CHINEGODAR — "C'était la panique totale!", confie Tam Mohamed, une jeune femme qui a quitté avec son bébé son village du nord du Mali après la récente offensive de rebelles touareg: comme elle, des milliers de Maliens ont rejoint l'ouest du Niger voisin pour "fuir la mort".
"Nous avons eu chaud. On vendait du bois lorsque nous avons entendu les bruits des armes, nous avons tout laissé pour nous cacher", raconte à l'AFP Tam, 30 ans, arrivée samedi à Chinégodar.
Ce village nigérien à une dizaine de kilomètres de la frontière malienne abrite environ 6.000 personnes, sur près de 10 000 Maliens et Nigériens qui ont fui les combats entre l'armée malienne et des groupes armés dans le nord du Mali depuis l'offensive des rebelles, le 17 janvier, la première depuis 2009.
En caressant son enfant épuisé par la faim et la diarrhée, la jeune mère jure de ne pas rentrer "avant le retour de la paix" à Adramboucar, sa localité occupée depuis fin janvier par les rebelles maliens, à 8 km du Niger.
Livrés à eux-mêmes presque sans nourriture, sans eau ni soins adéquats, les réfugiés, venus essentiellement de la région malienne de Menaka, sont installés à l'écart du village, sous des abris faits de couvertures, de pagnes et de vieux sacs offerts par les habitants.
"Ouf, nous sommes enfin en sécurité!", lâche Mariam Mohamed, une Malienne de 50 ans, entourée d'une dizaine de femmes et d'une grappe d'enfants arrivés à dos d'ânes.
"Les rebelles tiraient à tue-tête comme des drogués et ce n'était guère rassurant", se souvient Agyachatou, une Malienne de 45 ans qui vivait près de Menaka, arrivée avec ses dix enfants.
"Débandade" des militaires
"Les derniers arrivants nous ont dit que les rebelles sont très fortement armés et ont positionné des armes lourdes sur les hauteurs d'Adramboucar", indique Seïni Abdoul-Hassane, jardinier malien de 32 ans. "Les autorités et les soldats ont fui".
Assis sur une natte avec quelques notables touareg, refugiés comme lui, le maire d'Adramboucar, Aroureïny Ag Hamatou, en boubou blanc et turban noir, raconte: "quand les rebelles sont venus, ils ont attaqué le camp militaire. Les militaires n'ont pas résisté et c'était la débandade".
Bilan de ce sauve-qui-peut: selon le chef du village de Chinégodar, Abdoulaye Mohamed, 18 militaires maliens arrivés de la zone de Menaka attendent d'être rapatriés vers Bamako. Une quarantaine de soldats et leurs familles ont déjà transité par Chinégodar et été acheminés par avion dans la capitale malienne.
Pour Mohamed Abdoulaye, 51 ans, il n'était plus possible de rester. "Les rebelles ont bombardé la mairie, le camp militaire, le camp de la gendarmerie et la douane, explique-t-il. Ils ont ensuite bourré les puits avec des chaises, des ordinateurs, des bouses de vache et avec tout ce qui leur tombait sous la main".
"La situation est catastrophique, il y a eu des dégâts énormes sur les infrastructures économiques et sociales", déplore le maire d'Adramboucar, qui souligne que sa ville "s'est vidée d'une grande partie de ses 34.000 habitants".
Le chef du village de Chinégodar appelle "le président (nigérien) Mahamadou Issoufou à renforcer le dispositif de sécurité" dans sa zone, jadis attaquée par les rebelles touareg du Niger.
Et l'exode n'en finit pas. Ahmad Issa, un jeune d'Adramboucar, arrive encore avec une douzaine de personnes. "Les rebelles ont demandé à la population de ne pas paniquer et de rester chez elle, mais les gens continuent de fuir".
Qaddafi’s Arms, Appropriated by Old Allies,
Reinvigorate Rebel Army in Mali
BAMAKO, Mali — In life, he delighted in fomenting insurgencies in the African nations to the south. And in death, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is doing it all over again.
Hundreds of Tuareg rebels, heavily armed courtesy of Colonel Qaddafi’s extensive arsenal, have stormed towns in Mali’s northern desert in recent weeks, in one of the most significant regional shock waves to emanate directly from the colonel’s fall.
After fighting for Colonel Qaddafi as he struggled to stay in power, the Tuaregs helped themselves to a considerable quantity of sophisticated weaponry before returning to Mali. When they got here, they reinvigorated a longstanding rebellion and blossomed into a major challenge for this impoverished desert nation, an important American ally against the regional Al Qaeda franchise.
The Tuaregs hoisted their rebel flag in the sandy northern towns, shelled military installations, announced the “liberation” of the area and shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” according to local officials. Their sudden strength has deeply surprised a Malian Army accustomed to fighting wispy turbaned fighters wielding only Kalashnikov rifles.
