Mali: the looking glass war that never was

By Richard Cottrell: I am not going to tire my readers with in-depth reports from the new struggle for civilization,  recently fought in the semi-desert wastes of a West African republic that few until recently could locate on a map.
Mali, it is called, and Mali is a truly horrible place. It is a left over remnant of the dog’s dinner known as French West Africa, devoid of almost everything including food and civilized refuge.
Word concerning the French Revolution has yet to reach this parched, impoverished landscape and given the enthusiasm for educating the local natives by the former colonial proprietors, this is hardly surprising.
Yet the world is/was at war in Mali, or so we are told. Forget it. We are watching a cleverly constructed, brilliantly enacted, perfectly designed optical illusion. The players are the usual gang: the media, shackled to their real owners, the proprietors of Corporate Global Solutions PLC; our gullible selves, ever ready to believe in the phantom myth of some new offshoot of Islamic terrorism; and not least the authors of what this war is really about, namely the international goldbugs.
Mali is a sideshow, but an important one, in the new Scramble for Africa now being waged by the Western powers. I will explain just why in a moment.
As for the grand illusion, we are offered exciting reports from the battlefront.
The north is supposedly a playground for fanatical Islamists – belonging to the Tuareg tribe – bent on enforcing Sharia law, which implies the regular practice of lopping the hands of felons, hanging miscreants from building site construction cranes, and other such delights and entertainments as regularly practiced in the civilized Sharia-ruled Western pet called Saudi Arabia.
Well, war being war one expects some form of illustrated evidence, and of this the evidential facts are obvious by their almost complete absence.
True, we saw wire agency circulated snaps of posed glorious freedom fighters clad in immaculate designer gear and smart sunglasses, grasping fearsome looking weapons as they prepare to rumble off into the desert wastes in pursuit of the evil ones.
They look as though they are on a Boy Scout outing, c’mon these guys have never seen a fully paid up bandit or usurper in their entire lives.
The mood was perfectly captured by the image of a foreign reporter – from the BBC I think – who looked about twelve years old, crouched behind the usual stage scenery (a handy low wall) intoning in a hushed voice (lest anyone should overhear him) concerning the ‘city on the edge of fear, no-one knows what to expect’ etc. etc.
It is my very strong belief that the BBC has a secret manual packed with such useful phrases for foreign correspondents to employ in every eventuality when engaged in wars and insurrections.
Of course we have had the ritual burnings of precious and ancient texts dating to a long gone Malian civilization to remind us of the horrific nature of the West African Taliban. I venture that anyone can light a bonfire if they feel like a barbecue.
We have only the word of the wire agencies and a few reporters that these evil deeds actually happened, or if they did, that the violators of Timbuktu (which has come to mean nowhere at all in the English nuance) were responsible.
So what is this carnival about? We must wonder given that Mali is rich in goats and not much else, save for one important exception.  More than half the population gets along on not much more than a buck a day, so what is there here to scrap about or justify the arrival of Franco-English International Brigade?
The answer is that this strange benighted land is actually the second largest producer of gold in Africa.  The rich seams are in the north, where the predators huddled. The cleansing operation launched by the French president Francois Hollande had but one specific object and that was to install firm French hegemony over the entire country.
I saw an article in Le Monde in which Hollande – normally as exciting and entertaining as a small town bank manager – came alive with positive excitement as he gushed on about France’s new role as ‘the gendarme of Africa.’
But what is ‘new’ to mean, given that successive French presidents have intervened by my account at least 32 times in the affairs of the French Commonwealth of Nations in Africa?
Liberté, égalité, fraternité do not merit even a minor walk-on role in Mali or anywhere else for that matter.
There’s nothing more certain to set the pulses racing in Paris than a cruel despot in charge of some treasure trove. Think the former Emperor Bokassa of the ‘Central African Empire’ raised and cosseted by the Quai d’Orsay as an exemplar of French civilization in L’Afrique.
The Big Picture may help us to understand why.
The West is involved in a repeat of the 19^th century caper called Scramble for Africa. The continent is rich with enormous mineral resources – metals, diamonds, and ore – which the West seeks to get a hold of before the Chinese and the Russians grab everything for themselves.
Sad, dusty Mali fits this picture because it is a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. It has no strategic relevance of itself – aside from the gold that is – but acquires some when related to the Western imperialist adventures in the North African belt.
Moving along the Mediterranean shore, we see these as the following: Libya (government deposed, the president Gaddafi assassinated); Tunisia (government deposed, now suffering a repeat experience after the recent murder of a prominent secular politician); and the on-going struggle in Algeria for more than twenty years between the popular (and once freely elected) Islamists and the Secularists bent on keeping them out of power, at the price of a long and bloody civil war. Then Egypt, key to Arabic-Islamist world, pitched into uncertainty by the election of a Muslim Brotherhood leader whose actual allegiances are a matter of question.
Divide and conquer anyone?
George Orwell’s 1984 portrayed Oceania (the cipher for the Anglo-American world) engaged in a perpetual conflict with a pair of global adversaries, the struggle with whom dominated the nightly Hate News headlines. Orwell, who served in the British propaganda effort in WW2, used the experienced he gained there (and in the Spanish Civil War) to write the seminal work that dominates Western humanist thinking to this day.
When Big Brother announced victories and setbacks, nobody had any means of questioning the veracity of Oceania’s Endless War. This of course was not the point, since the confabulation of a war that might or might not exist was an end in itself.
We have lived in exactly such a world since 9/11, and for that matter, the endless war in Afghanistan that began – as we never seem to remember, or are shocked when we do – twelve years ago, with no conclusion in sight.
A colleague recently pointed out to me how curious it is that there are rarely any newsreel pictures or media photographs of the conflict in Afghanistan.
This is seemingly all of a chime with 1984, which employed redundant footage of former wars to give the impression of action. But not even that in Afghanistan. We rest on assurances and assumptions that there is a war, and then when combatants are killed, they were killed by the Taliban and its alleged al Qaeda affiliates.  Ditto, tiny prostrate Mali.
Increasingly those who would wage wars are looking for cheap ways to do it. Massed phalanxes, Korean War style are out.  Just about everything was tried in Vietnam, short of the Bomb, and failed. Thanks to Afghanistan, counter-insurgency manuals are on remainder these days. The future it seems rests with drones and robots, but a word of warning there.
If it is possible to create a mass illusion of the war that wasn’t with human actors (the sideshow rehearsal in Mali) imagine how much easier it would be to achieve the same result with robot actors.
We are then in the dream world of having wars forever as part of the general sedation of society, just as Orwell foresaw.  Did you notice that no injured return from ‘the Front’ in 1984?  Endless war as the final state of mind.  It has a ring to it, don’t you think?
Poor, exhausted Mali, long gone are her palaces, sparkling fountains,  great cities, philosophers,  men of science who made charts of the stars, the reductionism of progress has seen to that. All that is left is the after-glow of the curse of gold, and a new round of pillaging from a people who have nothing.
Where exists gold, there is war and poverty.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative).

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