Mali's interim President Assimi Goita attends the first ordinary summit of heads of state and governments of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Niamey, Niger on July 6, 2024. Photo: Mahamadou Hamidou/Reuters/file photo.
By Essam Elkorghli, Kribsoo Diallo, and Matteo Capasso – Aug 14, 2024
The recent attack on Mali has the fingerprints of Western imperialism all over it. This series of events is part of the tried and true imperialist method of creating the conditions for intervention by sewing chaos and terror. This cyclical process must be broken through revolutionary action.
On July 27, 2024, armed Tuareg militants and affiliates of the Islamic State in the Sahel attacked a Malian military convoy heading to the northern part of the country, Tinzawaten, close to the border with Algeria. The ambush led to the killing of a large score of the Malian military personnel and their accompanying cadres from the Private Military company, Wagner Group. Being inflicted on one of Russia’s allies in the Sahel, the Western puppet press voyeuristically rushed to glorify the violence. More importantly, Ukraine hopped on to cheer the massacre, and a Facebook post from their embassy in Dakar claimed that the country had provided information, intelligence and military support to Tuareg militants.
Such a claim was circulated to present Ukraine as capable of striking Russia and its interests anywhere, in an attempt to globalize their reactionary fight for ‘democracy’ under the auspices of NATO. In response, Mali and Burkina Faso severed diplomatic ties with Ukraine, while Senegal, a country that recently elected a president who is reconsidering his country’s position with the West, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, summoned Ukraine’s ambassador for lionizing violence and sewing hatred in the brotherly country of Mali . Given the outcry, the Ukrainian post on Facebook has since been deleted . However, the reasons for the attack, the history of the destabilization in the region, and the root causes of the violence are completely disregarded in such disjointed and Banderite celebrations of violence.
Violence, Minorities, and Revolution in the Sahel
The Sahel region enjoyed relative stability during the years prior to 2011, if compared to what it is happening today in 2024. A central element that led to the ongoing destabilization of the region must be traced back to the NATO-led destruction of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2011, which took place through the massive funding and arming of so-called rebels, including the most reactionary and obscurantist forces present in the country, jointly working together with the aim to topple the Libyan government. Once NATO’s goals had been achieved, these Western and Gulf provided weapons and armaments quickly left the country, ending up in neighboring countries, especially when the desert borderlands covered thousands of kilometers. As a result, in 2012, there was a drastic rise in terrorist attacks and violent raids. Islamist militant groups began wreaking destruction in the region, gaining more and more territories.
The militants promised self-determination to minority groups in the region, an offer that a large number of Touareg —a group of people that has resided across Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Niger for centuries— aspired to achieve given their historical grievances over their status, which had been sidelined by some of these countries’ leaders. Since then, NATO countries have launched a decade-long campaign that ended with a catastrophic failure. In such a context, France occupied the most reactionary role in the history of past and present pillage of Africa and the Sahel, especially due to its long monetary dominance via the CFA . After spearheading the destruction of Libya in 2011, France seized the opportunity to expand its military footprint in the region by launching a so-called counterinsurgency operation, Operation Barkhane, in 2014. Covering the entire Sahel region and allegedly fighting the Islamist threat, the imperialists were now claiming to be fighting these same groups to whom they had provided large shipments of weapons during the destruction of Libya. This renewed imperialist crusade hardly achieved any of the expected results by the time the French were forced to withdraw in 2022. More importantly, while the French were spending EUR 1 million per day to run this mission against ‘terrorism’, the poverty rate of these Sahel countries had reached almost 45 percent, even according to the most reactionary estimates.
It did not take long for the leadership of the countries, such as Mali, to reassess their political priorities in order to meet the demands of the people. In 2021, a people’s revolution spearheaded by the military’s Colonel, Assimi Goita, took place and major drastic change followed, as Mali cut its relation with France, while forging a new military and political alliance with its neighbors, Burkina Faso and Niger.
While the Western puppet press endlessly aims to minimize the political achievements of these political upheavals by smearing them as ‘military coups’, we must understand the newly formed confederation as the natural result of history and the long-established drive of the revolutionary masses of Africa to meet their demands for liberation. The Alliance of Sahel States, comprising Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, comes at a time when Africans are being plagued by imperialist crusades, such as the French one, that have led to the militarization and pauperization of the continent. Unlike the past forms of colonization, where Western militaries controlled the African masses via direct domination, the neo-colonial relation the West has forced upon the continent is now shaped by a paradigm of security dependency, a recipe they have mastered to feed their appetite for increased profits, especially at a time of Western global decline.
The formula revolves around a strategy of reproductive chaos: One ‘rebel’ group is armed to the teeth to achieve pro-Western goals. This, in turn, leads to a destabilization of a region, which calls for the same West to intervene, once again, in new conflicts by allegedly providing military support to combat these groups. Unsurprisingly, such a strategy turns the military into a main political actor, since they become receivers of military trainings and fundings, supposedly used to fight the never-ending threat of terrorism. This context is fundamental to understand because it makes us, on the one hand, realize why each of these states (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger) witnessed an armed rebellion precisely because the militaries were at the forefront of this new strategy of security dependency. On the other, it completely debunks the Western propaganda that dilutes these revolutionary events as reactionary coups. Therefore, Africans became wary of imperialist terrorism, especially in these Sahelian states, and they rose to stand with their revolutionary military cadres, delinking from imperialism and deciding to take matters into their own hands.