Months after the death of Colonel Qaddafi, his weapons have armed a rebel movement in Africa. In life he backed African insurgencies in Chad, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
And for this sparsely populated land, the recent fighting seems a step beyond the army’s desert skirmishes with the Tuaregs in the 1960s, the early 1990s and again in 2006. This time, the rebels are not being quickly stamped out or fleeing to the rocky mountains of this vast, inhospitable region. To the contrary, officials now say they are facing perhaps the most serious threat ever from the Tuaregs.
“Our goal is to liberate our lands from Malian occupation,” said Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, one of the rebel spokesmen in exile in France.
The rebels — perhaps as many as a 1,000, commanded by a former colonel in Libya’s army — brought with them enough of an arsenal to create a kind of standoff with the Malian Army.
“Heavy weapons,” said Mali’s foreign minister, Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga, referring to the rebels’ new arms. “Antitank weapons. Antiaircraft weapons.”
Malian military officials agree. “Robust, powerful machine guns,” said Lt. Col. Diarran Kone of the Defense Ministry. “Mortars,” he added, describing the weaponry as “significant enough to allow them to achieve their objectives.”
About a half-dozen towns in the north have been attacked, including Niafounké. Both government and rebel forces have suffered casualties, and nearly 10,000 civilians have fled the fighting, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Officials here make no secret of their shock at what one Western diplomat in Bamako, Mali’s capital, called the “robustness” of the rebel incursion.
“All of a sudden we found ourselves face to face with a thousand men, heavily armed,” said Mr. Maïga, the foreign minister. “The stability of the entire region could be under threat.”
The Malians, who viewed Colonel Qaddafi as a generous benefactor — he helped build a gleaming, retro-Moorish-style administrative complex here, among many other things — now find themselves gnashing their teeth over this less beneficent aspect of his legacy. Still, officials here insist that the situation in the north is under control, while acknowledging that the threat is not over.
Analysts who study the region agree that the latest Tuareg resurgence is something new, and that Colonel Qaddafi is largely responsible, posthumously.
“This is a fairly significant military force,” said Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg expert at the University of Paris. “The game has changed. They can directly attack the Malian Army. I think the army will have trouble.”
The new Tuareg campaign “shows a pretty serious military and logistical capability,” said Yvan Guichaoua, a Sahara expert at the University of East Anglia, in Britain. The Tuareg spokesmen are cagey about disclosing the precise dimensions of their arsenal, hinting only that they owe Colonel Qaddafi a good deal. “The Libyan crisis shook up the order of things,” Mr. Acharatoumane said. “A lot of our brothers have come back with weapons.”
In some ways, the aggressive new Tuareg campaign represents the kind of support the rebels had long sought from Colonel Qaddafi, who for years alternately aided and betrayed the desert warriors, according to a recent study by Mr. Boilley. After the great regional droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, young Tuaregs migrated north to the colonel’s military training camps, to later fight for him in places like Chad, while at the same time destabilizing the governments in Niger and Mali.
Libya, with its World Revolutionary Center, where the warlords Charles Taylor of Liberia and Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone were schooled in Colonel Qaddafi’s doctrines, became the regional matrix of instability.
The center’s mission was to “train volunteers in revolutionary warfare from all over the world,” according to a 1999 book by Stephen Ellis of the African Studies Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, in keeping with Colonel Qaddafi’s belligerent anti-Western posture. The Libyan training camps under the center’s auspices “became the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries,” Mr. Ellis wrote.
Mr. Taylor, who is awaiting a verdict after a trial on war crimes charges, recruited his first troops there, leading to years of chaos in Liberia, while Mr. Sankoh’s murderous brigades also had a Libyan genesis, in part.
Colonel Qaddafi backed independence movements all over Africa, including a coup attempt in Sudan in 1976, and he supported pariah governments the West shied away from, like the military junta in Gambia in 1994.
His most significant African venture was in Chad during the 1980s, when he backed a rebel group against the government, with an eye toward capturing a mineral-rich border area. His surrogates were defeated by Chad’s government in 1987, but Libyan troops did not leave the disputed border strip until 1994.
And yet — so Mr. Boilley writes — the closer-to-home Tuareg distrusted Colonel Qaddafi, whose rhetorical gestures on their behalf were rarely matched by material support.
Now, unwittingly, the picture is different. Outside a villa in Bamako recently, a dozen or more pro-government Tuaregs glumly contemplated the new order of things back home.
“When they came into Ménaka, they were yelling, ‘Allahu akbar.’ What does that mean? We don’t do that sort of thing when we fight,” said Bajan Ag Hamatou, a lawmaker from Ménaka, a town the rebels retook last week, according to the military.
His brother, Aroudeïny Ag Hamatou, the mayor of a small town outside Ménaka, said, “A lot of buildings were destroyed.”
Bajan Ag Hamatou angrily blamed the West for having created a mess in his backyard.
“The Westerners didn’t want Qaddafi, and they got rid of him, and they created problems for all of us,” he said. “When you chased Qaddafi out in that barbaric fashion, you created 10 more Qaddafis. The whole Saharo-Sahelian region has become unlivable.”
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