The military in Mali arrested the country’s prime minister and prime minister on Tuesday in a coup, drawn after weeks of destabilizing protests over a contested election, government corruption and a violent Islamist uprising that has lasted eight years.
The streets of Bamako, the capital, exploded with jubilation and gunfire after President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and his prime minister, Boubou Cissé, were arrested along with other government officials. At midnight, the president announced on state TV that he was resigning.
The effects of the unrest could go beyond the borders of Mali, a country whose strategic location has geopolitical implications for West Africa, the Sahel, the wider Arab world, the European Union and the United States.
French forces and American advisers show interest in the West
France remained deeply involved in the affairs of Mali, its former colony, decades after the country gained independence.
For French troops fighting Islamists in the region, Mali is part of what some call France’s “Forever War” in the Sahel, the most remote region in the Sahara.
The United States also has military advisers in Mali, and U.S. officials have a lot of interest in a stable Malian government, whose interests are in line with the West.
‘Mali’s internal governance and security challenges are driving instability across the Sahel,’ said Kyle Murphy, a former senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“This is important for the United States,” Mr. Murphy added, “because instability in the region allows great extremists to pop on populations and advance their goals, displacing millions of citizens.”
Extremists expelled from power but not defeated
Following a previous military coup in 2012, Islamist rebels, some with links to al-Qaeda, have taken advantage of the threat to gain control of large areas of the north of the country, including the ancient city of Timbuktu.
Under their brutal rule, Malians in those areas under jihadist control were forced to follow a strict religious code or risk severe punishment. Women were forced into marriage, and historic sites were demolished.
The rebels lost control of their territories after French troops intervened to help the Malian army drive them out. But armed groups still terrorize rural civilians, and violence has metastasized across borders in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.
More than 10,000 West Africans have died, more than a million have fled their homes and soldiers from West Africa and France have suffered heavy casualties.
“That’s the big concern here,” said Chiedo Nwankwor, a researcher and lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “These various jihadist movements in Africa do not bode well for a single Western government.”
A success story became sour
In the years following his independence from France in 1960, Mali was considered to have achieved a good track record in democratic government.
In 1996, a New York Times correspondent on a reporting trip to Mali took note of the continuing poverty affecting the bourgeoisie, but said that the West African country had nevertheless become “one of the continent’s most vibrant democracies”.
But Mali, once cited as a democratic role model in the region, has been lying from one crisis to the next since the 2012 coup that President Amadou Touré held a month before elections.
The factors behind that coup, in part as a result of the Arab Spring, underscore Mali’s position that connects North Africa with the rest of the continent. Following the fall of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya in 2011, hundreds of heavily armed Malian rebels who had fought for the Libyan leader returned home and attacked northern cities, creating the chaos that preceded military superiority. .
Another leader falls
Mr. Keita, the president arrested in Tuesday’s coup, won office in a landslide in 2013. But what hope did Mr. Keita raise when he took 78 percent of the vote, his star, and his true popularity, gradually faded.
He promised ‘zero tolerance’ for corruption, but Malians came to see him with distrust.
Mr. Keita won re-election in 2018, when he ran for a second term, but only after being forced to a runoff. In recent weeks, Protestants have complained that those responsible have not done enough to tackle the corruption and bloodshed that has plagued the country. And they accused the president of stealing a parliamentary election in March and installing his own candidates.
After security forces shot and killed at least 11 Protestants earlier this summer, the demands for reform only grew.
A team of regional mediators arrived in the capital, Bamako, to try to reduce the unrest.
Then the army stepped in.
Ruth Maclean and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
