Freeze frame
Schizophrenia
Introduction
Freeze frame
The Nigerian government recently declared that 'in a situation where all possibilities of expression are accorded to Nigerians, individually & collectively, there is no need to take up arms to make oneself heard' (Le Républicain, 21/4/94). But it was in this very country that, on the 24th of September 1994 in Agadez, the army threw two grenades into the crowd at a concert organised by the UDPS-Amana party whose members are primarily Touareg. This political party represents the current favourable to negociated solutions to the Touareg problem. It is neither outlawed nor underground, although its candidates were prevented, by being arrested, from presenting themselves at the last election. The bill for the police's intervention came to 6 dead and 38 wounded.
During the same period, on the Malian side, from the 7th to the 20th of September 1994, parachutists helped by the Gandakoy, a militia that they had armed & trained, massacred hundreds of civilians, notably women & children, in Gourma, between Rharous & Douentza. The job was continued in October with the elimination of the inhabitants of a Touareg village to the north of Gao in reprisals that even the prime minister of Mali, M Keita, described as a 'pogrom'. A clear case of 'ethnic cleansing' according to the Association for Refugees & Victims of the Repression of the Azawad. However, apart from a few articles in non-profit magazines, a petition launched in June 1994 by the Belgian Support Group for Indigenous Peoples and the propositions presented to the European Parliament by the French Greens & the European Socialists, none of the attacks on civilians that have taken place since 1990 have been mediatised. Why the silence ? And why particularly in the French press, even more silent on this question than the Malian or Nigerian press ?
Nobody will deny that the facts that define a situation in a given time & place are never related totally objectively. However, one can usually, by looking at the different points of view, attempt to make an opinion of the 'realities' described. But what to think when none of the points of view match & that the disparity is so great that one could even wonder if the same events are being talked about ?
Information concerning the Touareg leads to a real schizophrenia of language. For example, on the subject of the situation on the Malian side, in the Touareg regions of the river, an abyss exists between the weak but persistent voice of the people on the ground (Touareg, humanitarian associations, doctors) and, on the other hand, the powerful & omnipresent official voices of the media. In letters & communiqués that have remained, despite their efforts, unpublicised, the people on the ground have denounced the execution in the last few years by the army and the Gandakoy militias of several hundred innocent people, producing their names, ages, professions. On the other hand the medias have never mentioned the pogroms, some evoke abstractly the 'ill treatment', without figures, saying that it started as 'self-defense', which gives a whole other meaning to the events (in this framework the damage due to the military & the paramilitary militias are often grouped with those due to armed groups of Touareg or Maures).