UNMIL, Liberia) or getting in a taxi and driving up to the nearest office in Bouaké to get the name of the rebel spokesman you needed so you could work in his fief (UNOCI, Côte d’Ivoire). None of that: you wait outside a sprawling camp close to the airport under a modest tree in the blistering heat at Bamako-Sénou, until someone shows up to collect you. In fairness, the welcome thereafter was very warm. 

With varying degrees of intensity, I have been following eight such missions since 1992, from Mozambique and Angola through Liberia and Sierra Leone and into Côte d’Ivoire and Mali and a few more besides. So this one’s about the end of MINUSMA in Mali. How it began, how its genesis has little if anything to do with Mali, how it never fullfiled its mandate, how its mission creep ended up giving it a purpose and how that purpose was precisely what the military junta and its new Russian masters hated about it…

No peace to keep, nothing to stabilise

The origins of MINUSMA are murky. Already the ridiculously long name bestowed on The Mission bore no relationship to the situation on the ground. What was there to stabilise? Nothing. The French that had paved the way for The Mission through Opération Serval had swept some of the invading bands of armed criminals from the main towns of Gao, Ménaka and Timbuktu but these groups were readying themselves for a return – and return they did. So why would the UN Security Council decide on a $800m (now $1.2bn) per year that had no chance to succeed, when regarded form a neutral standpoint? 

Well the answer is of course that the decision to establish the mission had nothing to do with the situation in Mali. In his excellent book (and yes, I owe you a review as promised) Le mirage sahélien, my colleague Rémy Carayol talks about the way France used its influence and clout at the UN and especially its Department of Peacekeeping Operations to a) shape MINUSMA in its image and b) ensure that MINUSMA could not be framed as a French operation. However, the objective remained the same and that was: combat terrorism, entirely in keeping with the French #1 obsession. So while the mandate talked about protecting civilians and helping to restore state authority throughout all of Mali, the main sponsors of The Mission had other designs, for which MINUSMA was never intended.

_{MINUSMA was a multinational effort, except for human sacrifice. Most of the almost 200 troops that died were African.}

Similar with another great mover and shaker for MINUSMA at the time, my country – The Netherlands. And while the Dutch government was completely on board with the twin obsession of halting migration and terrorism – often conflated in European political discourse – and considered the security of the Malian population an afterthought, like the other major sponsors, there was another agenda: overcoming the Srebrenica trauma. 

One of the last Dutch actions in a UN peacekeeping force oversaw the cold blooded mass murder of almost 8,400 men and boys at Srebrenica, now in Bosnia-Herzegowina. Dutch politics at the time still possessed a shred of honour and Srebrenica caused the fall of the government. But also the withdrawal of The Netherlands from the international arena. Mali was going to herald the Dutch return to that arena. 

Domestic politics and diplomatic horse trading at the UN Headquarters in New York ended up producing MINUSMA. Mali, where there was nothing to stabilise and no peace to keep, was but an afterthought. The Dutch cabinet, for its part, made it abundantly clear that when it came to assessing merit, purpose and objectives of its participation in The Mission, the opinions of experts were irrelevant. French and Dutch agendas converged a little more when Bert Koenders, who was struggling to find his feet during another UN operation in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire (it was mostly regarded as a nuisance by all sides in that conflict) was moved to Mali where he very usefully and conveniently proved equally out of his depth. But his French is excellent and this was of course pleasing to Paris, which wanted someone in the job that would listen to them. Koenders lasted just over a year in the job before expeditiously making his way back to the safety of a plum ministerial job in The Hague. 

On the Malian side there was of course also a keen sense of business. After all, it was none other than Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop, the very same Abdoulaye Diop who shrilly demanded MINUSMA’s departure in June this year, who spoke very warmly of the fine cooperation between his government and The Mission, back in 2014. MINUSMA was a good thing to have and rent could most likely be extracted from it. 

(to be continued shortly)