ABSTRACT
After the so-called “third wave” of democracy 1 swept over the continent, Mali in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first appeared to be a rare success story in Africa. Aid donors, democracy activists, and academics were all taken in by regular election cycles, free press, and visible signs of economic development, at least in the major urban areas. Signs to the contrary were there, including low voter turnout, student unrest, and, especially, ethnic tensions, sometimes violent, in the country’s Saharan and Sahelian reaches. But observers saw what they wanted to see, an island of political reform, religious tolerance, and economic growth on a continent that otherwise featured failed states, authoritarian governments, poverty, and outbursts of genocide. This chapter will first examine Mali’s pro-democracy coup of 1991, its transition government, and the establishment of a democratic, pluralistic government that went through four regular elections cycles and nearly a fifth before the wheels came off the wagon in March of 2012. Then it will explain how Mali became a showcase of democracy and economic growth, and how that showcase image proved to be hollow, masking a sham democracy and badly skewed distribution of its limited benefits. The second part of the chapter will analyze the deeply entrenched corruption, in electoral politics, the civil administration, and the military, that ate away at the country’s apparent stability and strength, leaving a near-empty shell. That shell collapsed in 2012 under the twin blows of a military coup in the capital and the loss of more than half of the country’s national territory. The third part will discuss two ethnic-based secular-nationalist insurgencies in the north between 1990 and 2009 that threatened to give the lie to Mali’s vaunted stability and record of tolerance. The first of these two insurrections, then known as the Northern Conflict, began in the last year of the 22-year authoritarian secular-nationalist dictatorship of Moussa Traoré. It continued through the pro-democracy coup, the transition government, and well into the first term of Mali’s first democratically elected president, Alpha Oumar Konaré, ending with the highly symbolic, but now seemingly ironic, Flame of Peace celebration in Timbuktu in 1996. The second insurrection began in 2006 in the same troubled Adrar des Ifoghas region of northeastern Mali that had been the seat of the Alfellaga in the 1960s. Though shorter, more localized, and less bloody than the 1990 insurrection, the 2006 rebellion, as we will see, now appears to have been less a reprise of the 1990 rebellion than a preview of the 2012 insurrection that touched off the events that are part of the focus of this volume.
