Mali: Race TO The Bottom

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Good Morning, today is May 31, 2019.

NEED TO KNOW MALI Race to the Bottom Gunmen on motorcycles recently shot and killed seven people in the remote Malian town of Koury near the border with Burkina Faso. A similar motorcycle attack occurred at the same time in Boura, 34 miles away, but nobody died. That, unfortunately, is just another day in Mali. Nobody claimed responsibility, reported the Associated Press, but Islamic extremists and other armed groups are active in the region. This month, an improvised bomb injured three Chadian peacekeepers in northern Mali. Unidentified assailants killed a Nigerian peacekeeper in Timbuktu. And 17 soldiers from Niger died and 11 went missing after an ambush in western Niger in the same area where four American special forces soldiers and four local troops died in a 2017 firefight. Mali is the most dangerous country in the world for United Nations peacekeepers. Nearly 200 have died since 2013. They deployed to Mali, as the Defense Post explained, after a French force had repelled Islamist militants who had seized northern Mali in 2012 amid an insurgency driven by ethnic Tuaregs who wanted an independent state. Today, around 4,500 French troops are fighting jihadists in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. Around 2,700 are in Mali. The UN has more than 12,000 troops and almost 2,000 police officers in the country. A West African regional coalition is organizing a 5,000-personnel force to help, too. Mali, while large geographically, has only about 19 million people, about as many as China’s capital, Beijing. Meanwhile, what happens if and when this massive international military effort declares victory? The governments they have been fighting to keep alive have sometimes disappointed. Malian Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga resigned in April after revelations that government-affiliated “self-defense groups” had killed 160 people, including 46 children, in cold blood in Ogossagou, a village in central Mali. The victims were members of the Fulani ethnic group, which leaders in the capital of Bamako accuse of having links to Islamist extremists. Read a heartrending account of the massacre written by UNICEF’s chief of communications in Mali, Eliane Luthi, in CNN: “When he arrived here, his eyes were red and he could hardly speak,” a social worker recalls of one 9-year-old boy. “The only thing he could say was: ‘They killed my mother in front of my eyes, didn’t you see?'” Under the leadership of a new prime minister, Boubou Cisse, Malian Foreign Minister Tiebile Drame recently told diplomats in Brussels that his country desperately needs more help. “It’s a race against time,” said Drame, appealing for security forces, funding and other aid from “Europe and other countries in the world that have the means and feel concerned by the terrorist threat.” More help might come, but it may or may not yield much in the way of results. WA