Where gunmen kidnapped the opposition leader

April 19: Mali parliamentary elections
Rally for Mali: 51 seats
Alliance for Democracy in Mali: 24 seats
Union for the Republic and Democracy: 19 seats
Movement for Mali: 10 seats
Democratic Alliance for Peace: 6 seats
Convergence for the Development of Mali: 5 seats
Alliance for Solidarity in Mali: 4 seats
Union for Democracy and Development: 4 seats
African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence: 3 seats
Yéléma: 2 seats
Party for National Renaissance: 2 seats
Democratic Social Convention: 2 seats
Party for the restoration of Mali's values: 1 seat
Malian Union for the African Democratic Rally: 1 seat
Party for Economic Development and Solidarity: 1 seat
Alliance for the republic: 1 seat
Patriotic Movement for Renewal: 1 seat
Union of democratic forces for progress: 1 seat
Mali kanu Party: 1 seat
Socialist Party Yelen Kura: 1 seat
Other parties: 5 seats
Independents: 2 seats

Many countries have used the coronavirus epidemic to delay their elections. Not Mali, which went ahead with its planned election this spring despite the disease, as well as the kidnapping of an opposition leader and election officials.

On April 19, Rally for Mali, the center-left party of the country’s president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta won 51 out of 147 seats in the National Assembly, the country’s main legislative body. That’s more than twice as many seats as any other party. 

Here to explain is Ibrahim Maiga, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Bamako. This interview was conducted in French, translated and edited.

Can you tell us what happened in the recent elections?

The elections took place in a particular atmosphere: In addition to the insecurity, violent extremist groups and local conflicts, we now also had the coronavirus. Despite this situation, the government decided to organize the elections.

They decided this because they had already postponed the elections twice. The last elections took place in 2013. But in 2018, holding the elections was impossible because of violence in the country’s geographic north and center. So they were delayed for a year. In 2019, elections were delayed again. The National Assembly’s current mandate expires in May.

One of the main recommendations of an inclusive national dialogue which was held last December was to organize legislative elections before May 2020. The government decided to organize legislative elections as quickly as possible to give a certain legitimacy to this assembly so that they could push through constitutional and institutional reforms.

Nevertheless, the circumstances in which these elections were held (low participation, protests against the results of the Constitutional Court) are likely to have an impact on the legitimacy of the assembly and the laws it will vote on.

The opposition leader, Soumaila Cisse, was kidnapped.

A few days before the election, individuals probably linked to Katiba, a jihadist group which is part of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, kidnapped the opposition leader.

I don't think they planned to kidnap him. I think it was an opportunistic moment. The opposition leader ventured into an area that is known to be largely controlled by armed groups.  He decided to go because he wanted to demonstrate that he can go out on the field and campaign in the country. But as he and his colleagues were driving through a forest, they were attacked by unidentified gunmen who opened fired and blindfolded them.

And so far he has not been released?

No.

When people are going to the polls in Mali, what kind of issues are they voting on? What distinguishes the platform of the ruling party (Rally for Mali) versus that of the opposition?

You should know is that the participation rate is very very low. Ten percent in Bamako. It’s higher in the northern and central regions: 40-60%. But I think that rate is very exaggerated. We can't check the rates because there are very few observers in that region because of the lack of security.

We've had a few issues since 2012 which usually mobilize people. The first one is security.

The second is the economy: Poverty and ways to improve livelihoods.

But in Mali, in particularly in the local and legislative elections, the name of the candidate is particularly important. 

It can be difficult to distinguish between the opposition and the ruling party on the basis of ideology. In many parts of the country, voters vote not for a single candidate, but for a list. And often opposition parties and the ruling party are actually on the same list of candidates. This contributed to a lot of confusion for voters, because many wanted to vote for people of one party but saw that they were on the same list as members of the other. 

And after the election, these results are confirmed by the Constitutional Court?

