The underlying causes are still unclear but the facts are that on March 23, armed men dressed in traditional Dogon hunters’ clothing surrounded the Ogassagou village at dawn and commenced the destruction of the community. The village is home to a Fulani herding community near the town of Mopti in Central Mali. When the smoke cleared, more than 150 villagers had been killed, and the village had been burned to the ground.
Although, violence is not new to Mali, this outbreak was shocking to Malians and the international community including the United Nations (UN), being the first of its kind in terms of destruction and casualty rate since the all-out violence of 2012.
Indeed UN officials were already troubled about a perceived uptick in violence and a Security Council Mission was sent to discuss the increased violence of jihadist fighters in Central Mali with the Malian Prime Minister, Soumey Maiga, and to solidify details of a 2015 peace deal. After the raid, the UN then quickly dispatched a team of investigators to the Mopti region to probe what it described as a “horrific” attack.
Conflict between the Dogon ethnic group who are cultivators and hunters, and the Fulani who are a semi-nomadic herdsmen occurs regularly over access to land and water.
It is akin to the clashes between many communities and Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria’s North Central region and beyond. Last year in Mali, those clashes between Dogon hunters and Fulani herders claimed hundreds of lives.
But the Malian case seems more complicated when the issue of jihadists which inflames an already volatile relationship, is added to the equation. For instance, Reuters reported that it had been informed by a Mali-based al-Qaeda official that the jihadists had carried out an attack the previous week on a military base in which more than 20 Malian soldiers were killed in response to violence against Fulani herdsmen. One Ogossagou resident said Saturday’s raid appears to be in retaliation for the attack on the soldiers.
The Malian authorities are distinctly displeased with the performance of the forces. Reuters reported that the Army Chief of Staff Gen. M’Bemba Moussa Keita was replaced last Sunday by Gen. Abdoulaye Coulibaly while the Land Forces chief, Gen. Abdrahamane Baby, was replaced by Brig. Gen. Keba Jangare.
The UN investigative contingent would be expected to identify the perpetrators of the Ogossagou raid and apportion blames and perhaps recommend punishment for the killers. The Malian President Ibrahim Boubcar Keita ordered the disbandment of Dogon ‘self-defence’ group Dan Na Ambasagou.
But the government communiqué announcing the dissolution was silent on whether the group was to blame for the Ogossagou attack except an oblique reference that the organisation had departed from its initial objectives despite repeated warnings from local administrative authorities.
We commend the UN and its peace keeping mission, known as MINUSA, for the good work it has been doing in Mali since 2013. It is scary to imagine what would have been of the country without the intervention of France and the peace keeping by the UN. But the raid on Ogossagou has demonstrated that more efforts are needed. It is obvious that the Malian government is still too weak to take charge of security throughout the country and in that case the UN should boost its forces a little more to take care of conflict areas where ethnic conflicts are likely to erupt in the kind of raid which has occurred.
More crucially, we think the country needs internal peace and reconciliation committees all at the grassroots to counter the activities of jihadist elements whose stock-in-trade is war and destruction. It was wise for President Keita to dissolve the Dogon self-defence group. He should go ahead and do it all over the country for all the so-called self-defence forces.
Self-defence militias tend to reinforce and perpetuate conflicts and distrust. For a country to live in peace, a certain level of trust is imperative. It cannot come through armed protection which is indeed a symbol of distrust. Ethnic conflicts are an evil wind that blows no one any good.
It stalls progress and keeps a country in perpetual turmoil. A country like Mali needs peace more than anything else at this stage of its development after the turmoil of the last seven years. We hope the Ogassogou raid would be the last of such violence in Mali.