Bamako: Top members of Tuareg-led Malian rebel group MNLA ditched on Friday a week-old pact with al-Qaeda-linked Islamists to turn the country’s north into an Islamic state, saying it contravened their secular values, media reported on Friday.
According to reports, however one representative of the Islamist group, Ansar Dine, told Reuters that the accord was irrevocable and brushed off their rejection as “the view of a few individuals”.
The West African country has been in chaos since separatist MNLA, which wants an independent state it calls Azawad, seized the desert north in early April with the backing of Ansar Dine, whose goal is to impose sharia, Islamic law, across all Mali.
The confusion both in the north and the southern capital Bamako, still recovering from a March 22 military coup, has prompted fears of the emergence of a new “rogue state” acting as a safe haven for terror activity.
“The political wing, the executive wing of the MNLA, faced with the intransigence of Ansar Dine on applying sharia in Azawad and in line with its resolutely secular stance, denounce the accord with this organisation and declare all its dispositions null and void,” said a statement issued by Hama Ag Mahmoud, a senior MNLA political figure.
The emailed statement said it was issued in the name of the MNLA as a whole but it was not immediately possible to verify whether this was now the official stance of the rebel group. The deal was also denounced in a separate statement by Magdi Ag Bohada, another senior member of its political wing.
In an open letter posted on Berber website Tamazgha.fr, the MNLA’s communication director Mossa Ag Attaher acknowledged “a growing malaise” in the ranks of the group linked to a feud between its French-speaking and Arab-speaking factions.
While Attaher did not elaborate, the linguistic split could partly reflect divisions between those rebels who have remained in the former French colony and those who were based in Libya until the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
“The application of sharia and the Arabisation of our people is a grave violation of our culture and identity,” he said of a region in which nomadic Tuaregs have co-existed with other ethnic groups and where moderate Islam is widely practised.
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