When provisional results are proclaimed, they are transferred to the Constitutional Court, who confirms these results. And often these results change after they have been confirmed by the Constitutional Court. I’ll give you an example. In the provisional results, the ruling party had only won one out of the six districts in the capital. But after the declaration of the results by the constitutional court, the ruling party’s win went from one to four districts. So you can see: it's rather suspicious.

Of course the impartiality of judges is highly suspect. The president nominates three. The president of the assembly also nominates three. Three others are nominated by the magistrate council. This makes for a court that is rather subservient to the president and the ruling party. This creates a good deal of suspicion around the elections.

So you're in Bamako. I imagine you voted. What was the atmosphere like?

I actually made the decision not to go. The reports I was getting on the morning of did not really encourage me to go vote. In many polling stations there was no hand sanitizer gel. There were no masks. There were no gloves. There was no soap to wash your hands. Social distancing was not being respected.

All this really discouraged me and discouraged a lot of people from voting. In certain communities, participation was between seven and ten percent of registered voters (not of the whole population.) So we will have representatives in the assembly who will have been elected with only ten percent of votes. So we will see what kind of problems of legitimacy they will have in the coming months.

Explain the violence that is now overtaking the country.

It's difficult to talk about the violence without going back to 2012.

In 2012, three regions were occupied by groups that we would call jihadist or terrorist: AQIM in Timbuktu, du MUJWA in Gao and Ansar Dine in Kidal. They put down roots and developed affinities with a certain number of individuals and communities who felt themselves marginalized by the current state system. At first they would do simple things like provide medication to individuals living in places far from cities and medical centers. Then they started providing other basic necessities—milk, flour, oil, pasta and so on. They also offered many people a sense of security against possible aggressors, including against representatives of the state. 

But after Operation Serval, a joint French-West African counter-insurgency operation that took place in January 2013, the groups were not eradicated. They were just dispersed.

The strategy that they developed was very effective. What they understood was that what interested people in Bamako and in the West were big cities.

So they decided to do the opposite and occupy rural zones. In a country like Mali, 70 percent or even more of the country is rural. Most people live in a rural area, so when you say that jihadists are in rural areas, that isn't nothing. It isn't like they're in marginal areas. It's not the same thing as in the United States, which is a very urbanized country.

The jihadists really put down roots in rural areas. Today we see the state has a huge amount of trouble making themselves known in those spaces and so every time that the state is the subject of a dispute in a rural area, the jihadists take advantage of it.

This explains that we're not in a face-to-face battle so much as asymmetrical warfare. The jihadists have developed a strategy of avoidance and have managed to spread the insecurities that used to be simply in the north of the country to the center.

What’s most complex about what's going on is that every instance is really a local phenomenon and local dynamics are by nature very complex.

And of course, as soon as violence and insecurity spreads, this creates a new problem: Individuals wish to arm themselves. So what we’ve also seen in the past few years has been the proliferation of self-defense groups. That of course is risky to social cohesion, because they often occur in places where the state seems to have totally disappeared. So at the end of the day we find ourselves in a war of all against all. Some of these self-defense groups operate in a survival mode. Others have left that survival stage and are in the stage of predation themselves. They regularly commit crimes, from arbitrary arrests, imposition of illegal taxes, to pillaging or destroying entire villages. In March 2019, a militia group called  Dan Na Ambassagou attacked the Fulani village Ogossagou and killed more than 160 people.

You have written in the past that the violence in the region cannot be solved by “high level summits.”

Every time there's a problem in this region, we get  together either in Paris or Addis Ababa or Brussels or New York to talk about problems about which we actually know very little. As I say, security issues in the Sahel are usually about local questions. But people around the table discuss the issues with grand strategies: How will we help Mali get back on its feet? How will we help Mali have a well-equipped army? And so on. 

We haven't really changed direction when it comes to the crisis in the Sahel even though the situation could be improved by taking better account of these local dynamics. Which of course means actually talking and taking into account the communities that are affected by this insecurity and their proposals.