Libyan Conflict: Mali a Fertile Reserve for Mercenaries
Photo courtesy of Google ImagesMuch has been written about Colonel Gaddafi‘s importation of foreign mercenaries to Libya to prop up his weakened military and terrorize his people. The countries ofsub-Saharan Africa, with their almost staggeringpoverty and lack of any real possibilities to better oneself make easy pickings for a rich dictator willing to spend a seemingly limitless amount of money to stay in power.
The country of Mali is a case in point. It is even poorer than some of its neighbors but seems almost to be a subsidiary of Libya. The people of Mali watch television on a national network set up and financed by Colonel Gaddafi 30 or so years ago. Even though the average Mali resident subsists on 1-2 small meals a day they see a 100 million dollar government center, La Cite Administrative Muammar el-Qaddafi, being built by Libyan oil money rise up. It will be a governmental center for Mali,not Libya. You may understand the allegiance that kind of largesse will buy. It’s not moral or even well founded, but for a country like Mali some of its young men are so desperate that they will literally kill for an opportunity to get some of Gaddafi’s money. [See Martin Vogl's piece on BBC.com "Tuaregs join Gaddafi's mercenaries http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12647115 March 4, 2011] The main mosque in Bamako,Mali’s capital was even built by Gaddafi.
Libya’s leader has drained billions of dollars out of his country’s oil profits and set up what is basically Saharan Africa‘s venture capital company, buying anything of value he can use for leverage: rebel armies,Islamicorganizations,manufacturing plants, diamond mines,supermarkets and his very own chain of gas stations called OiLibya which are sprinkled all over Mali and surrounding countries. According to some estimates Libya literally underwrites Mali’s existance,both financially and militarily. While he has been acquiring a large chunk of Mali and surrounding countries he has set up rebel training camps for the desperately impoverished young men who see no way out of their present condition but to work for the Family Business- which is to be at the beck and call of Colonel Gaddafi to, among other things, murder,rape and terrorize the people of Libya to keep them in line.
One more case in point to show the lenghts to which Gaddafi will go to play the people of one country off against another is this. In the 1980s he created something called the Islamic Legion, a paramilitary organization that was neither Islamic in philosophy or very legion. He sent them off to battle another impoverished country in his neighborhood- Chad. He sent them to battle under trained and not ready for battle. They were beaten and bitterly went back to their home countries. Many of these mercenaries were from the Tuareg tribes (a nomadic Saharan tribe) in Mali.
Tuaregs from Mali
“What I know is that thousands of Tuaregs who were enrolled in the pan-Arabic army of Gadhafi were demobilized in the ’90s,” said Adam Thiam, a political analyst and journalist from Mali, home to the nomadic Tuaregs who also live in other Sahara Desert nations. “Many of them serving in the African legions in Libya came back to Mali and Niger, and they started the rebellion in Mali in June 1990 and a year later in Niger.”
But, Thiam says, some fighters stayed behind.
“Ten-thousand — that’s the figure which was given to us at the time — remained in Libya, and they are enrolled in the Libyan security forces,” he said
It is very likely that some of the next generation of Mali’s youth are in places like Tripoli today.
Cheers, Jeff
References
Wright, John (1989). Libya, Chad and the Central Sahara. C. Hurst & Co.. ISBN 1-85065-050-0.
Adam Thian (journalist from Mali) NPR interview “Morning Edition” Feb.23,2011
Martin Vogl, BBC.com “Tuaregs join Gaddafi’s mercenaries” March 4, 2011
