When religion is just a façade. Bandits of the worst kind. That's what these terrorists are who continue to hound often unarmed citizens. Religion is just a façade that hides their true activity - blackmail, drugs trafficking and murder. And they are the worst enemies of the true Muslim culture. These truths have never been as evident as with the events now unfolding in Mali and surrounding area, where Europeans have their responsibility too.
Marc Pierini from Carnegie Europe has said: “Groups which systematically practise hostage-taking to receive ransoms or to kill them, and who impose their law through whipping, rape and amputation, are terrorists.” Replying to questions from Philippe Regnier (Le Soir), Pierini said that radical Islamist groups are probably “number a few thousand, divided into several very fluctuating and very mobile organisations (…) In the Sahel - due to its geographical configuration, low population density and tradition of various kinds of trafficking - determined and well-armed mobile forces are enough to create centres of power. And for the first time radical Islamist movements have been able to seize a whole country - Mali” (our translation).
An ancient and glorious civilisation. Nevertheless, those who have brute force use it in the opposite sense of the Muslim civilisation. The journalist from the daily newspaper Le Monde, Véronique Mortaigne, has a deep knowledge of the wealth and history of civilisation in Mali. It has incredibly beautiful mosques and mausoleums made from clay and sand. The three great mosques in Timbuktu have been listed as Unesco world heritage sites since 1998. One of them (Sankore) houses the Koranic University - the centre for spreading Islam in Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Timbuktu harbours nearly 200,000 ancient manuscripts - one from the 16th century is a body of treatises on medicine, trade, land law and principles of governance. The inventory of Mali's artistic and historic wealth includes music too - a heritage of songs to the glory of Mohammed is part of this. It is this cultural heritage that the radical Salafists are in the process of destroying.
Is “official” Mali trustworthy? In the political arena, one important element has, as far as I know, been neglected by the EU, through political opportunism or through ignorance. I'm talking about how solid the official government of Mali is, and how much it can be trusted. cording to the New York Times, the United States worked hard on the Sahel dossier a few years ago, spending up to half a billion dollars in an anti-terrorist strategy - until the relevant American authorities noticed last year that part of the Malian troops they had trained and equipped had changed over - lock, stock and barrel - to the rebel camp which has seized the north of the country.
Questions to the EU. In the face of the situation described above, fundamental questions beg answers from Europe. One wonders whether the war started by France and now supported by most of the member states and beyond does not risk being prolonged along the lines of the Afghanistan model. It can be noted that the participants on the ground must, despite their reluctance at the start, become more and more engaged. International cooperation, under the EU or NATO, is inescapable because no country on its own concurrently holds transport and refuelling planes, attack helicopters, drones and information satellites. The EU countries which have these are generally ready to provide them, but in several cases - one thinks immediately of Germany - they explicitly exclude their participation in the conflict. And after the experience of Afghanistan, one can understand the timidity of the USA in Mali.
The second question concerns EU relations with the Maghreb countries. Europe is not calling for the Salafists and other fanatic Muslims to be banned, but for them to be prevented from acting violently against those who do not agree with them, and for the freedom of other religions and especially the freedom of women to be guaranteed - see, in this edition of EUROPE, the report on the meeting between the European Commission and the Arab Maghreb Union, where questions of security were raised. In fact, these countries do not represent a whole - differences and even conflicts between them persist.
The third series of problems concerns the Arabs living in the EU and the security issues resulting from this. This column will come back to this with reasonably optimistic considerations.
(FR/transl.fl)