The Week in Separatist News, 8-14 April 2012: Mali Declares War on Azawad; New Governments in South Ossetia, Iraqi Kurdistan

Photo of the week: An Iraqi Kurdistan political party called the Donkeys’ Party unveiled a statue this week on Sulaimaniyah’s Nalî Street, named for the Kurdish poet Mullah Xidir Ehmed Şawaysî Mîkayalî, nicknamed Nalî (1800-1873), famous for his donkey-themed poetry.  A press report said, “Donkeys’ Party Secretary General Omar Kalol said he hopes the statue will encourage people in Kurdistan to better treat animals, especially donkeys.”

TOP STORY: NEW MALIAN PRESIDENT VOWS “TOTAL WAR” AGAINST AZAWAD REBELS.


The reins of power in the Republic of Mali were handed on April 12th from the military coup leader, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo, to the speaker of parliament, Dioncounda Traoré, who took the oath of office in Bamako, the capital, and vowed “total and relentless war” to retake the northern two-thirds of the country, which seceded a week and a half earlier as the Islamic Republic of Azawad, under the apparent joint leadership of indigenous Tuaregs and a local al-Qaeda affiliate called Ansar Dine.  The new interim president, who is 70, said, “Mali has never experienced such difficult times.  Its very existence as a nation is at stake.”  Traoré will serve until long-planned presidential elections, to be held within 40 days.  Meanwhile, leaders of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) were drawing up plans for a possible military intervention to restore the Azawad region to Malian rule.   In Bamako, in a region dominated by Bambaras, the several thousand Tuareg residents have nearly all fled, fearing a backlash.  One local said, “All the Tuareg have left—civil servants, businessmen, students, musicians, artists.  They’ve all gone.”  In the north, at least 100 Nigerian fighters from the radical Muslim sect Boko Haram have entered the city of Ansar Dine–controlled city of Gao, raising fears that the western Sahel’s Islamist movements are consolidating in the wake of the Tuareg victory.  (See my recent blog article on the Azawad independence declaration.)

Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo with his successor, Dioncounda Traoré

AFRICA

Ban Accuses Morocco of Spying on U.N. Force in Western Sahara.  The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, asserted in a 28-page report to the Security Council leaked this week that the Kingdom of Morocco was spying on U.N. peacekeeping operations in Western Sahara, a territory which Morocco conquered after the departure of Spanish colonists decades ago and which has been the site of an ongoing civil war.  Morocco’s covert activities, Ban wrote, contributes to the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso) being “unable to exercise fully its peacekeeping monitoring, observation and reporting functions.”

South Sudan Seizes Kordofan Oil Field in Border Clashes.  The African Union on April 11th urged the Republic of South Sudan to withdraw from oil fields it had occupied the day before in a battle with the Republic of Sudan, adding that ongoing fighting needed to talk so that peace talks could resume.  The capture of the Heglig oil field in the disputed South Kordofan state was an unusual turn of events in a crisis in which Sudan, from which South Sudan seceded last year, is usually the aggressor.  (See my article listing the South Sudan crisis as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Somaliland Urged to Release 2 Journalists.  The New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists on April 6th urged the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland to release two journalists detained without charge. The two are Ahmed Ali Farah, a Republic of Somalia television reporter who (as reported in this blog) was arrested in Las’anod in the disputed Sool region on March 31st, and Abdisaman Isse, of Universal T.V., who was arrested when he went to the Central Las’anod Prison to visit Farah on April 3rd.  (See my recent blog article on the partition of Somalia.)

EUROPE

Bossi Says Northern League is Still United.  Umberto Bossi, who resigned last week amid scandal as founding leader of Italy’s Northern League (as reported in this blog), told a rally in Bergamo, in Lombardy, that the League, whose demise is being predicted widely, will stay on its course of fighting for the independence of a Republic of Padania, with a capital in Venice.   “The Northern League is united,” he said, adding, “We must get going again and buck the arch-enemy, Roman centralism.”  (See my article listing Padania as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012” and a more recent article on Bossi’s dreams of a Greater Padania.)

Russian Police Kill 10 Militants in North Caucasus.  On the morning of April 10th, Russian police killed five militants in a shootout near Mineralnye Vody, in Stavropol Krai, an overwhelmingly ethnic-Russian province bordering separatist Muslim republics like Dagestan and Chechnya in Russia’s North Caucasus region.  There were no police casualties.  Meanwhile, police also killed five rebels in Minvodi, Chechnya.

