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. 

Tags: Antonio Guterres, Bakary Sambe, Bamako, Gao, Margaret Anstee, Ménaka, Minusma, Rémi Carayol, Timbuktu, Timbuktu Institute, UNAVEM II, United Nations Security Council