In such a context, it is imperative to address a key issue that every of these Sahel countries faces, which is the minority question and its relation to the question of national sovereignty. First, the imperialist West weaponizes the minority question according to its own interests. In some cases, it refers to the principles of territorial integrity–i.e, Basque and Catalan (Spain), Crimea and Donetsk (Ukraine) Western Sahara (Morocco) or Ossetia (Georgia), while, at others, it relentlessly calls for the support of self-determination–i.e., Kosovo, Tigray, Bosnia, Taiwan. Of course, Palestine is always reduced to the status of a conflict, never to a question of self-determination or national liberation. The weaponization of these terms highlights the double-standards that plague imperialist diplomacy and praxis. Secondly, the desire to fragment the continent, even more than they have done since the 1884 Berlin conference, will not yield more sovereignty, delinking, and anti-imperialism. In fact, if self-determination were blindly applied, then the West would have recognized Catalonia’s referendum in 2017 and sanctioned the reactionary monarchy in Madrid for not giving the Catalans their independence.
Instead, this recipe is used as one among the many tools that Western imperialism adopts to undermine the national sovereignty of countries of the Global South. Whenever the need and desire arise to further divide and carve up the African continent, and the Global South at large, the minority question is weaponized in order to make such targeted countries docile and more economically, politically and security dependent. In this manner, the imperialist West weaponizes the legitimate demands of equality and justice that minorities have in the Global South, yet turning them into a Trojan horse for imperialism. The minority question, in other words, is exploited to infiltrate countries of the Global South and undermine their national sovereignty, which instead benefits the expansion of imperialist capital.
The imperialist nature of the attack
The attack on Mali was carried out by a military force, yet it is not the first time Mali and other countries in the newly formed alliance experienced war-like measures. We must constantly reiterate that imperialism walks on two legs: the economic leg and the military one, while the ideological component works across the two in order to legitimize that there is no alternative to imperialist terrorism. The economic leg entails a financial system that attempts to link economies and peoples into the imperialist orbit, and for those in the Global South, their integration is peripheral in nature–absence of industrialization, export-based economies, and so on. While this is a crucial component of imperialist expansion, it is always-already premised on militarism and war. That is, the financial economic measures can only kick off, once a policy based on coercive and military strategies takes place, comprising the use of sanctions, bombing campaigns, and funding opposition groups. To undertake these measures, imperialism, in our age of mass communication, relies heavily on the production of knowledge, values and ideas that justify and sustain its modus operandi. That is, it presents the Western military interventions as humanitarian gestures, required for the promotion of democracy, and proliferation of global stability. This, in turn, means that those who oppose such measures as flagrant violations of national sovereignty are depicted as international boogeymen, evil dictators seeking to destabilize the international order. Posing this as a backdrop, one can see how the attack on Mali is a reproduction of a well-practiced strategy for imperialist interventionism.
The military component
Once the countries of the Alliance of the Sahel formed their confederation in 2024, they incessantly highlighted the contradiction of the mode of production in the Sahel. These resource-rich countries were made hubs for mineral extraction to be exported to France, only for the latter to produce high-end consumer goods, expropriate surplus, provide energy to its people, and in return give breadcrumbs to the Sahelian countries. Following the people’s revolution that formed their confederation, they sought to break away from this subordinated relationship by dismissing military reliance on France and the West, closing foreign military bases, and developing a new relationship of equals with Russia and China.
In other words, these governments in the Sahel have dismissed Western countries economically and replaced them with the new, rising pole. Unsurprisingly, France, who primarily benefited for decades from this unequal exchange between the so-called Francophone Afrique, showed immediate hostility towards these Sahelian countries in the early months. It rushed to entice the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) to militarily attack Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali to ‘liberate’ them from these ‘military juntas’. When the African masses within ECOWAS countries expressed their disagreement on such a potential move, France and the West began cooperating with the very entities they armed a decade or so ago to legitimize their initial intervention and began supporting Islamists in northern Mali to proliferate unrest in the region again. These tactics have a twofold goal: First, they are meant to weaken the Alliance and make it impossible to focus on its developmental policies, which necessitates a stable and safe economic environment. Second, they are meant to pass a message to the entire continent, showing how any country that dares to put into place a strategy of political autonomy will not be left unpunished by the imperialists. After all, as we are seeing in Palestine, the price to reclaim one’s dignity, for the West, can also be met with genocide.
In the African context, unfortunately, the West weaponized minorities, their demands have been hijacked in order to turn them into functionaries of imperialism. It is ironic that, while the militants in northern Mali pre-2022 were considered terrorists, they are now deemed as righteous warriors of self-determination against Malian oppressions. Their positioning that aims to weaken Mali is inherently in service of western imperialism and its aim to keep its foothold in the Sahel.