Prosecutor Assassinated in Dagestan.  The Russian Federation’s Interior Ministry reported that a prosecutor was shot and killed by unidentified assassins in the Republic of Dagestan on April 12th.   Five masked gunmen broke into the prosecutor’s home in Makhachkala, the republic’s capital, in the early morning, stole cash and other valuables, and then killed him with a gunshot to the head with his family watching.

BITS OF ASIA WHICH LIKE TO PRETEND THEY’RE PART OF EUROPE

Tibilov Wins in South Ossetia, Calls for Union with North; Dzhiyoeva Forms Opposition.  After numerous runoffs over several months, Leonid Tibilov, a former K.G.B. official, was as expected elected president of the Republic of South Ossetia on April 8th, with 54% of the vote.  Tibilov, who will be inaugurated on April 19th, immediately called for some sort of unification with the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, in the adjacent part of the Russian Federation.  Only Russia and a handful of nations recognize South Ossetia—which was established as a separate state in 2008 after a Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia—as independent and not part of Georgia.  Meanwhile, the Minister of Education, Allia Dzhioyeva, who was elected president last year but then removed by a Supreme Court fiat and a raid on her headquarters by police who beat her savagely, announced that she was forming an opposition party called Ossetia–Freedom Square.  (See my article on Dzhioyeva and last year’s disputed elections.)

Leonid Tibilov voting for himself for president.

Whatever you may say against South Ossetia, they have the best national coat of arms I’ve ever seen.

6 Arrested in Abkhazia for Presidential Assassination Attempt.  The Republic of Abkhazia announced on April 13th that police have rounded up six suspects in the Feb. 22nd assassination attempt against President Alexandr Ankvab, in which one bodyguard was killed.  A search of the suspects’ homes yielded sophisticated weapons and illegal drugs.  No further information has been released.

Siberian Gets 4 Years in Prison for Donating to Islamists.  In Tomsk, in the central Asian portion of the Russian Federation, a man was sentenced on April 13th to four years in prison for donating the equivalent of $115, over the Internet, to a terrorist group fighting for a separate Caucasus Emirate in Muslim regions of southwestern Russia.

Turks Release Nobel Candidate Charged for Kurd Ties, Pending Trial.  Ragıp Zarakolu, a publisher, human-rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize candidate, was one of 15—out of 193—released on April 10th pending trial on charges of ties to the Kurdistan Communities Union (K.C.K.), which the Turkish government claims is linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.).  He could face 15 years in prison.  (See my recent long article on the Kurdish uprising, and a more recent one on shifting Kurdish alliances.)

Ragıp Zarakolu

2 Turkish Soldiers Killed in Kurdish Battle at Iraq Border.  Two Turkish soldiers were killed and three injured in battles with the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) in southeastern Turkey’s Sirnak province on April 12th, at the border with Iraq. An operation was reported in progress to pursue the P.K.K. fighters who escaped the battle.  (See my recent long article on the Kurdish uprising, and a more recent one on shifting Kurdish alliances.)

ASIA

Kurds Stay Out of Opposition, Demand Autonomous Region in Federal Syria.  A prominent Kurdish opposition leader in Syria told Turkish media this week that his people wanted an autonomous government in a future democratic Syria and would not participate with the main, Sunni Arab–dominated opposition group, the Syrian National Council (S.N.C.).  Seventeen Kurdish groups in Syria broke from the S.N.C. in January to form the National Kurdish Council (N.K.C.). The leader, Kendal Efrini, said, “The Syrian Arabs in the S.N.C. claim the territorial integrity of Syria and they call all the ethnic groups ‘Syrian.’  We believe this is very dangerous rhetoric. Because with this wording, they are in denial of groups like the Kurds, Turkmens, etc.” Efrini said the N.K.C. would consider rejoining the S.N.C. if it committed itself to federalism. The president of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, supports the N.K.C.  (See my recent long article on the Kurdish uprising, and a more recent one on shifting Kurdish alliances, plus an earlier article on prospects for the partition of Syria.)

Hashemi, Wrapping Up State Visits, Accuses Baghdad of Killing Bodyguards.  Tareq al-Hashemi, Iraq’s Sunni Arab vice-president, is set to return to Iraqi Kurdistan after state visits to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, defying the government in Baghdad, which called in vain for all three nations in succession to turn him over to face charges of running death squads.  Hashemi has been harbored since December by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s president, Massoud Barzani, who joins Hashemi in accusing Iraq’s president, Nouri al-Maliki, of slowly building a Shiite dictatorship.  Meanwhile, Hashemi claimed April 10th that two more of his bodyguards have been tortured to death by Maliki’s government in the supposed investigation into Hashemi’s crimes—an accusation Baghdad denies.  (See my blog article on prospects for the partition of Iraq.)

