Globalization’s final frontier

Krista Kapralos

Mali may be the boondocks of backwaters, but foreigners interested in oil, drugs, land, terrorists and souls are clamoring for a piece of it.

SEGOU, Mali —Usually, nothing much changes in this dust-choked West African city.

Families live in mud-built huts along the Niger River, where fishermen in paddle-powered boats cast nets for catfish and carp. The weekly market announces itself by sending out a pungent stench, from pile after pile of cured fish. Most of the traffic amounts to donkeys pulling precarious cart loads of millet and sheep; Men use switches, prods, and clubs, to spur the beasts forward. Segou is Mali’s second-largest city, but life here is stuck, in many ways, in a pre-modern era.

That’s why people here were flummoxed when, three years ago, Libyan leader Moammer Gadafi built a sleek concrete mosque large enough to hold 10,000 people near the city center.

In a region known among adventure travelers for towering mud mosques built generations ago, Gadafi’s mosque is like a gaudy costume necklace set in an antique jewelry box. But many Malians are delighted.

“It’s so beautiful that when I go inside, I’m inspired to be a better Muslim,” says Baaba Traore, 67. In a city perpetually coated with dust and goat dung, the mosque, protected by tall walls, is a clean oasis. The imam is chauffeured in a luxury car – a rare reminder for Malians that there is a world of riches beyond their rural fields.

This sweltering, desperately poor country appears to be one of the world’s most forgotten places. It’s a landlocked African wild west hemmed in by Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania; a place so slow that a sandy lane passes as a national highway and the boys herding goats beside it wave ecstatically whenever a car passes. Many drivers — strung out from the long desert slog — prefer to push through the night rather than staying in the seedy roadside inns that serve up young prostitutes as cheaply as mugs of millet beer.

Even in Bamako, the capital city, Mali is thoroughly under-developed. Raw sewage courses through open ditches. It wasn’t until recently that the first ATM’s appeared, and even now they’re only connected to a network so small that it renders them useless to many foreigners. Herders, dressed in long robes with indigo turbans piled high atop their heads, move sheep and goats straight through the city’s heart.

But call it a sign of how small the world has become, or how pervasive globalization has spread, but here in the boondocks of backwaters, diverse interests from around the world have begun to seep in. Oil-craving world leaders are searching the Sahara for signs of oil riches deep in the earth. U.S. soldiers wander through Mali’s river port cities each evening after teaching Malian forces how to fight terrorists and rebels who threaten to take over the country’s lawless northern region. And Gadafi, fueled by his desire to become the godfather of the continent, is lavishing mosques, money and aid on the Malian government.

This isn’t the first time that West Africa has garnered outside attention. It was a major attraction for European explorers in the Victorian era, who coveted exclusive entrée into Timbuktu, the fabled desert city they believed was built from gold. When they finally cracked the cultural code of desert travel and reached the city in the early 1800s, they found it dilapidated and desolate — a far cry from the golden oasis they hoped for. Colonial rulers came and went, leaving Malians to clean up the mess left behind in a nation that, these days, is consistently among the five poorest countries in the world. Most people live on little more than a dollar a day. Fewer than a quarter of all Malian adults can read or write, according to the World Bank. The country is desperately poor and a crossroads to little more than cattle herds and tourists racing to experience one of the last areas still untouched by modernity.

In an era when the winning of hearts and minds is a central goal for U.S. leaders, the question of who curries the most favor in places like Muslim-majority Mali could determine whether the nation is a friend or foe in the fight against terrorists and despots.

Up for grabs

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez brokered a deal in September with the Malian government to probe beneath Mali’s sand dunes for “black gold,” according to an official announcement of the deal. Chavez also plans to build houses, start a microfinance program and develop agriculture along the Niger River — a project he suggested the Russian government might support.

It’s not clear whether Chavez has begun any of those projects, but some experts worry that his real interest in Mali is of a more sinister nature. A Boeing cargo plane that analysts believe had been stuffed with cocaine crashed in an isolated area of Mali in early November. The plane had originated in Colombia, but had stopped in Venezuela — where lawless regions are pocked with secret runways that slice through the jungle canopy — on its way to Africa.

