Attachments
In my capacity as Coordinator of the Panel of Experts on Mali, I have the honour to transmit herewith, in accordance with paragraph 4 of Security Council resolution 2432 (2018), the midterm report on the work of the Panel.
The report was provided to the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2374 (2017) concerning Mali on 23 January 2019 and was considered by the Committee on 7 February 2019.
I would be grateful if the present letter and the report could be brought to the attention of the members of the Security Council and issued as a document of the Council.
(Signed) Ruben de Koning
Coordinator
Panel of Experts established pursuant to resolution 2374 (2017) on Mali
(Signed) Aurélien Llorca
Expert
(Signed) Albert Barume Kwokwo
Expert
(Signed) Carolina Reyes Aragón
Expert
Midterm report of the Panel of Experts on Mali
Summary
Following the re-election of the President, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in August 2018, the Government of Mali has embarked on ambitious political and institutional reforms, including a constitutional review and elections at various levels, all of which are part of the road map of March 2018 on the implementation of the Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation in Mali. Meanwhile, a precarious situation prevails in the central and northern parts of the country, where security sector reforms have just started to take shape.
Public consultations to inform territorial and administrative restructuring, which were needed before the legislative, regional and local elections scheduled for 2019, were violently obstructed in Gao in November 2018. Two armed groups associated with the Platform coalition of armed groups, namely the Coordination des mouvements et fronts patriotiques de résistance I and the Mouvement arabe de l’Azawad (MAA-Platform), and a splinter group, the Coordination des mouvements et fronts patriotiques de résistance II, deployed around 80 armed elements and pickup trucks in Gao to object to the Government’s draft law including a proposed restructuring, which they felt had been introduced without prior consultation and which they considered to favour Tuaregs. Consequently, consultations that were supposed to end by December 2018 remain incomplete.
Progress on the security and defence side is modest and has been complicated owing to opposition from the Coordination des mouvements de l’Azawad (CMA) at the end of November 2018 to allow splinter groups to be integrated into the army through the mixed units of the Operational Coordination Mechanism in Kidal. CMA has argued that this was not clearly agreed between parties beforehand. However, the backtracking of CMA on its earlier commitment to contribute heavy weapons to the Mechanism constitutes a clear obstruction of the implementation of the Agreement and has rendered the Mechanism vulnerable. In Timbuktu, alleged terrorists targeted and killed two high-profile individuals who had been integrated into the Mechanism.
The complicity of compliant armed groups with terrorist armed groups and their involvement in organized crime continue to pose threats to the implementation of the Agreement. Mohamed Ousmane Ag Mohamedoune (MLi.003), leader of the Coalition du peuple de l’Azawad, uses the former qadi (judge) of Timbuktu during the time of the Islamist caliphate, Houka Houka Ag Alhousseini, to expand his influence west of Timbuktu. Despite being officially employed as a teacher by the Government, Ag Alhousseini maintains close links with Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (QDe.159).
In addition to the trafficking of narcotics, the trafficking of otherwise licit goods, such as cigarettes and fuel, provides financial resources to criminal gangs, as well as to (compliant) armed groups, mostly through illicit taxes and fees for escort services. A series of targeted claimed and unclaimed terrorist attacks against customs and border officers along illicit trade corridors in neighbouring countries, in particular in eastern Burkina Faso, are likely to be linked to international trafficking networks.
Mali and its neighbours the Niger and Burkina Faso are experiencing a similar growing and worrying trend of intercommunity cycles of violence, which terrorist groups and trafficking networks are feeding on to exacerbate the resentment of local communities against States and their agendas. Equally worrying is the recurrence of retaliatory attacks against Fulani communities labelled as terrorists or as accomplices to terrorist groups.