Op-Ed on Dialoguing with Jihadists – at The New Humanitarian

The New Humanitarian asked me to distill some of my findings from my recent article on jihadist dialogues, the “local turn” in peacebuilding, and the possible ill fit between what local voices want and what international peacebuilders want. The op-ed is here. An excerpt:

This could be the kind of bargain that might ultimately attract jihadists: Amnesty, and Islamisation that goes beyond dropping formal references to French-style secularism (laïcité) from the Malian constitution.

However, what would this then mean for the status of Malian women, for access to education, for the country’s Christians and other non-Muslims, for Muslims who did not accept a “jihadist-lite” kind of rule, for Mali’s traditions of free assembly, music, art, and literature?

Though some Malian elites and citizens appear open to settlements with jihadists, it is difficult to tell what would be acceptable to the wider public, where questions of secularism, law, justice, and Islam are far from settled.

Piece for Responsible Statecraft on Changing Post-Coup Norms

The Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft asked me to expand a bit on my post here the other day about the lengthening tenures of ostensibly transitional West African military regimes. My piece for Responsible Statecraft is here. An excerpt:

American policymakers should not get comfortable with military regimes. If harsh sanctions and threats do not work (ECOWAS tried a sweeping sanctions package for Mali and then backed down when it did not sway the junta), neither should American policymakers fool themselves into thinking that a given autocrat is some vital ally on another priority. The African autocrats who survived the “third wave of democracy” did so because they partnered closely with Washington, Paris, or some other major power.

At the moment, American-Russian (and American-Chinese) competition and the African versions of the “War on Terror” have both led American policymakers to accept certain African leaders’ abuses — sometimes for decades, as in the case of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. The tradeoffs are not worth it, including reputationally, when American backing becomes closely linked with a ruler’s anti-democratic behavior and human rights abuses.

Changing Post-Coup/Transition Norms in West Africa?

I think I’ve made this point elsewhere (can’t remember where), but yesterday’s roundup on Burkina Faso reminded me of it, in the context of discussing the visit by an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) delegation to Ouagadougou. The point is this: ECOWAS seems now to be comfortable with (or reluctantly acquiescing to) two-year transitions, which differ from the previous expectation in two ways – the length (eighteen months) and the precision (“two years” can date from a more or less arbitrary point that is not necessarily when a given junta took power).

The coups in Mali (August 2020, May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), and Burkina Faso (January 2022) all upended business as usual in West Africa and confronted France, ECOWAS, the United States and other external actors with a major dilemma – how much pressure to apply to coup-makers, and to what end? The “gold standard” for an orderly post-coup transition, in the West African regional context, appears to be the fourteen-month transition in Niger in 2010-2011, and ECOWAS (with French backing) sought to enforce a standard of eighteen months. But intransigence from Mali in particular forced ECOWAS into negotiating. Sometimes ECOWAS negotiated in a tough way, as when ECOWAS imposed sweeping sanctions on Mali from January-July 2022 in response to the junta’s proposal for a transition that could have lasted through 2026. Yet even at its toughest-minded, ECOWAS was always negotiating at a disadvantage – ECOWAS is not, I think, going to physically force any junta from power, and I think the juntas all know that. So the end result – and here the juntas watch each other, clearly – is an adjusting of the norms in the ways I described above. Mali’s junta ended up getting sanctions lifted by offering a “two-year” transition plan (but dating from March 2022, meaning that March 2024 will in fact mark three and a half years since the junta took power) and Burkina Faso’s junta now appears to be on the same page as ECOWAS about a “two-year” transition plan (dating from July 2022, giving that junta as much as thirty months in power – not a far cry from what it demanded originally).

(ECOWAS’ mediation/negotiation efforts with Guinea – the new mediator [French] is former Beninese President Boni Yayi – are still ongoing.)

