The Timbuktu Twist

Following the Mali peace process? Well, you should. It's much more exciting than Iraq or Palestine or whatever other intractable slow-motion conflict you may be wasting your days with.

Super-brief recap: the old on-off Touareg rebellion in northern Mali blew up again in 2006, following which Algeria intervened and mediated peace on terms that, as of by accident, secured a lasting role for it in the region, which is of prime importance for smuggling and anti-terror operations (it is the presumed HQ of the Maghrebi al-Qaida's Saharan wing, among other things). However, when unrest then restarted, Libya also showed up to mediate, initiating a process parallel to Algeria's. To the visible irritation of the Bouteflika government, Qadhafi actually managed to calm things down by organizing some major hostage releases from the hardline group of one Ibrahim ag Bahanga. He, along with the Tripoli-backed MNJ, Niger's main Touareg rebel group, went on record as saying that only Libyan intervention could solve the conflict. Algeria pretended not to notice and re-activated its old deal, bringing the hostilities to a formal halt again, even though violence continued to simmer sporadically.

Now, the Tripoli-based Bahanga has torpedoed both the Libyan-initated status quo and the Algiers Agreement, which actually reinforced each other, by a major attack on Mali government forces (killing somewhere around twenty). Algeria says that it will "continue to mediate". Clearly, however, Algerian-Libyan rivalries are by now an important factor on the perpetually fragile and splintering Touareg side of the conflict. There are competing peace strategies and -- presumably -- competing sponsorships of factions on the ground, with violence variously interpreted as a Libyan attempt to muscle out Algeria, or, conversely, as a ploy to invite renewed Algerian mediation, or something else entirely. All the while, both countries are wooing Bamako, too, and Libya is highly active in the closely intertwined Niger unrest, where France is also a major player. Add to that all sorts of conspiracy theories concerning the hidden agendas of various smuggling networks, terrorist groups, rebel units, and so on, and the different security services that are alleged to puppeteer them (Algeria, USA, Libya, France, Mali, etc). While these claims are often grotesquely overblown, it is true that it can be hard to tell where rebel/criminal groups begin and state security organs end -- and the mere fact that these rumors exist and are widely if selectively believed, both inside and outside of the region, tends to complicate everything so much further.

To sum up: It's getting really messy, soon to pass the point of no sense -- but it's great fun for us casual onlookers and conspiracy theorists. Sort of like Lebanese politics minus the media coverage.

And: Only somewhat related, but: Algerian military planners must be spending an ever-increasing amount of time thinking of their eastern and south-eastern border. Qadhafi has been arming like crazy ever since he slipped out of his boycott, and it's not only with the sort of guns he could use for his usual Saharan/Sahelian chaos-mongering: he's buying heavy tanks, cruisers, radars and fighter jets faster than factories in Moscow and Paris can churn them out. Sure, there has been not a hint of aggressiveness from Tripoli towards Algeria so far (not counting a one-off call for Algerian Touareg to secede), but Libyan politics in the longer term, five or ten years from now, are as unpredictable as the Brotherly Leader himself -- and so is Libya's internal stability, post-Q. Not to be alarmist, but prudence calls for some attention to this.