Iraqi Kurdistan Swears in New Prime Minister, Cabinet.  A new prime minister and cabinet for northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) were approved by Parliament and sworn in on April 7th, with the new prime minister, Nechirvan Idris Barzani, pleading for unity in confronting Iraq’s central government in Baghdad.  The new prime minister is the nephew of Massoud Barzani, who is the K.R.G.’s president, and a grandson of Mustafa Barzani, who founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the 1940s in the brief-lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, in what is now northwestern Iran.  During the swearing-in, President Barzani was in Washington, meeting with the United States president, Barack Obama.  (See my recent long article on the Kurdish uprising, and a more recent one on shifting Kurdish alliances, plus an earlier article on prospects for the partition of Iraq.)

Iraqi Kurdistan’s new prime minister, Nechirvan Idris Barzani, with the South Korean, Kurdish, and Iraqi flags

Israeli Airstrike Wounds 2 Palestinians in Gaza.  Two Palestinians were injured April 7th by an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt.  The Israeli Defense Forces were, officials claim, aiming for a site in Rafah where rocket attacks against Israel were being attempted.  (See my article listing Palestine as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Hamas Leader Promises More Abductions of Israeli Soldiers.  Khaled Mashaal, the leader of the militant Islamist terror group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip portion of the Palestinian Territories, said in a press conference in Qatar on April 6th that his group would abduct more Israeli soldiers so as to use them as bargaining chips in securing the release of Palestinians in Israel’s prisons.   In October 2011, Israel released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners—some of them properly convicted terrorists, some of them being held without charge for political crimes—in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas.  (See my article listing Palestine as one of “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012.”)

Khaled Mashaal

3 Killed at Southern Thailand Mosque, Separatists Blamed.  Police are blaming militant separatists for an April 11th shooting at a crowd leaving a mosque in southern Thailand’s Pattani province which killed three.  The shooters have not been identified.  Ethnically-Malay Muslims have been accelerating their violent campaign for a separate state in southern Thailand over the past several months.

OCEANIA

Aceh Governor Accuses Former Rebel Party of Election Fraud.  In Aceh, the semi-autonomous Muslim province at the western tip of Indonesia’s island of Sumatra, a former militant from the Free Aceh Movement who ran for reelection as governor is blaming the former secessionists’ successor party of fraud and intimidation in the April 9th elections.  The governor, Irwandi Yusuf, is widely predicted to lose once votes are counted this week.  Exit polls give the lead to Zaini Abdullah, head of the Aceh Party.  Irwandi said on April 10th, “We’ve found some evidence of systematic and severe intimidation by rival candidates that took place throughout Aceh several days before the poll.  The intimidation favored certain candidates.  That’s why we plan to go court to have the results annulled and hold another election.”

Muslim Separatists Suspected in Mindanao Bus Bombing.  A bombing of a bus in the southern Philippines on April 11th which killed three is being blamed on extortionists tied to Muslim separatists.   Sixteen were wounded in the attack in Carmen, in North Cotabato province on the southern island of Mindanao.

NORTH AMERICA

Puerto Rican Separatist Cites U.S. Harassment in Panama.  Francisco Torres, leader of Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party, said on April 9th that the United States government continues to direct other governments to harass Puerto Rican separatists abroad.   Torres told the media that he was detained by a U.S. agent at an airport in Panama when he was on his way back from a labor conference in Mexico City.  He added, “This is part of the escalation of pressure against the Puerto Rican pro-independence movement, as that persecution is not limited to Puerto Rico and the United States, but it also includes other countries like Panama.”

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas. Look for it in spring 2013. I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

A New Country in Africa: Islamic Republic of Azawad

[Note (4/16/2012): Since this post was published, the Islamic Republic of Azawad has adopted the formal name Independent State of Azawad, though both names are in use.]


The establishment of an independent Azawad, depending on how long it lasts, is bad for Mali, bad for Africa, and bad for the world.  Here is a rundown of what has happened, what it means, and what might happen next.

For the first time since the birth of the Republic of South Sudan in July 2011, there is a newly independent country as of this week, and it is also in Africa.  But, unlike South Sudan, no one is recognizing or welcoming this new state, and it certainly won’t be joining the United Nations General Assembly any time soon.  It also has the unwelcome distinction of being perhaps the first independent state run by an affiliate of al-Qaeda (unless you count the al-Qaeda-ruled portions of southern Somalia and northern Yemen as nascent states, or unless you regard the Taliban’s Afghanistan as, in its final years, al-Qaeda-run).  This new state is the Islamic Republic of Azawad, and it might not be around for very long.