If one thinks that Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso are part of an “epidemic” of West African (or African) coups and if one expects that “epidemic” to claim further victims – I’m ambivalent on both questions – then the next question is what expectations the Malian and Burkinabè experiences set up for potential coup-makers elsewhere in the region. Again, I’m not necessarily expecting any more coups in the short term, but any aspiring West African coup-makers now know that they can likely expect at least thirty months in power. Depending on how one reads their motivations – and especially if one is ultra-cynical and sees coup-makers as primarily there for their own enrichment and empowerment – then the incentives are clear. That ultra-cynical view is a bit too strong for me; I think it’s hard to get in the mind of Assimi Goïta (Mali) or Paul-Henri Damiba (Burkina Faso) and separate what may be, on the one hand, their legitimate frustrations over insecurity, civilian corruption and fecklessness, and pressures from below from their own soldiers versus, on the other hand, more self-serving motivations. But even if one sees these officers as heroes (I don’t), the coup/transition combo itself becomes something different depending on the length of time it lasts. Fourteen months, eighteen months…that’s hitting a reset button on the country’s politics, for better or worse. Thirty months, forty-two months…that’s a full-blown military regime. The pendulum has not, I think, swung back to where it was in the 1980s (Mauritania 1984, Burkina Faso 1987, Chad 1990) or earlier, when a coup-maker could expect to come into power and stay there practically indefinitely, perhaps with the occasional rigged election or cabinet reshuffle to placate various foreign and domestic stakeholders. But the pendulum has certainly swung a bit in that direction versus where it was a decade ago, when coup-makers had a lot more trouble making their rule stick – including in Mali (2012) and Guinea (2008).

Burkina Faso Roundup – 27 July 2022

Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Embaló, who currently doubles as the chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), visited Burkina Faso on July 24 accompanied by ECOWAS’ mediator for Burkina Faso, former Nigerien President Mahamadou Issoufou. The visit was a follow-up to the July 3 ECOWAS summit, where Burkina Faso’s post-coup transition was on the agenda (French); ECOWAS and the Burkinabè junta, led by Paul-Henri Damiba, continue to appear satisfied with the current twenty-four-month transition plan (which runs through July 2024. Here is the Burkinabè Presidency’s readout (French) of the visit, and here (French) is Embaló’s brief comment.

Former longtime President Blaise Compaoré (in power 1987-2014) returned to Burkina Faso for a few days earlier this month for a “reconciliation” meeting with Damiba and one other past head of state. On July 26, he issued a formal apology to the Burkinabè people and especially to the family of his widely beloved predecessor Thomas Sankara (in power 1983-1987). In April of this year, Compaoré was convicted in absentia of complicity in Sankara’s murder (in the coup that brought Compaoré to power) and received a life sentence that he appears very, very unlikely to serve. The author of a recent biography of Sankara, Brian Peterson, comments here.

Jeune Afrique (French; paywalled) has a brief discussion of the career of the most wanted Burkinabè jihadist leader, Jafar Dicko. Jihadist attacks continue, including the destruction of two bridges (French) on July 15-16 in the Sahel Region (one of Burkina Faso’s regions, not to be confused with the overall Sahel region of Africa).

A Ghanaian TV report on Burkinabè refugees arriving in northern Ghana:

Here is the International Organization for Migration’s latest report (French) on population movements within, into, and out of Burkina Faso.

French Ambassador Luc Hallade upset (French) the Burkinabè authorities and various civil society groups with his remarks to the French Senate on July 5. More here (French).

Sahelian governments should crack down on extremist preaching? Turns out it’s not so simple (French).

Radio Omega with a long report on the “quiet mourning” of military families who have lost someone:

Roundup on Floods in the Sahel

Flooding has become a regular and tragic recurrence in the Sahel, a challenge compounded by poor infrastructure – which makes flooding a political issue as well as an environmental and humanitarian one.

A few snapshots:

Senegal:

Torrential rain fell across Senegal on Wednesday, causing floods in the capital Dakar and bringing down a section of one of the main highways into the city.

Cars, scooters and pedestrians inched through torrents of brown knee-deep water as unusually strong downpours battered the semi-arid city, where sandy roads and flat-roofed houses are poorly equipped for the July to October rainy season.