There’s no question that drugs shipped through Venezuela are connected to Chavez, says Douglas Farah, a national security consultant and senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Venezuelan authorities restrict outside monitoring of flights originating there, so it’s impossible to know exactly how many planes move between there and West Africa. But based on flights recorded to have moved through international air space, the number has grown dramatically over the past two years, Farah says.

“It used to be almost nothing, but now it’s a thick black line from Venezuela toward West Africa,” he says.

Northern Mali is a smuggler’s paradise: few cities and vast stretches of isolated desert. Tuareg traders who push their camel caravans from salt mines in the north to port cities just beyond the Sahara’s reach still navigate the desert by eyeing the stars. It’s difficult to police the trading routes, which weave between the desert’s dunes. Smugglers have long trafficked in cigarettes, but now they’re carrying more valuable loads of narcotics to Europe through North Africa’s least-policed dirt roads, Farah says.

The Malian government has, numerous times, fought to quell rebellious Tuaregs fighting for independence in the north, some of whom had been backed by Gadafi. Those conflicts have calmed, but now terrorists operate in the region, using those isolated trading byways to transport drugs, weapons and hostages, according to experts who testified at a U.S. Congressional hearing on the issue in November 2009.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, an off-shoot of a terrorist group that once operated primarily in Algeria, has claimed responsibility for a growing number of violent acts, including the death of a British tourist captured in Mali in early 2009.

“Up until 9/11, West Africa was basically forgotten by security people,” says William Miles, a Northeastern University professor who specializes in West African issues. “It was seen as a backwater, but not a threat. After 9/11, there was a feeling that these are Muslim areas, these are uncontrolled areas. Might they become a haven for terrorists?”

U.S. officials created the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership in 2005, replacing the similar Pan-Sahel Initiative, to train Malian soldiers to “thwart extremist threats,” says Kenneth Fidler, a Germany-based spokesman for United States Africa Command.

The number of U.S. troops in Mali fluctuates based on requests from the Malian government, Fidler says. He would not give an estimated number of U.S. troops currently working there.

“It is always our intent to maintain the smallest footprint possible when engaging with our African partners,” he says

Although AQIM is growing stronger, it’s unlikely that their threat warrants the attention U.S. officials have granted it, says David Gutelius, who was among the experts who testified before Congress in November.

“The U.S. saw the label of al Qaida and reacted and assumed there was this new branch of al Qaida on Africa’s doorstep,” he says. “The reality is much more complex.”

AQIM is a ragtag group that doesn’t hold much credibility in the larger terrorist network, Gutelius says. The group’s interests are more centered on regional issues in North Africa than in staging an offensive against the west.

The same is true for Gadafi, the Libyan leader, Miles says.

Libya was removed from the official U.S. list of terrorist nations in 2007, four years after Gadafi had formally renounced terrorism and had agreed to dismantle weapons of mass destruction. U.S. officials hoped that had marked the end of Gadafi’s rogue days. He invaded Chad in the 1970s and 1980s, only to be beaten back by French troops.

Gadafi’s forays into neighboring countries are gentler now, yet they’re anything but discrete.

Bamako is a sprawling collection of squat concrete and cinderblock buildings, but a new Hotel Libya, reputed to be the only five-star hotel in the city, towers high over men fishing from hand-carved boats in the river. Countless flatbed trucks, all labeled in Chinese, rumble into OiLibya gas stations. Signs for “Malibya,” Gadafi’s agricultural investment organization, are plastered on billboards throughout the country. Malibya recently leased about 250,000 acres of prime farmland from the Malian government along the Niger River. That’s about two percent of the country’s arable land, based on a Central Intelligence Agency geography analysis. Malibya is building a vast office complex in Bamako, labeled with the company name on all sides. Critics worry that the Malian government will parcel out the country’s best farmland, leaving little for Malian farmers.

In Segou, Gadafi preemptively soothed land-grab fears when he built the giant mosque, but his ultimate goal for investing in Mali isn’t yet clear.

“Gadafi has always thought of himself as the patron of all Africa, especially northern areas,” says Miles, the Northeastern professor. “But it’s impossible to guess what the ‘dear leader’ is thinking when he offers gifts to his neighbors.”

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Source: http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/100124/globalization%E2%80%99s-final-frontier
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Source: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/mali/100124/globalization%E2%80%99s-final-frontier
Photo: http://www.globalpost.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/medium/photos/21/mali_mud_mosque.jpg