In February of this year, I wrote an article for this blog on the latest Tuareg rebellion in the Republic of Mali. Since Mali’s military coup d’état on March 22nd, this has become very nearly the most widely read article in the blog.  Turns out there weren’t that many people blogging about Mali yet.

The Azawad, the northern part of the area that is now Mali, as I discussed in that article, has seen repeated rebellions by the Tuareg minority in its vast northern deserts, some of them asking for outright independence.  A revolt against France’s colonial rule in 1916-17 was smothered by the French military and resulted in thousands of deaths.  After the Republic of Niger and the Federation of Mali (a brief-lived union of what are now Mali and the Republic of Senegal) broke free from France in 1960, Tuaregs fought to establish a state for themselves in northern Mali, but the newly established Malian military responded with savage finality, creating a refugee crisis in neighboring Algeria and a resentment of the central government that would burn in the Azawad region for decades.  In the early 1990s, Tuaregs who had been devastated by the famine that had raged across the Sahel in the 1980s (most famously in Ethiopia and Somalia) agitated again for a separate state.  Some of these separatists operated from bases in Moammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya to the north.  A smaller rebellion occurred in 2007-09 when Tuaregs who had dispersed to other countries in the 1990s rebellion returned and ended up in conflict with other groups.

Flag of the N.M.L.A., and of the Islamic Republic of Azawad

It was, indirectly, Qaddafi that made a difference this time around.  In his later years Qaddafi used Tuareg people—whose territory covers much of Libya, Algeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso, in addition to Mali—as mercenaries.  A nomadic, warlike people, Muslim but darker-skinned than most Arabs (though also not technically sub-Saharan), Tuaregs were like Qaddafi’s personal Cossacks; they did his dirty work in foreign adventures in places like Chad, and also in repressing other groups in southern Libya.  Tuaregs know the desert like the backs of their hands.

Tuareg mercenaries in Libya

The Tuaregs are lone wolves when it comes to geopolitics.  They are not Arabs, nor are they quite Berber, but their language is related to Berber.  (The Berber, unlike the Tuareg, it should be noted, were among the fiercest opponents of Qaddafi during the civil war.)  After 2003, when Qaddafi turned over a new leaf and began cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency against al-Qaeda’s inroads into north Africa, the Tuaregs became C.I.A. stooges as well.  Any love they may have had for the United States, however, surely dissipated last year as the U.S. and its allies sided against Qaddafi in the civil war that finally removed him from power.  The dictator’s defeat left Libya’s Tuaregs isolated, angry, and armed—and, not incidentally, subject to reprisals by Libyan Arabs who branded them Qaddafi loyalists.  They began flooding into Mali, bringing with them huge portions of Qaddafi’s vast arsenal.  (See my recent blog article discussing the aftermath of the Libyan civil war.)

The Tuareg region

The civil war and power vacuum in Libya in 2011, as well as the sundering of the Tuareg–C.I.A. partnership which had been keeping al-Qaeda to a lesser or greater extent at bay, were the opportunity al-Qaeda’s local arm, the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (or A.Q.I.M.), had been waiting for.  In February, as the newly formed Tuareg militia, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (N.M.L.A.) (M.N.L.A., in French), began launching random, surprise attacks on northern Malian towns, they got help from a radical fundamentalist Islamist militia called Ansar Eddine, an affiliate of A.Q.I.M.  Ansar Eddine is run, and was possibly founded, by Iyad ag Ghaly, a Tuareg who led the 1990s Tuareg rebellion in Mali.  Although the fog of war still hangs heavy over all attempts to get information on the current crisis, it seems likely that the majority of Ansar Eddine’s rank and file are Arab—and that they are bolstered by mercenaries and would-be martyrs arriving from other jihadist trouble spots.

For most of February and March, Mali’s war against the N.M.L.A. and Ansar Eddine was going badly, but they weren’t losing.  Then, things changed on March 22nd, when a military uprising in Bamako, Mali’s capital, became a full-blown coup d’état.  The new junta’s main grievance was that soldiers fighting Tuaregs in the north were undersupplied.  The coup put a nobody, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo in charge, brought the condemnation of the international community, and led quickly to crippling economic sanctions by the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).  The rest of the world had been counting on Mali to at least keep the al-Qaeda-allied Tuareg uprising at bay.  But now that was not possible.