#Dakar après la pluie de ce matin.
Les gens vont perdre leurs véhicules. pic.twitter.com/DpSfLXu4Pg

— Reyes Moukila (@RMoukila) July 20, 2022

Mali: “Inondation : les populations priées d’évacuer le lit du fleuve.” From Studio Tamani, this segment discusses authorities’ efforts to evacuate riverine areas.

In Burkina Faso’s Le Pays (French), an editorial argues for both increased proactivity on the part of citizens as well as much more ambitious efforts by the state to relocate and care for vulnerable populations.

RFI (French) reports on flooding that has killed roughly a dozen people and left some 16,000 people homeless in Niger, with brief comments from the mayor of a heavily affected commune in the Zinder Region (southern Niger).

Al Wihda Info (French) describes flooding in the Lamé sub-prefecture, southwestern Chad.

Unfortunately, there is very likely more flooding to come. In 2021, in the zone stretching from Mauritania to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a total of 1.4 million people were affected by seasonal flooding. Out of the countries in that zone, Chad and Niger were the second- and third-most affected countries, respectively, after the DRC – 256,000 people were affected in Chad, and 250,000 in Niger.

Piece on Mass Atrocities for Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft

At the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog, I wrote this week about mass atrocities in the Sahel. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

Amid the final push for a new Africa strategy, what the Sahel needs from the United States is not grand strategies but rather day-to-day efforts to help some of the world’s most vulnerable people, and to hold perpetrators of violence to account. Bluntly, each successive administration’s “Africa strategy” tends to reshuffle the one before it, with nods to abstract priorities such as “democracy,” “development,” and “security.”

Such lists of priorities give little guidance for how to help local Sahelian communities and their governments, much less the entire continent, move toward greater stability and inclusive governance. Meanwhile, there is a risk that substantial U.S. government energies will be consumed by processes that are really about optics — a major new strategy will be rolled out with great fanfare, but it is likely to collect dust. In that connection, there is hubbub around an “African leaders’ summit” in this fall, but it will likely prove just as empty as the summit under Obama in 2014. Biden appointees should measure their success not by whether such Washington-focused events go smoothly, but by tangible accomplishments improving lives on the African continent.

Mali and Burkina Faso: ECOWAS Kicks the Can to July

On June 4, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) held an extraordinary summit in Accra, Ghana, to discuss the situations – i.e., the military juntas – in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso. Tension between ECOWAS and Mali’s junta are particularly severe, and ECOWAS imposed country-level, sweeping economic sanctions in January 2022 in an effort to pressure the Malian junta to set a rapid timetable for holding elections and handing over power to civilians.

In its communiqué from the summit, ECOWAS had a few qualified words of praise for the Burkinabè junta, but took no major decisions, electing to maintain the sanctions on Mali and revisit the situations in all three countries at the next ordinary summit scheduled for July 3.

There’s a fair amount being reported about intra-ECOWAS divisions on how to proceed, especially with Mali. RFI calls Niger, Ghana, Gambia, and to some extent Nigeria the hardliners, in other words the really pro-sanctions crowd. Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire are, or at least as of early May reportedly were, also in the pro-sanctions camp. There is also a lot online about the role of Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe, who is now formally mediating between Mali and ECOWAS; I’m having trouble cutting through the speculation to find what’s reliable, but there is a lot of speculation that Togo is open to a much softer line on Mali. For whatever it’s worth, his tweet about the summit spoke of “stability and peace” rather than, say, “democracy.”

Je participe ce jour au sommet extraordinaire des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de notre communauté #CEDEAO, consacré au #BurkinaFaso, à la #Guinée et au #Mali.

