The plight of three very poor countries

These countries are absolute losers by every metric: literacy (below half even among the young); GDP per capita (less than $100 a month); health (life expectancy around 60 years, compared to low 80s in every major developed country except the United States.) They also account for over half of all terrorism-related deaths in the world.

It’s three landlocked countries stuck together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in the Sahel, the part of the Sahara that didn’t completely dry out when the rest of it suddenly turned into open desert about 5,000 years ago. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso: to be born there, for the vast majority, is to be born poor.

They rarely make the news, because poverty is not news. When they do feature, it’s usually because of military coups, like the three that brought young military officers to power in Mali in 2021, in Burkina Faso in 2022, and in Niger in 2023. But nobody cared — not even Ecowas, the Economic Community of West African States, which is supposed to defend democracy.

Eighty million people in three penniless countries, all ruled by ambitious and overconfident young military officers whose skills rarely extend beyond small-unit tactics. Moreover, all three countries have Islamist armed groups that seek absolute power, and ethnic minorities that feel oppressed. What could possibly go wrong?

They have already been down the road of getting foreign powers to prop them up. At first it was troops from France, the former colonial ruler, but they were all expelled. Then for a while it was a cat’s cradle of military missions from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States, most of which were also eventually thrown out.

Now it is mercenaries from what Moscow calls the Africa Corps (Afrikanskiy Korpus), originally known as the Wagner Group: 2,500 Russian contractors in Mali and around 300 each in Niger and Burkina Faso. The latter two groups are mostly serving as bodyguards to the military juntas that rule those countries, but in Mali they are in combat — and doing badly.

Last week the Russians in Mali were hit by two groups at once: the ethnic Tuareg separatists who are fighting for the independence of Azawad (northern Mali), and the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), the local affiliate of al-Qaeda. Their alliance is probably temporary, but it has almost overwhelmed the junta that claims to be in charge.

According to the Russian defence ministry, its mercenaries defeated a Western-backed coup and gallantly defended the northern city of Kidal from JNIM’s fighters for a full day and night “while completely surrounded and vastly outnumbered” before withdrawing with honour. If Michael Caine had been available, they could have re-shot the film Zulu with real guns.

The Malian junta, the Russians’ paymasters, tell a different story. They say that the governor of Kidal warned the Russians an attack was on the way three days before it happened, but the mercenaries just used the time to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from the city. Discretion is the better part of valour, certainly, but that’s not what the Malians were paying for.

The rebel offensive also killed both the defence minister and the head of military intelligence, and it is likely that most of the country’s north will now become a no-go area for the regime. The Tuareg separatists will concentrate on persuading their fellow-tribesmen in Niger to rise in rebellion, while the JNIM will try to create a mini-Islamic State in other parts of the North.

JNIM has now set up checkpoints on all the roads into Bamako, the capital, a city of three million people. The collapse could come more quickly than expected: The French newspaper Le Monde suggests that Mali is on the brink of becoming “a kind of African Afghanistan.” So what should be done about this looming crisis?

Nothing, preferably. This is a region doomed to suffer greatly in the next few generations, and foreign military intervention will only intensify the suffering. Humanitarian aid, yes, of course, but it’s a bottomless pit.

Professional “strategists” can find plausible reasons (for a fee) why almost any patch of ground on the planet is “strategically important,” but even they struggle when the Sahel comes up. It’s not on the road to anywhere else, its resources are minimal, its internal conflicts are huge, and the desperate poverty is rocket fuel for Islamist extremists.

Parts of the Sahel are still viable — Senegal and northern Nigeria, for example — but the heart of the region is a lost cause. In Mali and Niger, literally half the population is under 15.

Enough said.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.