The French Basque guitarist-vocalist Manu Chao, and Damon Albarn, the front man of the British pop group Blur, had performed there in the following years, and prominent guests had included the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede, on a fashion shoot for Vogue, and Princess Caroline of Monaco, who had handed out prizes at the camel races in 2006. “Swords turn to guitars, democracy blooms, and music helps bring a sense of national unity,” wrote Tom Freston, the founder of MTV, in Vanity Fair, of his 2007 trip to Essakane with Jimmy Buffett and Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. “The festival has been vital in bringing foreigners [to northern Mali], with its irresistible invitation to three days of Saharan magic, world music, and cross-cultural community—the only place in the world where Robert Plant can share a bill with West African griots [traveling poets, singers, and storytellers] and Tuareg bluesmen,” noted James Truman in a lengthy piece on Malian music in Condé Nast Traveler in 2008.
Yet both Condé Nast writers were so swept up in the romance of this “African Woodstock” that they had missed signs of growing danger. Tuareg clan intermediaries had warned Ansar that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb militants regarded the festival as an abomination, a “Sodom and Gomorrah” that would have to be expunged. “You invite nonbelievers to your festival, who drink alcohol and commit sins in our dunes,” they told him through clan elders, forcing Ansar to increase security at the event and watch his own back. Freston’s piece in Vanity Fair contained just one cautionary note, which barely registered at the time. “Manny [Ansar] congratulates us on our bravery for defying the recent U.S. State Department travel advisory warning U.S. citizens to stay away from the festival,” he wrote. “Needless to say, we know nothing about this.” Freston made light of reports of “banditry, factional rivalry, and carjackings” in this “lawless area.” It sounded, he joked, exactly like Los Angeles.
In 2010, the wave of kidnappings carried out in the Sahara by AQIM had obliged Ansar to relocate the Festival in the Desert to Timbuktu, where, he believed, Malian security forces could better protect it. The kidnappings-murder of the four Westerners inside Timbuktu now exposed the total inadequacy of their measures. Nevertheless, the musical stars were lining up again. For the sixth time in a decade, the featured performers would be Tinariwen, the Tuareg practitioners of the desert blues, who had gained an impassioned following around the world and the imprimatur of some of the West’s most influential music critics. Other stars who had committed were Vieux Farka Touré, the thirty-one-year-old son of the late Ali Farka Touré, who had died of cancer in 2006; and Oumou Sangaré, described by Freston in Vanity Fair as “Mali’s most popular female singer and its greatest advocate for women’s rights—a true diva.” And Ansar was holding discussions with one of the world’s most recognizable musicians and celebrities: Bono. The lead singer of U2 and peripatetic human rights activist was considering making a twenty-four-hour visit to the festival after inspecting a Millennium Village antipoverty project near the river town of Ségou with Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Bono was the latest in a long line of Western rock stars who had become entranced by the music of Mali, in particular the desert blues of Tinariwen.
Still clinging to the hope that he could reverse Mali’s sagging fortunes as a tourist destination, President Touré promised Ansar that he would send in tanks and hundreds of troops, including members of his Presidential Guard, to secure the festival. “The entire état-major of the Malian military will be in Timbuktu, the minister of defense, all the top military chiefs,” he assured the promoter. He begged Ansar not to cancel. “There will be more security in Timbuktu than in Bamako.”
On Thursday, January 12, 2012, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb threatened via the Internet to kill the two French geologists it had seized in Hombori in November, and the three European tourists it had grabbed in Timbuktu the next day. The group announced that it was preparing for “military operations” against the Malian state and warned the hostages’ home countries—France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden—not to intervene or else invite the deaths of its captured citizens. Bono’s private jet landed at Timbuktu airport at eight o’clock Friday evening. Ansar, both dreading and thrilled by Bono’s visit, found the musician relaxing on a sofa in an onboard salon with his wife and friends, including Renzo Rosso, the founder and owner of Diesel, the designer jeans line. A music video was playing, and the group was in a convivial mood. Dressed in black, eyes shielded behind his blue-tinted glasses, Bono asked Ansar whether he thought that Timbuktu was safe. Ansar, disconcerted by the contrast between the dust, poverty, and violence of Timbuktu and the cocoon of privilege, wealth, and celebrity that he had just entered, stammered that he believed it was.
President Touré deployed armored vehicles and troops on the perimeter of the concert. Three thousand people, including two hundred foreigners, and Malians from across the country—men, women, and children, Tuaregs in traditional dress, Bamako and Mopti professionals in Western clothing—gathered in fifty-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, bundled in jackets and vests. Bono was escorted to a VIP box for the evening’s concert. The star and his entourage, guarded by a dozen troops, spent the night at the Hôtel La Maison, a French-owned villa in Timbuktu’s Sankoré quarter. The next day he took a hike alone past the military perimeter and into the dunes, while Ansar—his escort for the twenty-four-hour visit—waited in high anxiety.
On the festival’s last evening, Saturday, January 14, Bono climbed onto the stage to perform with Tinariwen. “The concert had been going on for an hour when projectors lit up the crowd and a clamor erupted. Bono, the leader of U2 and guest star, had arrived,” reported an article in Jeune Afrique. “Dressed in black, jerking to his left, then to his right, the Irishman raised his hand and shouted, ‘We are all brothers here!’ This unleashed a wave of hysteria from young girls who tried to climb onto the stage, without success. His four bodyguards watched over him, as did military security.”
Bono improvised with the Tuareg band, trying out a few French phrases, dancing with the Tinariwen singers and guitarists. “Music is stronger than war,” he declared, before boarding his jet and flying back to Bamako.