Avec mes pairs, nous examinerons les voies et moyens d’un retour à la stabilité et à la paix dans ces pays frères. pic.twitter.com/vy40GFkcoo

— Faure E. Gnassingbe (@FEGnassingbe) June 4, 2022

Burkina Faso: Notes on HRW’s Latest Report on Jihadist Abuses

Human Rights Watch is out with a new report entitled “Burkina Faso: Armed Islamists Kill, Rape Civilians.” The subtitle is equally important – “Army, Militia Respond with Summary Executions, Enforced Disappearances.” The contents of the report will not be shocking to long-time watchers of Burkina Faso, but the report is a vital update. There were a few points that stood out to me:

• The report’s focus on rape highlights, once again, the wide gap between jihadist ideology and jihadist practice. The jihadist promise is one of a utopian counter-order based on their version of justice, which includes the idea that a jihadist state will bring safety and fairness for ordinary Muslims. In practice, jihadist predation and crimes of opportunity occur frequently: “A nurse from a village near Dablo said she had treated over 55 women who had been raped by armed Islamists between September and December 2021. ‘The women came from 11 villages,’ she said. ‘The terrorists attacked Muslims, Christians, and animists alike. They cried – they couldn’t eat or sleep and were too ashamed to tell their families what happened.'” Much research has been conducted on rape and gender-based violence as a “weapon of war” (and see more on this below), including the use of rape as a tool for punishing and driving away perceived outsiders, but use of that weapon obviously narrows whatever political appeal Burkina Faso’s jihadists may have for civilians in the country’s conflict zones.
• Relatedly, the HRW report points to a high degree of deliberate displacement by jihadists: “The attacks, said security analysts, appeared designed to compel widespread displacement from towns perceived to support the government, thereby consolidating armed group control from their strongholds in northern Burkina Faso to the central regions. Humanitarian workers expressed alarm at the dramatic pace of deterioration. Said one, ‘Civilian life is being suffocated as roads are mined; villages blockaded; markets closed; and water points, telecommunication, and electricity infrastructure sabotaged.'” If this is indeed the strategy – reduce the population, and then rule over what remains – it does indicate to me that there’s some exhaustion of the jihadist political project, an admission that they cannot win over the majority. On the other hand, it takes some level of political support to have the recruits necessary to execute such a strategy.
• The closing sections of the report, focusing on abuses by the army and by civilian fighters in the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (French acronym VDP), confirms earlier trends – collective punishment, ethnic profiling of the Peul, and government empowerment of the VDP but simultaneous VDP mistrust of the government (“describing one incident [of a VDP unit ethnically profiling and then killing accused jihadists], a VDP member said, ‘We used to turn suspects over to the gendarmes, but they always released them, so we decided to sort this problem out ourselves’…) Notably, although the report focuses on dynamics in the conflict zones rather than on macro-politics in Ouagadougou, the report conveys a sense of continuity of military and VDP practice before and after the January 2022 coup; in other words, the report describes abuses both in the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. Current military President Paul-Henri Damiba has alluded vaguely to a new approach, but on the ground it does not appear that much has changed.

An Attack in/on Togo: Serious, But Not Necessarily A Game-Changer

Reuters:

Eight soldiers were killed and 13 wounded in an attack in northern Togo on Wednesday, the government said, marking potentially the first deadly raid on its territory by Islamist militants who have killed thousands in neighbouring countries.

Before dawn, a group of heavily armed gunmen ambushed an army post in the Kpendjal prefecture near the border with Burkina Faso, the government said in a statement.

The Togolese government’s statement is here.

Suite à l'attaque terroriste dans la nuit du 10 au 11 mai 2022 à #Kpékpakandi dans le #Kpendjal, le @GouvTg condamne cet acte lâche et barbare.

Il présente ses condoléances aux familles des victimes et souhaite un prompt rétablissement aux blessés dans ce communiqué 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 pic.twitter.com/K39X9Dd4Me

— Gouvernement Togolais (@GouvTg) May 11, 2022

As the statement mentions, the attack targeted soldiers in a Togolese border security mission called Operation Koundjouare, which was launched in 2018 (the most information I could find about it was here).

Kpendjal (map) is the northwestern-most prefecture in Togo. From Kpendjal, it is almost twice as far to Togo’s capital Lomé as it is from Kpendjal to Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou. In other words, this is a remote part of Togo. Notably, an earlier attack in Kpendjal was also reported in the Togolese press in November 2021, also targeting the security forces, although that attack was attributed to “bandits” rather than “terrorists.”

