The Devil Exists in Unintended Consequences

That inveterate and brilliant wit, Oscar Wilde once said: "When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers."  That statement, both witty and true to experience, time and again issues a lesson in unintended consequences, a lesson that, though history will repeat itself, we never quite learn to serve to our advantage.  Those who have the power to do so intervene in matters where often they should not; their intentions are often enough, though not always, respectable, but the outcomes sometimes are not.

The late (un)lamented tyrant of Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, seemed to have compassion and a will to aid his African neighbours.  He used his influence and his oil gains to aid other impoverished African states, helped them maintain order when they were under threat, and in so doing gained their confidence and their gratitude.  There was more than one neighbour who mourned his passing.  Mali might very well have been one of them.

Among Libya's mercenaries absorbed into its state militias were large number of Malians and Tuareg tribesmen, fierce warriors who learned their professional craft under Libyan tutelage, were handsomely paid by Libya, were well provisioned and armed by Libya.  When the Gadhafi regime fell, the Tuaregs took what they could, including their personal arms supplied by the regime, and they also ransacked arms depots left unguarded by the fleeing Libyan military.

And they turned their attention to their own singular needs; a homeland to be carved out of Mali, for the Tuareg.  The Malian military, not as well armed or motivated since a military coup unseated their president, and his successor was attacked by Malians, was unable to beat back the advance of the Tuareg who were joined by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Now Mali is a fractured state.  Timbuktu has been captured by the Islamists who, shouting Allahu Akbar, set about destroying ancient shrines, monuments and tombs as insults to pure Islam, while townspeople cringe and despair their ill fortune, witnessing the sacred symbols of their ancient faith destroyed.  International jihadists from across the Muslim world; Algerians, Nigerians, Somalis and Pakistanis rule the inhabitants of Timbuktu.

"We first saw the foreigners when they were in our city.  How they entered our country, we don't know."   But the African Sahara of over 750,000 square kilometres has been absorbed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its allies.  They have taken for their own, airports, military bases, arms dumps and training camps, along with numerous cities and towns, and their populations helpless to do anything about this occupation.

The UN-sponsored, NATO assistance to the Libyan rebels determined to overturn the reign of Moammar Gadhafi to free Libyans from the yoke of tyranny resulted in Sharia law being imposed within Libya, with tribal and sectarian animosities fully unleashed.  And with looted arms depots now furnishing more than ample supplies for al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the region.

The rest is the fabled domino effect.  Fate, like a giant bowling ball, striking all the pins and laying them low.


Furthermore, United States-supplied vehicles, satellite telephones, navigation aids and arms are now in the hands of the Islamists.  Five of the six specialist military counter-terrorism units in Mali whom the U.S. had supplied abandoned their equipment when AQIM advanced.  "The Islamists are the masters today.  They have all the equipment that we left in the field."

Artillery, rocket launchers, large reserves of small arms and ammunition abandoned by Mali's retreating army have all been inherited by AQIM which now also controls the airports of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal,including one of the region's largest military airbases near the northern border with Algeria.  The spread of Islamism is as incendiary as it is inevitable.


"It pains my heart that I have relatives in the north who are suffering day by day and it is not in my military capacity to help them."

Mali no longer has an official government.  Its army now lacks the capability to retake its north.  "If you have a vast unpoliced, ungoverned area, you can do what you like in it.  The fact is that two-thirds of the territory of a sovereign country is not under the control of the government", stated a western diplomat in Bamako.

And so, some residents of Timbuktu have fled, and refugees are filling up camps.  "When they destroyed the mausoleums, that affected me personally.  We cannot live with the terrorists in the city", said one refugee after the Islamist Ansar Dine razed eight of the city's 15 mausoleums and broke the entrance to the Sidi Yahya mosque dating from 1350.

Al-Qaeda and its ally Ansar Dine have installed Sharia, banning alcohol and music, the local television signal, and radio stations may only broadcast official announcements and Koranic verse.  Floggings and persecution, oppression and public displays of penalties, disciplines and stark capital sentences for insulting Islam are now the order of the day, every day.