Translated "Avante!" article by Angelo Alves, Member of the PCP Political Committee
Mali is being targeted by imperialist foreign military intervention. France, its Air Force and Foreign Legion are the most visible aspect of an intervention, which involves several other NATO powers - such as Germany and the USA. War is presented to the Mali authorities as an “aid”, in order to fight organizations that spread terror and impose the Shari in the North of the country, or , in other words, another “war against terrorism”. In fact, all far from the truth.
Several Islamic radical organizations, with liaisons with the CIA and the Gulf’s monarchies, involving African countries’ intelligence, have been in action in North Mali for a long time, using pro-independence movements undergone by the Tuaregs, originally lay and secular, holding a recent military and political expression - the ANLM - Azwad ( the North of Mali region) National Liberation Movement , which recently “converted” to Islamism, allying to its organizations and ultimately was crushed. An undeniable fact, and proving, that those who are currently considered terrorists within Mali, are the same who were the former “ liberating rebels” and France’s allies during the Libya aggression war and considered to be the Syrian “ democratic opposition”.
Therefore, it is necessary to confront Mali’s reality in order to understand what is behind the imperialist military intervention. First of all, understand that France , an old colonial power in Mali, always attempted, by all means, to hold political and economic control over its old colonies. And all was done to hold that power: supporting dictatorships, which power lies on generalized corruption and all kinds of trafficking, namely narco-traffic and human beings, as former president Touré ’s clan,later overthrown upon a military coup, led by Pentagon officials; a direct military intervention, as proved by the more than sixty interventions France unleashed against its former colonies, upon decolonization processes; or, the imposing of IMF structural adjustment programmes, which, as in Mali, only served to handover the most varied economy sectors unto multinational companies ( mining, textiles, and then communications and electricity).and obstruct the building of Mali’s state, both the economic and social structure and sovereignty and military authority.
Therefore, within the capitalism crisis deepening, the inter-imperialist contradictions intensifying and the growing Chinese presence, within the African continent economic reality, Mali, a former French colony, as the whole Sahel-Sahara region, acquires a fundamental strategic importance for imperialism.
On Mali’s case, it regards a country twice France’s dimension, holding a millionaire natural resources abundance, a determinant strategic position, regarding raw materials, namely energetic, and situated within a region where, for example, huge plans are being developed round the use of solar energy. Whilst considering its population, namely in the North, sunk in the worst of poverty, Mali is at the same time , a country with the world’s greatest uranium reserves, one of the continent’s great gold exporters and rich in gas and oil. These are the Mali’s military intervention’s motives, as the motives for other wars and projects - as the AFRICOM - within the African continent.
And why currently? As many state, both the so-called “ Arab Spring” orchestration and the Libya intervention, ought to have provoked a wave of destabilization all over the North Africa and Sahel-Sahara region and , as previewed, would have contributed for the strengthening of the terrorists movements. But such events, as reality shows, do not raise by chance, they are part of imperialism strategy and of capitalism violent reaction unto its own crisis.