Assuming that one or both of those attacks were by jihadists, that would be worrying – and any attack is worrying, even “just” by bandits. But I think the concerns about the spread of jihadism into the coastal West African countries – Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and possibly Senegal – need to be right-sized. On the one hand, sporadic attacks can signal the beginning of a more substantial incursion, as areas such as central Mali, northern and eastern Burkina Faso, and western Niger have tragically discovered. There are already credible fears about a jihadist presence in northern Benin, and Cote d’Ivoire has suffered attacks since at least 2020. On the other hand, even in the worst conflict zones of the Sahel (and the Lake Chad Basin), the degradation of insecurity and the onset of multi-sided civil war took considerable time to occur. Moreover, there are serious potentials for self-fulfilling prophecies – counter-jihadist units tend to get attacked by jihadists, government efforts at rooting out cells tend to lead into counterproductive collective punishment, foreign interventions and heated rhetoric tend to turn up the temperature, etc.

Meanwhile, I think one should be hesitant about drawing any connections between national-level politics and what are, ultimately, very local dynamics that are necessary for insurgencies to gain traction. Would Togo appear to be remarkably brittle and potentially full of resentments, having been ruled by the same family since 1967? Definitely. Does that mean that jihadists are going house-to-house in Kpendjal riling up sentiment against President Faure Gnassingbé? I doubt it. I think where jihadists choose targets or see footholds (and sometimes I think they stumble into opportunities rather than seizing them), I don’t think who the head of state is figures largely in their calculations. Or, if one wants to feel very grim, one could say that the majority of the coastal states (with the exception of Ghana and Senegal, in my view) are brittle at the top. But as I mentioned above, it’s a long way from Kpendjal to Lomé.

Comparing the Prime Ministers of the Sahel

Who are the current prime ministers of the five core Sahelian countries, and what do their careers and approaches tell us about Sahelian politics? A few basic patterns emerge. In education, a combination of domestic government schoolings, STEM specializations, and some overseas training helped to fast-track their careers. In the first phases of their careers, employment within the civil service and particularly within state-owned enterprises was the means of ascent; often simultaneously, these men (they’re all men) either built parallel political careers within political parties, or at least (from within the civil service) weathered major shakeups in the political scene around them. The pivotal decade, in all cases, appears to have been the 1990s – in their 30s and 40s, they solidified positions as insiders that they have maintained ever since.

In the current political environment, the default model is that of a military head of state with a career politician or civil servant as prime minister; Niger is the only fully civilian-civilian lineup, in the sense that the head of state there is neither a current nor retired soldier. Two additional takeaways: (1) military heads of state have deep benches of technocrats and career civilian politicians to draw on when forming governments, even in some of the world’s poorest countries; (2) military heads of state in the region prefer civilian to military prime ministers, even if soldiers sometimes take up other key ministries in governments; and (3) in some cases, there are political rewards for the ability to strategically tack back and forth between the ruling party and the opposition, just as there are rewards for repeatedly seeking the presidency even if one doesn’t win it. None of those patterns are particularly unique to the Sahel, of course. One other interesting detail is that all three of the prime ministers in the core conflict zone of the Sahel – Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso – hail from the conflict zones themselves. Such origins, however, don’t necessarily give these men any particular advantage in attempting to manage or resolve those conflicts.

Here are the biographical sketches:

Mauritania – Mohamed Ould Bilal Messoud (b. 1963, Rosso): Ould Bilal Messoud is a technocrat and engineer with a background in hydraulics and business administration; parts of his education were in Algeria, Senegal, and possibly Europe. Since 1991, he has risen through the ranks of the state bureaucracy. Political turbulence in Mauritania between 2005 and 2009 clearly did not hurt his career, which continued to advance after the coup of 2005 against longtime ruler Maaouya Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya; he then moved into his first ministerial position (as Minister of Facilities, Urban Planning, and Housing) under the short-lived civilian administration of Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi; he then headed up several state-run enterprises after the coup of 2008 and the coming to power of Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz (military head of state 2008-2009, civilian head of state 2009-2019). In 2020, Ould Bilal Messoud became prime minister after allegations of corruption brought down his predecessor, Ismail Bedde Ould Cheikh Sidiyya. From what I observe, Ould Bilal Messoud does not have a particularly big profile, perhaps by choice.

