The splits in the armed resistance
Introduction
The splits in the armed resistance
The ishumar (trained in Libya) fighters have declaimed the stages of the resistance in singing of the love & the nostalgia for their country & nation, the intense desire to rebuild them, the hardness of exile, the suffering of having to leave the old, the women & the children behind in the grips of 'the domination which wounds the soul', the heroic image of the modern warrior mounted on a Toyota and armed with a Kalachnikov ... But in these poems, is also expressed with insistence a painful opposition between, on the one hand, the desire to 'build the nation & the country' &, on the other hand, the fact of the current division between the armed fronts & the individual rivalities : 'you dont get on between yourselves' is a frequently proffered reproach.
The exterior observers, faithful to the dichotomy between hereditary system and the political system, have isolated two main causes for these divisions : tribal disorder and the contradictory meeting of two incompatible projects for their society (one, hierarchic & aristocratic, anchored in the independent past, the other, egalitarian & democratic, open to western modernity).
On the other hand, the statements of those involved indicate the influence of other protagonists : the States, showing how important their intervention has been in remoulding the original goal of the struggle and dividing the resistance movement.
In fact, far from being spontaneous or conjuctural, the project of revolution appears to have been clear for a long time. From around 1975 a secret network of resistance was created across the whole Touareg country. In the '80s the military enrolment increased, recruits from Niger, Mali & the Upper Volta went to be trained in Libya. When it came out of secrecy, the network, now visible, became an important political stake for the different States which sought to block this movement or to direct it to their advantage.
From 1981, Libya brought the idea of the liberation of a cross-frontier Touareg land into question & imposed a seperation between Touareg of Niger & Touareg of Mali. In 1983 a new current emerged which claimed to have Algerian support on condition of breaking ties with Libya. As it happened the majority of the political leaders of the West who were in Libya were Ifoghas. It is from there that the anti-Ifogha campaign dates, launched by Algeria. According to the classic xenophobe arguments, the Ifoghas are treated as 'foreigners' who have come from Morocco, and are accused of trying to link up to the Touareg rebellion in order to take a country that isnt theirs. The rallying cry of 'all against the Ifoghas' would metamorphose some years later into a new clash borrowed this time from the framework of the class struggle : the oppostion between lords & tributaries. The other groups of nobles of the Adagh, that's to say the Idnan and the Taghat Mellet, were forced to withdraw from the dissident front organised around 2 criteria : the fact of belonging to the social category of the imghad (tributaries) and the desire to inverse the hierarchy. 'Death to the aristocrats' became the new slogan covering a much more complex Touareg reality. The members of the other social groups of the old hierarchical order : artisans, religious people, slaves, freedmen ...., engaged in the struggle for the 'nation' in which they felt a part, would no longer find a place in this dualist schema. Chaos settled in, for the greater good of the States.
The 'proletarian' thesis was diffused by the educated, an easy target for the States which trained them and widely used them as channels for their power. Inactive & powerless in the military confrontation, they arrived on the political scene thanks to the agreements, translating the revendications of the armed fronts into a language acceptable to the States.
Certain conceptual inventions were then promoted : any terms which indicated the existence of a Touareg entity, such as the widest name of imajaghen - which means the 'Touareg', whatever their social standing, and the 'nobles' - were amputated of meaning that would get in the way of the States politics. The language became the only recognised shared trait of the Touareg, from whence came the extraordinary campaign for the launching of the name used in the West of Kel tamashaq , meaning 'Touareg speakers', to be the only authorised term for them. Other notions were created on schemas particulalry fruitful for the 'modern' political sensibility, that's to say Western, opposing people & aristocrats, democrats & feudalism, progressists & reactionaries : thus in 1993 emerged the concept of tamaghada , 'the fact of being a tributary', which became the opposite of temujagha or ellelu, whose meaning was reduced simply to 'the fact of being a noble'.
The political semantics thus in full growth, not only guided by the States but also by ethnologists & Western experts under contract who became the active propagandists of the established order.
Worked at by the political logic of the States, unanimous in seeking to eradicate all danger of Touareg independance, and at the same time, caught up in the rivalries between States, the Touareg resistance suffered enormous pressures. To logistics & material of persuasion (arms, vehicles, money) were added the various ideological manipulations which sought to divide the Touareg according to the diverse criteria of belonging to a State, a tribe, a hierarchy, a race or by opposing the elite of the educated to the other who remained 'primitive'.
Fluctuating between relationships of collaboration - to protect themselves from the Touareg danger - and rivality for control, the most active States such as Libya, ALgeria, France & Mauritania each modelled their 'rebel' candidates. Mali & Niger armed militias for so-called 'self-defense' (Songhay in Mali & Arab in Niger), stoking racial hatred, while the medias widely reported the xenophobic black african ideas which proposed the extermination of 'whites' (including the Touaregs), who are intrinsically bad as opposed to the 'Blacks' who carry the only 'positive genes' of humanity.
These massive political interferences, strong & corruptive of the States contributed to destructure even more an already fragile social terrain. The result of it was the rapid transformation of the war chiefs into mercenaries, the splitting of the movements of struggle due more to individual interests than political projects, the abandon of the original project of the liberation of the Touareg people, which would have led to demands for independence, the break between the aspirations of the fighters and those of the educated who negotiated agreements that were never applied, the absence of credibility and moral authority of the 'chiefs', the unpunished massacre of civilians by the military amidst general indifference, the rupture between the people & the armed fronts. But as one of the fighters said : 'the people has still not had its say' and, although stripped, exhausted, decimated by the raids of the army & the militias, swept by misery & hunger, chased from their country, locked in exile, on their knees, he thinks, more than ever, that justice will have to be given one day.