Sahelian blowback: what’s happening in Mali?
By Vijay Prashad | June 2010
Washington’s counterterrorism spectacles see only al-Qaeda. The debt burden and the impossibility of governance are not on the agenda. Whether the State Department or the Defense Department give arms to the Malian military says more about the anxiety in the U.S. than about the dynamic in Mali. Once more the U.S. will strengthen the military against civil society, and once more we might see Mali fall the way of Guinea and others in the region that were set up to become dictatorships. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quite rightly called the mass rapes by the Guinean military ‘criminality of the greatest degree.’ If better sense does not prevail, not long from now we might read of similar atrocities at the Modibo Kéita Sports Stadium in Bamako.
Keywords: Africom | Al Qaida in the Maghrib | Mali | Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat | Tuaregs
