In the early hours of Aug. 19, five men in various shades and styles of military fatigues took to Mali’s national TV station to introduce themselves. The mid-ranking officers had begun the previous day with a mutiny in the garrison town of Kati and ended it by arresting the president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in the capital, Bamako. Malians had been glued to their TV sets for hours. First, they watched a detained Keita offer his resignation and dissolve the Malian government on live TV. Then, they met the anonymous men in berets who were now in charge—and still are.
Calling themselves the Comité National pour le Salut, or CNSP, the junta pledged to “organize general elections to allow Mali to equip itself with strong institutions within a reasonable time limit,” and to oversee a “political transition leading to credible elections for the exercise of democracy through a roadmap that will lay the foundations for a new Mali.”
Keita was a deeply unpopular figure, and his downfall was certainly foreseeable. Yet as historian Gregory Mann noted, “It’s still amazing what a few men with assault rifles and SUVs can accomplish in West African politics.” The August coup marks the second time in eight years that the Malian military has removed a president who, at least by the slippery and ambiguous standards of the international community, was twice democratically elected. What’s more, it ushers in a new phase of political uncertainty for a country that has gone from international darling to international quagmire in less than a decade.
The junta inherits a country overwhelmed by multiple, overlapping crises. A jihadi insurgency burns across northern and central Mali, where jihadi gunmen, paramilitary self-defense militias and Malian armed forces have made a habit of killing civilians. Meanwhile, a French-led counterterrorism campaign, dubbed Operation Barkhane, is struggling to actually counter terrorism, while a United Nations peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, also fails to keep the peace.
Keita’s mishandling of these crises in part explains why large segments of Malian society welcomed the coup. Mass demonstrations calling for him to step down had rocked Bamako since June. Those protests were led by a coalition of opposition parties and were emboldened by the participation of one of Mali’s most influential religious leaders, Imam Mahmoud Dicko. As recently as 2017, Keita could count on Dicko as a reliable, if at times reluctant, ally. As the former head of Mali’s High Islamic Council, Dicko has followers ready to mobilize at his call.
As he often did in response to pressure from the street, a beleaguered Keita tried to assuage the protesters with largely cosmetic measures such as reshuffling his Cabinet—a revolving door of self-dealing elites—and calls for dialogue. The demonstrators, who by then had coalesced under the banner of the June 5 Movement-Rally of Patriotic Forces, or M5-RFP, were undeterred.
On July 10, protests took a violent turn when, in response to demonstrators ransacking government buildings and setting up barricades throughout Bamako, the Malian military fired live rounds at civilians, killing 11 people. The Economic Community of West African States immediately dispatched former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to lead mediation efforts between Keita and the M5-RFP. Despite high-level diplomatic engagement from heads of state throughout the region, the M5-RFP stuck with their ultimatum that Keita must resign.
With Keita ousted, both Malians and the international community find themselves asking, What comes next? Days after the coup, the officers in the junta, the M5-RFP and Dicko all took part in a massive rally to celebrate Keita’s demise. But a joint pep rally is no substitute for a shared vision of Mali’s future.
Dicko, who has always been selective with his forays into politics and prefers to wield his considerable influence behind the scenes, has said he will “return to the mosque” now that Keita is gone. For their part, the junta leaders have kept the M5-RFP at arm’s length, making it clear they have no intention to simply hand the reins over to the faction of the protest movement comprised of elites from Mali’s insular political class.
After eight years of violence and failed governance, the most important question is the one that the international community too often ignores. That is, what do Malians want?As Bamako-based analyst Ibrahim Maiga noted in an interview with Malian newspaper L’Essor, a lot of the pressure placed on Keita stemmed from a “succession of long-term, persistent strikes” in the Mali’s health, justice and education sectors. The M5-RFP may have galvanized the movement to remove Keita, but it was the junta that seized the moment and grabbed power.
Meanwhile, the international community is also scrambling. ECOWAS took its typical hard-line stance on coups among its member states, closing its borders with Mali, threatening sanctions against coup leaders and cutting off financial flows. West African heads of state, many of whom are dealing with their own versions of the crises in Mali and have designs to hold onto power past their mandates, have no interest in legitimizing coups in their own back yard. Yet even they have backed away from their calls for Keita to be reinstated, while at the same time pressuring the junta to put in place a civilian leader immediately.
France, the United States and the European Union also responded with alarm. All three have invested significant military and diplomatic resources in the Sahel region and view Mali as the epicenter in their fights against two competing jihadi coalitions—one aligned with al-Qaida, the other with Islamic State. Both groups have gained a foothold in Mali in recent years, expanding the territories under their control into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, while also launching attacks further afield.
Despite the fact that few, if any, diplomats in Bamako believed Keita was up to the task at hand, the corruption, dubious parliamentary elections and stalled peace process were all worth the price of having a feeble but ultimately reliable ally in Bamako who would back their security agendas. Policymakers in Paris, Washington, New York and Brussels no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when the junta announced its plans to continue Mali’s international military and peacekeeping partnerships, as well as to support a barely implemented peace process stemming from a 2015 agreement between Keita’s administration and various former rebels based in northern Mali.
Thus far, the junta and ECOWAS negotiators have failed to reach an agreement on the structure of a transitional government. The generals initially floated the idea of staying in power for a three-year transition period, while ECOWAS has called for elections within a year.
Although the junta’s statements should not be taken at face value, and there are good reasons to look askance at military officers calling for an extended period of transition, many analysts question the wisdom of rushed elections. A free and fair ballot may not even be feasible given insecurity throughout much of central and northern Mali.
“Organizing elections to get out of political crises, violent conflicts, periods of transition after a coup, is a recipe that we like,” political analyst Gilles Olakounle Yabi, who heads the West African think tank WATHI, wrote for Jeune Afrique. “It generally has the approval and even the preference of the most influential external partners in search of interlocutors who would be legitimate because they are democratically elected.” The problem, Yabi noted, is that “we then wait for miracles to happen… regardless of the quality of the electoral process, and emptiness of the pre-election political debate.”
Moreover, the international community has tried using hasty elections to paper over the underlying structural issues in Mali before. “We did that in 2012 and here we are with another coup,” Lori-Anne Theroux-Benoni, head of the Dakar office of the Institute for Security Studies, told Reuters. “We should be innovative and use the time of the transition to make the process of the reform irreversible,” she added. “This might take longer than what some international actors want.”
After eight years of violence and failed governance, however, the most important question is the one that the international community too often ignores. That is, what do Malians want?