International Community Pushes Mali Rebels on Peace Accord
Despite numerous ceasefire violations, international brokers are desperate to persuade at least part of Mali's rebel alliance to sign a peace accord, so they can claim the process has been a success, say analysts.
French and Algerian foreign ministers Laurent Fabius and Ramtane Lamamra, in Algiers for talks on Tuesday, called on all parties to attend the signing ceremony in Bamako on Friday.
But rebel leader Almou Ag Mohamed, of the High Council for the Unity of Azawad (HCUA), ruled out endorsing the document in its current form, adding that "us signing on Friday would be nothing short of a miracle."
The rebellion has accepted an invitation from the United Nations to talks in Algiers before Friday to "discuss and even initial the text" but Ag Mohamed said a firm signature would require "new negotiations to get things moving forward."
As the Friday deadline approaches, northern Mali has seen an upsurge in attacks by pro-government militias and various factions of the country's Tuareg-led rebellion, which have left many dead on both sides.
The U.N. has warned that the violence threatens to upend a peace process which, while tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, looks more fragile with every skirmish.
The violence escalated after pro-government fighters seized positions from the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) rebellion in the northern town of Menaka at the end of April.
The following day 10 militants and nine soldiers died in clashes between the Malian army and the CMA in the central town of Lere.
- 'Raising the volume' -
"The attacks and fighting on the ground are clearly a response to the ceremony on Friday," a source in MINUSMA, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, told AFP.
"The groups are raising the volume to express their discontent against the taking of the town of Menaka by a Malian armed pro-government group."
Mali was plunged into chaos by a coup in 2012, which opened the door for Tuareg separatists and then Islamist extremists to seize the towns and cities of the vast northern desert.
A French-led military intervention returned democracy but the country remains deeply divided, with the lighter-skinned Tuareg and Arab populations of the north accusing the sub-Saharan ethnic groups in the more prosperous south of marginalizing them.
The government and a coalition of armed groups from the north known as the Platform have already initialed the peace accord, negotiated under the auspices of the U.N. and Algerian-led mediation over eight months.
But the CMA has been holding out, demanding an amendment guaranteeing political recognition for "Azawad", the name used by the Tuareg for the northern part of Mali.
In the latest bloodshed, nine Malian soldiers were killed on Monday when they were ambushed by fighters who, according to the MINUSMA source, were from the Arab Movements of Azawad (MAA), a component of the CMA.
Meanwhile a series of attacks carried out beforehand were the work of a Tuareg CMA group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the source said.
International pressure is now coming to bear on all factions of the CMA, which "no longer speaks from the inside with one voice", according to a mediation document seen by AFP.
- 'Paradox' -
MINUSMA chief Mongi Hamdi offered a concession to the groups last week, saying it would be possible to sign the peace accord separately if things didn't work out in Bamako.
"On Friday, the locomotive will start up," said Malian sociologist Mamadou Samake.
"Now there are stations along the way where the actors can get back into the coaches. But the important thing is that it leaves, to show that we are moving forward."
Mohamed Ag Intalla, the tribal leader of the HCUA's Tuareg community in the far north-east, visited Bamako recently, where he had "constructive discussions" with the Malian authorities.
Yvan Guichaoua, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia in Britain and an expert on the Sahel region, told AFP that if mediators could not bring all the rebels on board, a "cynical" move might be to coax certain CMA figures to the signature ceremony, even if they were not backed by the others.
"They have had no luck so far, which is historically without precedent, but that doesn't mean the CMA is free from faultlines," he said.
"But these faultlines haven't led to fragmentation -- they have been dealt with internally. The big paradox is that the mediation wanted this coalition to be strong, to open discussions in Algiers. Now they want it to be weak, to obtain a signature."
A source close to the international mediators said at least two of the CMA's five armed groups were expected to sign the document while the HCUA and MAA were in an "evaluation phase" and the MNLA remained the "great unknown."
Source: Agence France Presse
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