Azawad: from Joder Pasha and Faidherbe to Al Qaeda the new imperialism

According to Algeria¹, the infiltration of Jihaddists from Libya into Azawad (Northern Mali) has been financed by key Western allies, namely Qatar and Morocco, benefiting from the pointless military coup of a US puppet general last year, which led to the independence of Azawad, soon captured by the internationalist fundamentalist forces of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (West), originally the Salafist Front. Ironically now France and the USA have launched a military intervention against the very forces deployed by their dearly allies. 

Morocco has got since independence diffuse claims on Mali (it also used to claim West Sahara, Mauritania and large swathes of Algeria). The imperialist rationale behind it comes from the colonial expedition of Joder Pasha (also Judar, Yuder), a Castilian renegade (originally Diego de Guevara, born in Andalusia) arguably nicknamed on his favorite swearword: "joder" (fuck), who, after purchasing some cannons to England, launched a trans-Saharan campaign against the Songhai Empire... and won. Sadly for the Moroccan imperialists the profits of this colonial enterprise in search of the fabled gold of Sudan, parallel in all to European trans-Oceanic one, were little and gradually the Moroccan rule over Azawad vanished.

But the autocrats of Morocco, reveling as they do on history, myth and tradition, as well as an all-pervading police state, probably still dream with exerting their influence across the Ocean of Sand. In any case, the two aforementioned dictators, along with Saudi Arabia and others of their ilk, have for long financed Islamist Fascist terrorist forces in the hope of reaping some benefits and keep at bay the ghost of rationalism that would destroy their golden thrones of vanity and greed. 

This policy is of course supported in general terms by their Western allies, notably the USA, France and Britain, as well as Israel, who only see opportunities for military meddling in this sock-puppeteering farcical game.

This was most obvious in Afghanistan, where the farce of Al Qaeda and the criminal inside job of the 9-11 attacks, provided a pretext for US and NATO intervention in Central Asia, a key region of the international chessboard. For some time now the USA has sought to consolidate their presence in Africa, the only continent that holds no US bases... yet. The Mali war is probably such engineered opportunity and France is playing their role as good major ally with a consolidated presence in the region. 

So far many West Africans, unconscious, cheer French intervention. Even in Azawad itself the many people already offended by the Islamo-Fascist tyranny, that has forced women to wear veil, stumped hands, leashed backs, cut heads off and destroyed venerated shrines, will welcome anything... really. 

The very Tuareg activists of the Azawad National Liberation Movement (MLNA) almost do. They wow to fight against the Islamists who they could not contain much less defeat for lack of decent weapons (they have always said: give us weapons that we will take care of the fundamentalists ourselves and gladly so). However they want a comprehensive agreement with Mali that ends a war that has lasted for too long. 

But what Tuaregs and Songhai want is not too important for Mali, much less for any of the geostrategical players involved: France, the USA, Morocco and Qatar (at least). They probably do not even truly want to conquer Azawad at all, a most challenging endeavor without doubt, what they want is a pretext to consolidate their influence and military presence in the region. 

So the Azawadis (and by extension other West Africans probably) have a very rough ride ahead while the masters of puppet Islamo-Fascism laugh in their golden palaces.

PS- And who was Faidherbe, you may ask? Why, of course... the founder of the French colonial empire in West Africa, who conquered Kayes to the Toucouleur Empire, allied with the dominant ethnicity of modern and historical Mali: the Bambara. In a sense he can be considered the founder of modern Mali and also of the ongoing bombings by French airplanes of the millenarian cities of the Niger Bend.

¹ Correction: I first said wrongly that the source was the MLNA. It is the Algerian government in fact (taken from Basque newspaper Gara, printed edition).  

France and the African Union oppose Azawad's independence

New state: Azawad

The actors are different but the reasons are the same: both France (and its satellite Spain) and the artificial post-colonial African states fear that the status quo of these unnatural states imposed on the reality of ethnicities and often also on the true will of the affected peoples will spread like an epidemic of sorts causing the collapse of the old world order. 

There are many other cases I can think of but this problem specially affects Southwestern Europe, which is still to enjoy the benefits of national self-determination as Central and Eastern Europe and even Ireland could achieve in the 20th century, and Africa, where states are in most cases nothing but capriciously drawn colonial administrative divisions.

North Africa faces the issue of the Berber minorities, demanding independence or at least greater autonomy in Algeria and Morocco specially, where they are more numerous, but the situation is totally dramatic south of the Sahara, where almost not a single polity approaches the modern concept of nation-state.

This issue has triggered long and/or bloody separatist wars by areas and ethnicities which find themselves disadvantaged in the states assigned, often dividing them in several arbitrary portions. Some of the most notable secessionist struggles have been:

• Casamance (vs. Senegal)
• Biafra (vs. Nigeria)
• Katanga (vs. Congo/Zaire)
• South Sudan (vs. Sudan, suceeded)
• Darfur (vs. Sudan)
• Eritrea (vs. Ethiopia, succeeded)
• Somalis in Ethiopia (vs. Ethiopia)
• Tuaregs (vs. Mali, Niger and Algeria)

There are also other cases  in which a territory has been more or less arbitrarily assigned to a neighboring country against the will of the people, even if the case of distinct ethnicity is not so clear. This is the case of West Sahara, whose military annexation to Morocco is mostly rejected, and of Somaliland, whose incorporation to Somalia was challenged more recently and has declared its independence unilaterally as well. 

And the dissatisfaction with the post-colonial political arrangements does not just manifest in secessionism and the occasional religious conflict but also in civil wars and other internal conflicts, which often run across ethnic lines. 

In fact it is scientifically demonstrated that ethnicities which have been divided as result of border-drawing suffer the most from all kind of conflicts, at least in Africa (though I'd dare say this applies to all). 

In brief: the Jacobin neocolonial regimes organized by the former colonial power, France, in the Francophonie and in general all the regimes produced by the scramble of Africa 130 years ago (and the unfinished decolonization of 50-60 years ago), associated in the African Union, fight and will fight by all means at their reach against the right of self-determination of the peoples in Africa as in Europe. 

However reality is gradually overriding their Jacobin dictates. Eventually, it is inevitable that the artificial borders are redrawn by the peoples themselves.

New sovereign state: Azawad

The Tuareg rebels from Northern Mali, who, following the stupidest coup ever (US-supported, of course), captured (or liberated) Timbuktu, Gao and other cities, have stopped military operations and proclaimed the independence of Azawad. 

It is almost the first Berber state since ancient times (with the occasional exception like the Rif Republic in the 1920s), although it also includes other ethnic groups besides Tuaregs, notably Songhai, the also nomadic Fulani, some Arab-speaking Moors and some presence of southern ethnicities like the Bozo and Mandinka.  

Approx. borders of the new state (tan) with mention of some ethnicities