The financial component
Since these Sahelian countries severed their relations with the West, functionaries of imperialism were deployed in the region to cause unrest and prevent these countries (the Alliance) from investing their resources in sovereign, national development. Not so long ago, Niger, for example, had a military agreement with the United States that allowed the latter to house arguably one of the largest drone bases on the African continent. After the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland of Niger reoriented itself politically, allied with its neighbors and demanded the closing down of the drone base, the US retaliated by employing the docile neighbors against Niger. It did so by attacking the agreement China and Niger made in 2023 to construct a pipeline that will deliver oil to Benin’s ports. The agreement was put on halt because the US demanded Benin block Niger’s oil exports. Other sanctions have been imposed and lifted by ECOWAS on the Alliance, while the US still constantly puts various leaders from Mali on a sanctions list , as part of the campaign to dissuade other actors from engaging with Russia. For instance in May 2024, Mali and Russia commenced the construction of West Africa’s largest solar power plant , which comes at a time when Mali struggles with providing electricity to some half of its population.
The financial nature of this imperialist attack should be examined beyond the confines of the nation state of Mali and be understood as an extension of Mali to the countries and economies in the region. Libya, following the lifting of sanctions in 2003, was able to invest heavily in Africa. However, when NATO unleashed its war in 2011 on the people of Libya, it was coupled with sanctions that linger to this very day. One such investment entailed Malibya – an agricultural and infrastructural project that paved roads and extended water access from Niger River to the northern part of Mali. The project was sanctioned in 2011 and has been since then under mismanagement and sanctions. As a consequence, farmers have been losing their jobs, and drought has soared in the region. Clearly, drought, migration and mass infiltration of weapons from a destabilized Libya made this context a hotbed for violence.
The ideological component
The self-serving logic of Western imperialism is that problems created by imperialism can only be solved by imperialist intervention, and the case of Mali is no different. The recent attack on the Malian army was not only glorified by Ukraine , it was in fact lionized by so many supporters and functionaries of imperialism. In this era of mass communication, keyboard warriors such as FREEAZAWAD with identity attachment to a geographic location are often conscripted to give detailed accounts of events and these narratives are unquestionably accepted because of these authors’ identities. Of course, while their identity is weaponized to justify certain claims, their class relation vis-a-vis imperialism is never brought up. In this manner, numerous Libyans or Syrians were used and invited to speak, as long as their narratives tallied with those of the imperialist West.
During the recent attack, a score of France-aligned, English-speaking accounts began writing about the attack and how there is a genocide being carried out by the Malian army against the Tuareg. This fabrication stems from the fact that Tuaregs, including the Azawad, are black but with lighter skin, as compared to other Malian populations. So, the ethnic cleansing claims weaponize the question of race outside of history. Let us explain this point very clearly. We are told that the Russians, alongside the Nigeriens, Burkinabes and Malians are racist, thus they attack the Tuareg people. One should never forget how the race card was successfully employed in Libya the other way round. In 2011, the Blackness of Africans was a sign of evilness that Western imperialists needed to fight. In fact, the Western puppet press claimed that Libyans were fighting African mercenaries, framing the imperialist attack on the country as Libyans and NATO on one side, against ‘savage Africans’ on the other. Naturally, they conveniently forgot that Libyans are also Africans and many Libyans are Black. The genocide and ethnic claims narrative served imperialism, and now it is being operationalized by the same Western puppet press to legitimize the destabilization of Mali and supporting the breaking up of the country.
Anything hides under the imperialist mask
Let us conclude by going back to the biggest crime of the century: the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This genocide is being enabled and funded by the very countries that have sustained imperialists elsewhere. Zionism is a racist and religious-based ideology, which is first and foremost central to the material project of Western imperialism in the region of West Asia . Hence, this genocide cannot be understood by simply looking at race or religion. Race divorced from questions of political economy and class interests blinds us to understand as to why and when imperialism operationalizes the race/ethnicity card to pursue its interests. The revolutionary masses of the world ought to be aware that, while racism and chauvinist nationalism exist, they must always be understood in relation to imperialism. Otherwise, we will be reacting via moral panics devoid of history, and become functionaries of imperialism ourselves. Similarly, the revolutionary masses of the world must show their firm resolve and condemn without any hesitation those who entertain the slightest idea about the progressive nature of a Black, female president in the US. Imperialism is a masked-up bandit, and anything can be hidden under that mask.
Essam Elkorghli is a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches Libya’s modern political history and contemporary imperialism in education. He is a labor organizer with the Graduate Employees’ Organization, assistant editor for Middle East Critique Journal , and a member of the Global Pan African Movement .
Matteo Capasso is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Editor of Middle East Critique .
Kribsoo Diallo is a Cairo-based Pan-Africanist researcher in political science related to African affairs. He has written for many African magazines and newspapers, and Diallo has contributed to translated editions of papers and articles in Arabic and English for several research centers within the African continent.