The N.M.L.A. and Ansar Eddine took advantage of the power vacuum. On March 30th, they took Kidal.  On March 31st, Gao fell to the rebels.  And on April 1st, the ancient city of Timbuktu, a Unesco World Heritage Site, fell as well.  That took care of the main three cities of the Azawad region, and the bulk of its population.  Reports were filtering to the outside world that it was not the N.M.L.A. but Ansar Eddine who planted their ominous black flag in downtown Timbuktu, in an elaborate ceremony.  And gunmen were going from shop to shop in all three cities demanding that any images of unveiled women be taken down.  Shari’a law is now in full force there.  Within a few days, the N.M.L.A. had announced control of the Azawad and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Azawad.   An N.M.L.A. spokesman, Hama ag Mahmoud, explained, “Our objective is not to go further than the Azawad borders.  We don’t want to create problems for the government of Mali, and even less create problems for the sub-region.  We don’t want to give anyone the impression that we are gung-ho for the war, so for now we have liberated our territories and our objective is achieved, we stop there.”  But this was no comfort to Capt. Sanogo, panicky and out of his depth with this latest turn of events.  Today (April 5th), he begged Western countries to intervene and turn back the Islamists, saying, “The enemy is known and it is not in Bamako,” adding, “If the great powers are able to cross oceans to battle fundamentalist structures in Afghanistan, what’s stopping them coming to us?”  Sanogo had been surprised to learn that in the modern era coups in Africa are not tolerated by the international, or even regional community.  But, for him, the loss of Azawad is worse yet: the international community really doesn’t like coups that allow for the creation of an al-Qaeda state smack dab in the middle of north Africa.  He is trying, a little too late, to distance himself from events in the north and to ingratiate himself with the international community.

The flag of the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)

The prospects for international recognition of Azawad are approximately zero.  For what it’s worth, I will opine here that the prospects for a near-permanent state of dysfunctional civil war, à la Somalia or Yemen, are about 50%, while the prospects are also about 50% for an eventual Libyan-style intervention by one or more Western countries.  If so, then how soon that happens will depend greatly on how this month’s elections in France go (Nicolas Sarkozy is a bit more likely to take on another such war than François Hollande is), and, much more crucially, how the U.S. president, Barack Obama, estimates the effects of the timing of such an intervention on his prospects for reelection in November.  Any moment now, Sen. John McCain will start waving his “kill some towelheads” banner, which will put pressure on Obama to not look weak.  (Sadly, even after Obama’s killing Osama bin Laden and removing Qaddafi, Republicans are still deft at making him look ineffective.)

For the time being, Azawad has now joined the ranks not of partially recognized states like the Northern Cyprus, Kosovo, or Abkhazia, but of de facto sovereign but utterly unrecognized states like the Republic of Somaliland or the former Chechnya (1992-2000).

Keeping that in mind—okay, we’re done with complex, nuanced geopolitical analysis, the rest of this article is just for geography geeks—this week has seen a sudden rejigging of the rankings of largest country in the world.  Mali, up until last week, was, at 1,240,192 square kilometers, the 24th-largest country in the world.  As of this week, however, the Azawad separatists control three of Mali’s eight regions—Tombouctou, Kidal, and Gao—and, although they claim Mopti as well, they don’t control it, or only control about half of it, depending on whom you believe.  Let’s split the difference, grant them half of Mopti’s 79,017 square kilometers, for a total of 859,436.5 square kilometers.  This places it between Venezuela (the new no. 32) and Namibia (the new no. 34) as the 33rd-largest country in the world.  What’s left of Mali, meanwhile, is now, at 380,755.5 square kilometers, way down at no. 61, between Zimbabwe and Japan.

This is the first change to the top-25 ranking since South Sudan replaced Algeria as no. 10 last year, which also knocked what was left of Sudan to no. 45, between the Central African Republic and Ukraine. (It would be no. 46, if Somalia were to be counted as one country, but if what the world calls Mali is treated as two countries then what the world calls Somalia is at least seven or eight.)  That, in turn, was the first modification of the top-25 list, or indeed of the top-10, since Kazakhstan entered the list at no. 9 in 1991.   To find a modification to the top-10 list before that, we’d have to go to 1964, when the United Kingdom dropped from no. 7 to no. 16 by granting independence to Zambia, Tanzania, and Malawi.

More importantly, Azawad is now the only country whose dominant language (Tuareg) uses (like Berber) the Tifinagh script, which looks like this (see below).  I must say, al-Qaeda or no al-Qaeda, that’s pretty darn cool.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]