File photo shows a group of French soldiers in Mali.
The Western media outlets have stirred a hype to depict the separatists in Mali as “Islamist extremists” in an attempt to facilitate the Western and French colonial agenda in the resource-rich African country, a political analyst says.
“Much of the Western media depiction of northern Mali maligns these people as ‘Islamist extremists’. Many of the Tuaregs are secular and many subscribe to the Islam faith. One of the Tuareg rebel groups, Ansar Dine, is more outwardly Islamic in its tenets and aims. But that doesn’t make them ‘Islamic extremists’, Finian Cunningham wrote in a Wednesday article at Press TV website.
“That depiction is more a self-serving Western political and media agenda to discredit and demonize what is a genuine political movement among the northern Malian people for regional autonomy from the despised Francophile regime in Bamako,” he added.
Cunningham argued that “the weirdly angular borders of Mali,” after its independence from France in 1960 is “a crude colonial construct imposed on a region” that relied on centuries of cultural and political traditions before the Europeans colonized that region.
“France needed a pretext to go into Mali for several self-serving geopolitical reasons, including asserting political control over its client regime in [the Malian capital] Bamako,” the article added.
To achieve that objective, Cunningham noted, France embarked on militarizing the political situation in Mali by sabotaging the ongoing negotiations between the Malian conflicting parties in an attempt to portray the country as an international security threat from “Islamic extremists.”
On January 11, France launched a war under the pretext of halting the advance of the fighters in Mali.
Chaos broke out in Mali after President Amadou Toumani Toure was toppled in a military coup on March 22, 2012. The coup leaders said they mounted the coup in response to the government’s inability to contain the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country, which had been going on for two months.
However, in the wake of the coup d’état, the Tuareg rebels took control of the entire northern desert region, but the Ansar Dine fighters then pushed them aside and took control of the region.
ASH/SS