Mali – Choguel Kokalla Maïga (b. 1958, Tabango): Maïga is another engineer, in this case with a specialty in telecommunications; he graduated with a doctorate from the Moscow Telecommunications Institute in 1987/1988. Politically active as a supporter of Mali’s then-military ruler Moussa Traoré, Maïga built a career from 1990-2002 at the Mali Telecommunications Firm (Société des Télécommunications du Mali), rising through the ranks there even as Traoré fell in 1991. Meanwhile, Maïga became the leader of the Patriotic Movement for Renewal (MPR), a successor party to Traoré’s party the Democratic Union of the Malian People; under the MPR banner, Maïga ran for president in the open elections of 2002, placing seventh with under 3% of the vote. He again placed seventh in the open elections of 2013 and then scored eighth in the 2018 elections, each time receiving a slightly lower percentage of the vote. Maïga was appointed transitional prime minister by Mali’s current junta in June 2021, after the junta perpetrated its second coup (the first was in August 2020, the second was in May 2021).

Burkina Faso – Albert Ouedraogo (b. 1969, Dori): Ouedraogo has a background in management sciences, having received a doctorate in that subject in 1999 from Caen-Normandy University in France. From 1996-2002, he taught at the University of Ouagadougou, and then fashioned a long and apparently extremely successful career in the private sector (including at Deloitte) and then as a government consultant on a wide array of technical projects. His previous overt political experience was limited to some student activism, but when the Burkinabè junta (came to power January 2022) was seeking a transitional prime minister, Ouedraogo may have appealed to military ruler Paul-Henri Damiba not just because of Ouedraogo’s technocratic credentials, but also because he is close to Damiba’s uncle Pierre Claver Damiba, the first president of the West African Development Bank.

Niger – Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou (b. 1954, Amaloul Nomade): Mahamadou has a background in economics and public administration, having studied in Togo, France, and the United States. A career civil servant from 1979 to 1991, he was also a founding member of the Nigerien Party of Democracy and Socialism (PNDS) in 1990; the PNDS is the party of Niger’s immediate past President Mahamadou Issoufou and the current President Mohamed Bazoum. During the 1990s and 2000s, Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou was in and out of the Nigerien government while also taking up major posts at the regional and international levels. He served twice as minister (Mines, Energy, Industry, and Crafts from 1991-1993, and Finance from 2011-2012), once as chief of staff (to Issoufou, 2015-2020), was elected twice as deputy from his home Tahoua Region (2011 and 2020), with stints at the Economic Community of West African States, the African Development Foundation, and other such organizations along the way. He was appointed in 2021 as Bazoum’s first prime minister, replacing Issoufou’s longtime prime minister, Brigi Raffini.

Chad – Albert Pahimi Padacké (b. 1966, Gouin; more biographical details here): At least in my research so far, I have not found details of Padacké’s biography between his birth and 1990, when he entered government. Since 1990, under the rule of Presidents Idriss Deby (1990-2021) and Mahamat Deby (2021-present), Padacké has been a major civilian figure associated with the regime, holding ministerial posts on and off: Finance, Commerce, Mines, Agriculture, Justice, Communication, etc., before being appointed Prime Minister in 2016. The post of prime minister was abolished in 2018, but then was resuscitated under the transitional military regime of Mahamat Deby, who appointed Padacké as his first and so far only PM. During the 2000s and up through the 2021 election (won by Idriss Deby just days before his death), Padacké was a frequent candidate for president (2006, 2011, 2021). In 2011 and 2021 he was a distant runner-up, scoring 6% to Deby’s 89% in 2011, and scoring 10% to Deby’s 79% in 2021. If one feels cynical (I do), one could say that Padacké was not a convincing opposition figure, given how many times he served in Deby’s governments – including, by some accounts, serving during the 2006 elections. Mahamat Deby would not have made him PM, it seems to me, if Padacké was not an insider through and through.