The shattered country
The Touareg, swimmers in the infinite.
Mohamed Ali ag Ataher Insar
Mohamed Ali ag Ataher Insar became chief of the Kel Intesar at the death of his father in 1926. At the beginning of the 20s two years after the defeat of the last great episode of the touareg armed resistance against the French in the Aïr (Algeria), he was involved in attempting to create a quality french language education system among the Touareg - seeing education as the greatest arm of resistance.
The project was blocked both by Touareg traditionalists & the French administration in Algeria although he managed to obtain support from the arab states that his graduates could go on to study in middle eastern universities.
Shortly before the creation of Mali & Niger in 1960 he went to Morocco. Suspected of having directed the violent touareg revolt of 1963 in the Adrar, he was extradited from Morocco & handed over to the authorities of Mali. He was imprisoned in Bamako from 1963 to 1977.
On coming out of prison, refusing all compromise with the state of Mali, he returned to his Moroccan exile. He died in Temara in july 1994.
This text was recorded in Touareg by Hélène Claudot-Hawad & Hawad at Temara in 1992.
A nation trampled & pillaged
In the beginning the Touareg formed a nation (tumast) which had its structure & a vision by which it continued its world. Then France arrived with its engineering. It tried to dominate them and they resisted until it broke them & enslaved them.
This was the situation when the time of the African so-called independences came, a colonisation which surpassed the first for the Touareg because this period - from around 1960 to the present - has reduced Africa to a corpse & in particular the Touareg world, seperated from the heritage that colonisation had taken away and that should have been handed back to each colonised people or nation. Even though it was a phase of colonisation, the comedy of 'liberation', France gave nothing back nor did it reimburse the Touareg for the invasion & the trampling of their nation, as it did with other peoples, but on the contrary the Touareg, after the comedy of independence, found themselves once again colonised & even more so than before.
The revolt of these last 2 years (1990 - 92) is only a small part of the rebirth of a people assassinated, exhausted & suffocating beneath a terrible weight. But this uprising has been up till now the affair of one part of the Touareg (imashaghen), while the other part, the majority of the Touareg, even if they continue to resist in silence, has not risen up. This uprising by which the exhausted Touareg drag themselves forward will lead them to the conquest of the rights (turagen) of their nation. It is difficult now for the Touareg to pull back. The nations of the world must know also that by their aid to the states that colonise us, those who have eaten away all our rights, they have transformed our prison and even our hunger & our thirst into a growing fortune for these states born on our back.
When I was in prison in Bamako I listened to the radio every evening & I often heard the announcements of foreign aid for Timbuktu. In all those years, I counted up to 11 billion, but I who was tortured in the prison of Bamako, each time that I fell ill & that I asked the government of Bamako for medecines I was chased away as if I was a dog. Obviously, we are not speaking of the poor of Timbuktu & especially not those in the desert : no foreign aid has got to them.
On the contrary, this aid has amplified the pillage of the state of Mali which they have to deal with every day & for which they have become the bait for world charity which fattens the armies & the good people who are physically & socially breaking us down. At the moment this is the situation. The state has become a tool for the massacre of the Touareg.
A single future, the resistance.
What is our society's future ? For me, nobody can know what his tomorrow will be. The only thing that I'm sure of & that I share with all my people, is that we Touareg, to the very last man, will never accept this colonisation & will not submit to it.
As long as our people are massacred, our resistance will not cease to find more strength and new breath to nourish this rockhard resistance. What future do we have except to resist, dying or living to continue our nation ?
On every side death & hatred encircles us, a whole order that is seeking only the exhaustion & the extermination of our people. There is nobody nor any country that will lift us above the facts that are strangling our life.
From this path of resistance that has become our essence, nothing will distract us nor hold us back. Let the whole world know that we, the Touareg, we are ready for nothing less than battle, to combat until the day of our victory or of our destruction, following the clear & worthy path of resistance.
With our fighters & our people who have taken refuge in exile in Mauritania & Algeria, there again we have remarked that Mauritania & Algeria wish only for our disappearance. But what the people in Nouakchott & Alger do not know is that we also prefer to die as resistants to defend our nation. To a life without dignity - dignity by which we will preserve our nation - to this life without soul, we prefer death in honour & in the path of resistance.
Death has struck us because of our nation, this death we want it and, for us, it is still a treasure which our fighters rush to.
My brothers & my children ask me : "Tomorrow if we liberate one or two sections of our territory, should we give up the struggle ?" No, no. Even if we tear from the occupier a piece of our land we will only give up the struggle when the Touareg nation is liberated. For me this combat or this resistance which is making us stagger is already a sun which is born in the night to illuminate all of our country.
The Touareg men & women who sell their nation's cause to Mali, Niger, Algeria or even Libya, these people who have broken their souls by betraying their nation for money, these sellouts will receive neither words nor looks from me & we wait for them to kill us today or tomorrow because we will not stop resisting for infinity.
To shelter our torn up nation, we are at the beginning, at the beginning of the liberation of our country. Wherever there is a Touareg, for me, there is a fragment of the Touareg nation's dismembered heart. And nothing can sew it back together except the blood & the bullets of its children, those who exercise the spirit of resistance, a resistance which never submits, a resistance like that of our ancestors.
France, who broke up our nation & our country, should know that neither money nor fire will ever persuade us to accept to be ruled by their new servants.
Today I am 95 years old and I am heaven's neighbour. And by heaven I swear that I and all the Touareg are determined to navigate the ills of our nation, to navigate until we manage to hold in our arms the rudder of our destinies & of our country.
Touareg, swim, swim until we reach our day & if we perish in the ocean of the liberation of our nation, then our resistance will be a lesson for the worlds to come.