Mali is important

The military coup in Mali — in which a group of mutinous soldiers has overthrown the elected president Amadou Toumani Touré, as he was coming to the end of a 10-year mandate — has greater implications than the run-of-the-mill African-style army rebellion, as it has taken place in one of the most stable countries in the region.

The most serious of these implications is the insecurity it adds to the sub-Saharan region, whose emptiness and nebulous frontiers are fostering rapid growth in the trafficking of arms, drugs and people, as well as allowing the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terrorist group to set down roots, abetted by the favors afforded by human misery.

Under the orders of a captain, the rebellious soldiers announced a new Constitution and elections, in order to avoid reprisals by the West African community of states. They justified the coup on the government’s inability to stem the advances made by the Tuaregs in the north of Mali, where growing insecurity is forcing the flight of thousands of nomads to neighboring countries.

The Tuaregs have historical grievances against Bamako, but their current rebellion, by far the most serious, is being fed by the formation of a unified political front, and above all by the arsenal with which their military leaders returned from Libya after the death of Gaddafi, who gave them asylum and enlisted hundreds into his army.

The Tuareg insurgency, better equipped than the symbolic Malian Army, which has less than 10,000 men, long to set up their own territory, Azawad, in the vast desert in the north of the country.

Mali, two times the size of France, has been a precarious but stable state under the deposed President Touré, backed by democratic forces, and with the support of African political organizations. The military junta in power since last week, whose coup has been internationally condemned with rare unanimity, lacks legitimacy and the simplest means of containing the Tuareg rebellion, not to mention the advances made by Al Qaeda, which has extended its field of action to Mauritania, Algeria and Niger, in a vast area that, despite its emptiness, is becoming critical.

The situation could get worse if, despite the disparity of their aims, nascent fears of possible collaboration in the form of arms and money between the insurgent nomads and the jihadists materialize.