BAMAKO, Mali – Soldiers arrested the president and prime minister of Mali on Tuesday after they stormed a residence and fired into the air in an apparent coup d’état after several months of demonstrations demanding the ouster of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
The soldiers moved freely through the streets of Bamako, making it increasingly clear that they were in control of the capital. There was no direct comment from the troops, who hung from the same military barracks in Kati where an earlier coup took place more than eight years ago.
Moussa Faki Mahamat, President of the African Union, condemned the ‘forced detention’ of Malian leaders and called for their immediate release. He denied “any attempt at unconstitutional change of government.”
The developments were also condemned by the United States, the United Nations, the regional bloc known as ECOWAS and former colonizer France, which has worked together with a UN peacekeeping mission since 2013 to stabilize the West African nation.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sought “the immediate restoration of constitutional order and regulation,” said UN spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric.
Tuesday’s political uprising threatened to further jeopardize security in Mali, where the 2012 coup could allow an Islamic uprising to take place amid a power vacuum.
But news of Keita’s arrest was met with celebrations throughout the capital by anti-government protesters who took to the streets only in June to demand that the president resign three years before the end of his final term.
The detention was a dramatic change of fortune for Keita, who emerged seven years earlier from a field of more than two dozen candidates to win Mali’s first Democratic election post-coup in a landing with more than 77 percent of the vote.
ECOWAS regional mediators failed to bridge the gap between Keita’s government and opposition leaders, raising fears of another military change of power.
Then on Tuesday, soldiers in the garrison town of Kati retrieved weapons from the truce at the barracks and detained senior military officers. Protesters against anti-government immediately cheered the actions of the soldiers, and some even set fire to a building belonging to Mali of Justice in the capital.
Hours earlier, Prime Minister Boubou Cisse had urged the soldiers to lower their arms.
“There is no problem whose solution cannot be found through dialogue,” he said in a statement.
But the wheels were already moving – armed men also began holding people in the capital Bamako, including Finance Minister Abdoulaye Daffe.
Keita, who has sought to meet the demands of Protestants through a series of concessions since the demonstrations began, has also enjoyed broad support from France and other Western allies.
“The US is against any unconstitutional change of government, in the streets or by security forces,” tweeted J. Peter Pham, the state envoy’s special envoy for the Sahel region.
It was a gruesome repeat of the events leading up to the 2012 coup, which unleashed years of chaos in Mali when the ensuing power vacuum allowed Islamic extremists to take control of northern cities. Eventually, a French-led military operation escaped the jihadists, but they grouped and expanded their reach during Keita’s presidency in central Mali.
On March 21, 2012, a similar mutiny broke out at Kati’s military camp, when soldiers with rank and file began to quarrel and then broke into the camp’s army. After retrieving weapons, they later went to the seat of government led by Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo.
Sanogo was later forced to hand over power to a civic transitional government, which then organized the elections that Keita won.
The current president is facing growing criticism of his government’s handling of the Islamic uprising that once praised the country as a model of democracy in the region. A wave of particularly deadly attacks in the north last year prompted the government to close its most vulnerable outposts as part of a reorganization aimed at losing people.
Regional mediators urged Keita to share power in a unity government, but those overtures were quickly rejected by opposition leaders who said they would not stop Keita’s sister.
