The Touareg 'question'
Introduction
The Touareg "question'
Helene Claudot-Hawad
Hélène Claudot-Hawad is an ethnologist , researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and member of the Institut de recherches et d'études sur le monde arabe et musulman in Aix en Provence, France.
In May 1990, in Niger, a clash at the police station of Tchin Tabaraden and the murderous military repression which followed served to detonate the armed insurrection of the Touareg. The fire spread rapidly over the border to Mali. This armed uprising across neighbouring states was widely covered in the media & brought the ''Touareg question'' to the public eye.
The development of the revolt prompted, on both sides of the Niger-Mali border, a series of punitive military expeditions, then paramilitary militias who didn't so much attack the rebels, often untraceable, but any civilian with light skin. After 5 years of fighting the costs have been high. There are thousands of victims & those who have been able to escape the pogroms, thirst & the exhaustion of walking through the desert have sought shelter in refugee camps installed at the borders with Algeria, Mauritania or Burkina Faso. Some manage to slip into neighbouring countries & settle at the edges of big towns. The worst hit zone is definitely the loop of the Niger, on both shores of the river, where the nomads have practically all been chased away or killed. The exiled population is in the hundreds of thousands, equivalent or surpassing in some zones the number of Touaregs still in the country. The agreements concluded from 1991 to 1995 between representants of the armed fronts & the governments give the exiled the hope of being able to return to their homes & to be able to live in dignity. But despite the agreements signed, several attempted returns ended in violence, bringing the exiles back to the unhealthy border camps, or leaving them abandoned in a state of complete poverty.
Touareg specificity
From the very beginning of the incidents, the specificity of the Touareg became a fashionable theme & was systematically opposed, by the commentators, to the universality of republican modernity which the states previously colonised by France embodied. Having become the preferred key to explain the violent events, the 'exception touarègue' was formulated with the aid of arguments belonging to a variety of concepts - from the political domain to social, psychological, economic & racial 'realities'. The polemical & racist treatement of the question of this irritating minority in different states was blown up in the press & often reached verbal extremities difficult to accept.
If, for the rebels, injustice is the reason for the uprising, the States prefered to see in the events the manifestion of the anarchy & disorder which are supposedly the nomad character. This reductionist explanation shows the authorities' incomprehension & refusal of dialogue. On the political level, the idea that the Touareg - far from forming a community or a people - are just disparate tribes without any relation between them became the central argument for the authorities to disqualify the demands of the rebels for federalism & autonomy. This negation of Touareg unease is however contradicted by the practice of the saharo-sahelien states, since their beginnings, of being very careful to keep their respective minorities in the territorial logic of exclusion & differentiation. This is shown by the multiple measures taken in the different countries to interrupt the circulation of men & goods in the Touareg area, divided, in the 60s, between Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali and the former Haut Volta, now known as Burkina Faso.
In fact the Touareg represent a case that the State-nation-territory model has great difficulty in dealing with. On the one hand, by showing their feeling of belonging to a particular community, defined by specific traits, they raise the problem of the nation in the nation, of the community as intermediary between individuals & the central authority. On the other hand, this collective identity is accompanied by a nomadic lifestyle in a specific, cross-frontier zone. This territory is demanded, not only as the place of belonging, but also with the goal of giving it back its role of bridge between the North & South shores of the Sahara and not to block it, as is the case now, in the roles of enclosure, seperation & isolation.
In other words, the Touareg, simply by their existence, offer a perfect alternative to the legitimacy of the State conceived of as a closed, homogenous entity excluding the other. They embody in this sense the transgression of the established order which, stuck in its centralising logic, has finally only one interest : that they should disappear, whether politically, culturally or physically.
From the academic side, the thesis of 'the invention of a people' rejoins the aforementioned position of the authorities which, applying the dogmas inherited from the French Revolution to the letter, refuse categorically all form & all expression of communitarism.
Because they are demanding the right to existence for their community, the Touareg have seen their role criticised & interpreted as being the last breath of the world of customs as opposed to the world of laws, of tradition against reason, of individual interest against universal rights, of a people against the State.
Are a people's rights really incompatible with human rights, as the narrow Jacobin vision would have us believe, denying all community outside the State or stigmatising it as a backward & old-fashioned social structure ? Can there not be a balance between the two extremes resulting in social peace ? Can a democracy, without becoming undemocratic, deny the request for recognition of identity as a perception that people have of themselves and of the characteristics that define them as human beings' ?
That is one of the essential questions that, amongst others, the touareg question invites us to reflect on.