Tuesday, July 23, 2013 , Paul Jeffrey
In the heat of the afternoon, Aissata Kantao sits in the shade of a tree in front of her home, the sound of children playing in the sandy street rebounding off the dirt walls that characterise Timbuktu, the city in northern Mali where she grew up. It’s also the city she was forced to flee when Islamist extremists took control and quieted the children, covered the women, and imposed a regime of terror.
“If the bearded ones found a woman on the street, they’d chase us back inside, telling us women don’t belong in public,” Kantao said, referring to the jihadis who took over the city in 2012. “If you didn’t move fast enough, they’d beat you.”
The Islamists came to Timbuktu to help a Tuareg separatist group drive out the Malian military. Yet then they took control from the Tuaregs and imposed a brutal form of sharia law. They forced women to cover themselves head to foot, men to grow their beards, banned music and smoking and, initially, closed schools. After a few days, Kantao took her seven children and fled to Bamako, taking five days to make the journey, alternately walking and riding a bus. In the capital, they stayed with her sister.
Life in Bamako wasn’t easy. Some days there wasn’t enough food for everyone. She and her children longed for their desert home. In May, they came back after French troops intervened and drove the jihadis into the desert. “The north was finally free thanks to France and [President Francois] Hollande, so we came home,” Kantao said.
Although some of the people displaced by jihadis have begun returning to Timbuktu and other northern cities, the region’s moribund economy has kept the return rate low. Banks are closed after being looted by the jihadis. Many government offices remain abandoned; most civil servants consider the area too insecure to return. Military checkpoints surround the city, and nervous soldiers make many travelers lift their clothing to show they’re not suicide bombers. Most Arab merchants in the market fled the city when the French arrived, and remain fearful that other residents of the city will blame them as collaborators if they return. There’s little cash circulating and few jobs to be found.
Kantao keeps the hardship in perspective. “There’s no work here, but I’d rather suffer at home than suffer in some faraway place,” she said.
Many of those who fled the north say they’ll consider returning after national elections, scheduled for July 28, and before the new school year starts in September. Yet many will find their homes and businesses looted by the jihadis and damaged by rains. Finding work will be a major challenge.
Ancient treasures destroyed
Tourism had long been a driver of Timbuktu’s economy but tourists had stopped coming even before the 2012 takeover, scared away by kidnappings of foreigners carried out by jihadi groups. The industry is unlikely to rebound soon. Some of what drew foreigners to the fabled city were the tombs of Sufi saints, many of which were decried as idolatrous and smashed by the jihadis. Tourists also came to see ancient manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages when the city was an international centre of learning and scholarship.
Yet the documents reflected a tolerant and inquisitive character of Islam that the jihadis found blasphemous. They started burning the ancient books, motivating the people of the city to launch a massive underground operation to surreptitiously smuggle them out of the city to safekeeping in Bamako. The documents won’t last long in Bamako’s tropical humidity but until there’s more confidence that the jihadis won’t return to Timbuktu, neither will the ancient books.
Most discussions of security quickly turn to the future of the French troops. Although their presence in Timbuktu has diminished in favor of Malian soldiers and troops from a United Nations peacekeeping force, the French maintain a major base at Gao and continue their operations against the Islamists throughout northern Mali, aided by intelligence from United States military drones based in neighbouring Niger.
Hady Mahamane is a women's leader and vice-mayor in Toya, a small village outside Timbuktu where ACT helps villagers combat the threat of desertification. Because of its isolation, the village is much more vulnerable to the jihadis’ possible return.
“I worry the French will leave someday, because we suffered a lot under the jihadis. We women couldn’t go out without them asking you where you were going and with whom. If they didn’t like your answer they beat you. We argued with them a lot, and my niece got put in jail for arguing. We don’t want them back, and right now it’s the French who are keeping them away,” she said.
Ridding the city of animosity
For centuries a meeting point of tribes and cultures in the middle of the desert, Timbuktu has long been the focal point of ethnic conflicts, often between lighter-skinned inhabitants of the north and darker-skinned Africans from the south. The months of rule by the jihadis – for the most part northerners – only exacerbated those tensions. Thus Timbuktu’s frayed social fabric will take some time and effort to reweave, a challenge ACT is helping meet.
“Timbuktu can’t revive its health without people returning, but for people to return there must be an atmosphere of reconciliation, of people pardoning each other so that we can enjoy the peace,” said Mouna Cisse, coordinator of the Timbuktu office of the Malian Association for the Survival of the Sahel (AMSS), a partner of an ACT member.
AMSS runs programmes that foster reconciliation, including formal dialogue circles where people of all social groups and ages can publicly discuss the community’s challenges.
“It’s not an easy task to bring all these groups together, but it’s a challenge we must face for people to return. For they must return. They are Malians. They’ll never feel at home in other countries. We’ve got to make them feel welcome here,” Cisse said.
In addition to funding reconciliation efforts, ACT is funding programmes that create income-generating opportunities, as well as providing support for schools, and helping female survivors of gender-based violence, whether the violence was from their partners or from the jihadis.
Defusing the situation
The post-conflict rehabilitation of northern Mali faces another serious obstacle in the deadly artifacts of war that lie around the countryside. Uncleared land mines and other unexploded ordnance litter the fields around cities and other areas where fighting occurred. Two members of an ACT mine clearance team were dispatched to Timbuktu earlier this year at the invitation of the mayor after children started finding explosives near their homes. Two children died as a result and two were injured, including one amputation.
“Children see unexploded ordnance and tend to think it’s a toy, so they start banging on it or throwing it,” said Jean-Jacques Maerel, head of mission in Mali for Dan Church Aid, an ACT member.
Maerel’s team taught Timbuktu’s teachers how to help their students identify and understand the dangers of unexploded ordnance. Not much is known about what unexploded ordnance is where, so one of the priorities for the ACT team will be working with the UN and other agencies to develop accurate maps of risky areas. Beyond that, clearing and disposing of explosives will free up land for more agricultural development.
Demining is indispensible for rehabilitation and development programmes. “There’s no point in starting an agricultural programme when you still have unexploded ordnance in the fields. But once we’ve cleared the land for people to return and work their fields, and they’re provided with the seeds and tools to do so, then the economy can begin to recover and people can get on with their lives in peace,” Maerel said.