At the end of last year, I posted on this blog about “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012,” which included Boko Haram’s Islamist rebellion in northern Nigeria and the ongoing border warfare between the Republic of Sudan and the fledgling Republic of South Sudan. Both conflicts lie more or less along the Sahel region that spans Africa west to east, dividing Saharan from sub-Saharan Africa, and, like other flashpoints along the Sahel, they are splitting Africa’s traditional states along north–south lines.
Typically, a conflict along the Sahel is between a Muslim northern region and a non-Muslim southern region or an Arab north and non-Arab south; the strip approximates the boundary between Christian- and Muslim-dominated regions of the continent.
African national borders, which were drawn by European colonial powers, are quite famously contested (see my blog post from November on this topic), usually following ethnic distribution on the ground either imperfectly or not at all. South Sudan is no exception. In July 2011 it became the first new nation in post-colonial Africa which does not correspond to European colonial boundaries, freeing, after decades of separatist struggle, the non-Muslim tribal groups of the southern third of the old Sudan from a repressive and increasingly Islamist Arab government to the north in Khartoum that has a history of harboring al-Qaeda terrorists. Although the idea was to partition Sudan to respect ethnic and religious differences, the contested border has been a war zone since it was drawn. Despite the fact that partition hardly solved Sudan’s problems, still, from Senegal to Chad, many Africans in the Sahel seem to feel that it may now be time to partition their countries as well. And now Mali has joined the trend, with a fresh Tuareg rebellion in the northern Azawad region.
The Tuareg—also called the Tamashek—are a 1-million-strong ethnic group whose territory includes much of Mali’s northern desert, western Niger, small parts of Libya and Burkina Faso and a large chunk of Algeria. Tuaregs are Muslim but speak a language related to Berber but quite distinct from Arabic. In appearance, they are darker-skinned, more sub-Saharan than many North Africans. They are mostly nomadic, and their traditional culture—like that of the nomadic Plains Indians in North America—is heavily oriented toward warfare.
The Tuareg region in north Africa
Tuareg mercenaries in Libya
Moammar al-Qaddafi in some of his many moods ...
Northern Malian griot Ali Farka Touré
• Côte d’Ivoire (a.k.a. Ivory Coast), for much of its civil war in 2011, was divided between areas loyal to the embattled president, Laurent Gbagbo, and areas in rebellion. Before France intervened to support the rebels, a partition seemed an outside possibility, and it would have divided the more arid Muslim north from the more cosmopolitan and Christian south where the authority of Gbagbo, a Roman Catholic from the Bété ethnic group of the southwest, held sway.
Côte d’Ivoire’s political territories at the height of its civil war in 2011
The Republic of Senegal, with the rebellious Casamance region shown in red
• Ghana has not experienced the kind of sectarian conflict that plagues its less prosperous neighbors. But here, too, we find a divide between a Christian-dominated southern region and a less developed, more arid, Muslim-dominated north. In the mid-1990s, a minor civil war broke out among different northern Ghanaian kingdoms, which revealed just how poor and disorganized the region is. The economic ingredients of rebellion are in place. A political crisis or the importation of Islamist ideology, or both, could light the powderkeg.
A moderate Muslim event in southern Ghana; let’s hope this approach prevails
Map of Chad showing Libyan-occupied areas (1976-87) in dark green and,
in light green, areas run by the Qaddafi-backed transitional government
in light green, areas run by the Qaddafi-backed transitional government
Two factors are likely to worsen the trend of latitudinal Balkanization in the Sahel. One is the greater influence of Al-Qaeda in this region, in particular the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. Not overtly affiliated with the Osama bin Laden branch, and originally founded as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) by Hassan Hattab, a commander in the Armed Islamic Group that had plunged Algeria into civil war in the 1980s, it affiliated with Al-Qaeda only later and now wages a low-level insurgency campaign throughout west Africa against European and non-Islamic targets—including in places like Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Western Sahara that have not even been discussed in this article. Mali’s NLMA renounces Al-Qaeda and their tactics, but Al-Qaeda are presumed to be at least sympathetic to the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and surely the closing off of areas of possible operation in Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, and the emergence of a suddenly unmoored military class with groups like the Tuareg veterans of the Libyan civil war will give them plenty of scope to incite insurgency in the near future.
Hassan Hattab, founder of the precursor to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
More broadly and less visibly, desertification has been a powerful ingredient in political destabilization in the Sahel. The Sahara is creeping southward, making many areas less productive and forcing migrations that lead to territorial scraps and conflict. As catastrophic climate change begins to chart its unknown course, one thing is sure: water will become scarcer in Africa’s future, and areas that are only marginally agriculturally productive, or only marginally capable of sustaining a nomadic lifestyle, may abruptly tip in the direction of becoming wasteland.
One proposed flag for an Azawad Republic
Sometimes, as in the case of Sudan, the West supported the secession because it reduced the size and influence (and natural resource base) of an Islamic state. But many of the new states that would be formed by the partitioning of Sahelian nations—in Nigeria, Chad, Mali, and elsewhere—would create radical Islamic governments. It would create a corridor of desperately poor, radicalized nations where Al-Qaeda might be welcome to operate. So if these separatists think the international community will tolerate their ambitions—or even, as it did with South Sudan, abet them—they may be sorely disappointed.
[You can read more about these and other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar. The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon. Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]
the religon map is wrong
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