As military operations in Mali escalate, the customary calls by aid workers and humanitarian groups for the protection of civilians and for all parties to respect international humanitarian law have been made. As so often before, the warnings typically go unheeded as protracted and deadly military interventions have become the standard operating procedure in countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya, exacerbating already fragile humanitarian situations with additional casualties and widespread displacement.
The intensifying war in Mali, combined with the effects of a major drought across much of the country, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in search of safety and relief. The insecurity has added to the difficulty for international aid groups and agencies responding to the growing crisis. The United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) had planned to aid 1.2 million people in Mali this year, but halted its food distribution networks in the northern part of the country following the outbreak of violence. The WFP says it will resume its programs “as soon as the security situation allows.”
The spike in violence and dangers for civilians is also likely to have a regional impact. If the fighting continues, says Handicap International, a group that had been distributing food in Mali until it suspended its operations on Jan. 9, 2013, “it may lead to further population displacements to neighboring countries such as Burkina Faso and Niger.”
This should not come as a surprise given that much of the violence in Mali has its roots in the 2011 toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Even before that regime had completely collapsed, large numbers of weapons began finding their way out of Libya and into Mali and other countries across North Africa. The surge of weapons refortified the native Tuareg fighters’ position in the northern parts of Mali and also benefited a number of armed groups in the region, including al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). (It has been reported that AQIM took advantage of Qaddafi’s wavering power by importing arms from Libya as early as March 2011.)
Over the last ten months, Mali has endured a military coup d’état, regional food insecurity, a weak transitional government, a separatist uprising, and an occupation of the country’s northern half by armed groups. And the response by France and its allies, as so often before, is essentially all in military terms. Meanwhile, only a tiny percentage (about 2 percent) of the $370 million in humanitarian support earmarked for the region by the UN has been received by the aid groups who requested it.
In response to the military intervention supported by UN Security Council Resolution 2085 to take back northern Mali from “terrorist, extremist and armed groups,” Amnesty International cautioned that “indiscriminate attacks, arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial executions, and the use of child soldiers by both sides, could become even more widespread.” Is a predominantly military-centric response the right one in Mali? We will have to wait and see. But, as so often before, it is the civilian population that suffers most while we wait to find out.