The former Malian Tuareg rebellion is asking Algeria and other international mediators for an “emergency meeting” in a “neutral place” to examine the agreement for peace in northern Mali, which it recently denounced ” deliquescence”.
The Coordination of Movements of Azawad (CMA) is an alliance of predominantly Tuareg groups with also an Arab component that fought the Malian state before signing with it the so-called Algiers peace agreement in 2015.
The CMA says it is “grateful for the efforts made by the international mediation led by Algeria and which resulted in the signing” of the Agreement “for almost eight years”, in a correspondence to the Algerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ramtan Lamamra, dated Saturday and reached AFP on Sunday.
It requests “an emergency meeting with all of the international mediation in a neutral place”, in this text signed by its president Alghabass Ag Intalla.
This request “is justified by the need for a decisive examination of (the) viability” of the agreement signed in 2015, adds this text.
The CMA had “denounced” the “decline” of this agreement and called on its international guarantors to “avoid a definitive rupture” between its parties, in a press release published Friday following a meeting of its executive bureau held between Wednesday and Friday in Kidal, his stronghold in the north of the country.
“It is regrettable to admit” that “the peace agreement” unquestionably suffers from the obvious lack of effective commitments (from) the key parties for its implementation, namely the successive governments of Mali, the (Algerian) mediation and the international community guarantor of its full application”, she said in this text.
Instead of independence, the agreement the rebels signed in 2015 with pro-government armed groups and the Malian state provides for more local autonomy and the integration of fighters into a so-called “reconstituted” army, under the state authority. Its application remains fragmentary.
Mali, a poor and landlocked country in the heart of the Sahel, was the scene of two military coups in August 2020 and May 2021. The government has adopted a transition timetable to allow civilians to return to power in March 2024 .
But the political crisis goes hand in hand with a serious ongoing security crisis since the outbreak, in 2012, of separatist and jihadist insurgencies in the north.
This violence, which spread to central Mali, then to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, caused thousands of civilian and military deaths as well as hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Mali.