Mali: a sadly familiar African conflict

**The relationship between France and her ex-colonies is quite unlike that of any former colonial power, whether European or otherwise. Whilst countries like Britain and Belgium (the latter, of course, with good historical reason) keep a distance from their former possessions, the French take a more strongly interventionist stance.**

The most recent example of this is the French intervention in the Ivory Coast in late 2010, when the country was in crisis following a disputed election wherein incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to accept that he had lost the election to Alassane Ouattara.

As Gbagbo dug in, the French, under a UN mandate, kept the peace whilst Ouattara’s fighters gained control. Gbagbo was arrested and deported to the International Criminal Court, the violence was ended, and the democratic process was upheld. In some ways, it was a model for how foreign intervention ought to work.

{{ quote We are talking about is nothing less than a usurping of a democratic government by two terrorist forces }}

This precedent seems to have been forgotten by many radical voices of the left, who in this case are guilty of the same lazy conflations they rightfully castigate many more mainstream voices for. Both Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian and Owen Jones in the Independent have at once cast Mali in the same guise as Iraq and Afghanistan, in other words as an ill-fated, imperialist example of Western overstretch, and part of the ‘War on Terror’ that conversely causes terrorism by killing, maiming and alienating Muslims.

There are two good reasons why this is not the case in Mali. After months of increasingly confusing three-way fighting between the democratically-elected Malian government, Tuareg separatists from the North, and radical al-Qaeda-style Islamist militants, the French have stepped in, under the terms of a UN mandate, to provide air support to the Malian state by bombing strategic rebel-held strongholds in the north.

There are two parts of that paragraph that ought to jump out at the reader. The first is that what we are talking about is nothing less than a usurping of a democratic government by two terrorist forces, which then fell into infighting against each other. The second is that unlike the largely disastrous US-UK foreign adventures, the French action is entirely legal under international law. Also, given the French state’s non-involvement in Iraq and tentative engagement in Afghanistan, it is laughable to suggest that this most anti-American of Western European states is colluding in the ‘War on Terror’.

Due to the yawning void where critical and Marxist conceptions of international relations ought to be, it is perhaps not unsurprising to see leftist commentators fall back on the lazy, simplistic realism on which Marxism is in part founded. This is used by both Greenwald and Jones to suggest that the takeover by Tuaregs returning from Libya, where they were employed as mercenaries by Colonel Gaddafi, was inevitable (as if they couldn’t help but forcibly take over half a sovereign state) and that to some extent the West had it coming for intervening in Libya (which was again a humanitarian and not imperialist effort).

There are mitigating circumstances. It is true that due to rapid de-colonisation, national boundaries are poorly defined in Africa, hence why there are so many wars like this. It is also true that the West can ill afford another long counter-insurgency war in difficult terrain. But as long as the intervention remains limited and legal, the French (and by extension, Britain and the US due to their small-scale backing) are doing the right thing by standing up for democracy in a region where its scarcity makes it even more precious than elsewhere.