Four days later, Iyad Ag Ghali led a coalition of heavily armed fighters on a bloody sweep across the north. At dawn on January 18, they attacked a remote army camp at Aguelhok and besieged the troops until the government forces ran out of ammunition. Ghali and his men overran the compound, took ninety soldiers prisoner, manacled them, lined them up in two rows, and executed them by cutting their throats or shooting a single bullet into each man’s head at point-blank range. “It was us or them,” he told a Bamako journalist in a satellite phone conversation from an undisclosed location in the desert. The French accused Ghali’s men of committing an “Al Qaeda–style” atrocity. Days later they encircled an American-built military base called Tessalit, a few dozen miles south, and prevented convoys from reaching those inside. Food and water ran short. At the Malian government’s request, U.S. planes dropped emergency rations to the beleaguered Malian troops and their families, but the camp fell in the middle of March after a six-week siege. Witnesses described a panicked flight, and the abandoning of mortars, rocket launchers, and tanks.
Enraged by the massacre at Aguelhok and the humiliating retreat from the base at Tessalit, soldiers rioted on March 21, 2012, at an old military compound outside Bamako. They stole weapons from the armory and marched toward the hilltop presidential palace, which was lightly protected at the time, because most of the elite presidential guard had been dispatched to the north to fight the rebel army. Amadou Toumani Touré and his wife slipped out of the marble-walled villa in the darkness, walked down a steep trail through the brush to a waiting vehicle, and disappeared into the night. Mutinous soldiers rampaged through the palace, stealing TVs, bed linens, wall hangings, and electrical fixtures, then looted shops in Bamako. The new ruling military council was led by a U.S.-trained captain, Amadou Sanagou, remembered by former U.S. Defense Attaché Marshall Mantiply as a
n unprepossessing figure who had often joined fellow officers at Mantiply’s home in Bamako on weekends, watching soccer matches on his television. The military body dissolved Mali’s constitution and democratic institutions, imposed a curfew, and closed the borders. The army was “putting an end to the incompetent regime of Amadou Toumani Touré,” a spokesman declared. Touré took refuge at the embassy of Senegal, and flew to asylum in Dakar.
To some extent the collapse had been beyond Touré’s control: he could not have foreseen the Arab Spring and the NATO bombing that led to the toppling of Qaddafi, nor the looting of Libya’s arms depots that would give the Tuareg rebels and their radical Islamist allies the wherewithal to defeat the Malian army. But he had ignored pleadings by Western ambassadors and his own generals to supply and strengthen his army and move decisively against the jihadis, and he had scurried away like a hunted animal into the night.
The jihadis, meanwhile, seemed unstoppable. Eight months earlier Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which answered, like its counterpart in the Maghreb, to Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, had captured Zinjibar, the capital of Yemen’s Abyan Province, and declared it the twenty-first century’s first caliphate. It was the initial step in Al Qaeda’s goal of sweeping away Muslim and Arab secular regimes and replacing them with a pan-Islamic fundamentalist state. Further emboldened by their victories in Mali, the radicals would pursue this goal with increasing aggressiveness. The triumph in Mali would inspire, at least in part, the seizure of much of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State between 2013 and 2015.
The endgame in Mali had begun. Demoralized troops abandoned their bases. Iyad Ag Ghali and his jihadis captured Kidal on March 26. They overran Gao, the north’s largest city and onetime capital of the medieval Songhai Empire, two hundred miles downriver from Timbuktu, on March 30. At the same time that the jihadis were marching on Gao, secular Tuareg fighters advanced through the desert, and made camp forty-two miles north of Timbuktu. The director of Timbuktu’s most popular radio station, Radio Communal Bouctou, a sixty-seven-year-old elder who was a respected member of Timbuktu’s majority Sorhai tribe, took the initiative to form a committee comprised of spokespeople for the city’s main ethnic groups. They charged themselves with making face-to-face contact with these Tuareg rebels to plead with them not to take the city by force.
The Sorhai elder, joined by a representative of the Bellas—lower-caste black speakers of Tamasheq who had served as slaves to the higher Tuareg castes during precolonial times—and a spokesperson for the Peuls, traditionally pastoralists along the Niger River, left the city at sunset on Friday, March 30. Darkness fell quickly, and soon they were enveloped by the black desert night broken only by the phosphorescent glare of their headlights. They drove for an hour, making nervous conversation. Three miles from the rebel position, they called their contact on his satellite phone. “Turn off your headlights,” he ordered. The delegation groped their way forward on a track illuminated only by the stars, and found a gathering of rebels and four SUVs parked around a wool blanket in the sand.
The three spokesmen shook hands with the rebel group, and at the commander’s grunted invitation sat down on the tattered blanket. The night was so dark that the Timbuktu representatives could not see “five feet” beyond this intimate gathering, the radio director recalled; there might have been an entire army lurking behind them. The rebels’ cigarettes formed tiny pinpricks of orange light, and cast a glow upon the men’s features—haggard after months of camping in the desert. They stared at one another in silence. The station director asked the commander to spare Timbuktu.
“I cannot,” he answered. “We are ready to take Timbuktu tonight.”
“Just give us the time to prepare the population for your arrival.”
“How much time do you want?” he asked.
“Two weeks.”
“We will give you until Thursday.”
The committee members shook hands with the commander and his men, climbed into their vehicle, and drove back through the night. The next morning, the radio man announced on air that Timbuktu’s residents had been given another six days. But the rebels were already on the move.
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Abdel Kader Haidara had watched the advance of the Tuareg secular rebels and their jihadi partners with relative calm. He believed that the latest uprising would be concentrated in the northeast of Mali, several hundred miles from Timbuktu, like the other full-scale rebellions and minor insurrections he had lived through in the previous twenty years. He wasn’t especially worried, and he barely discussed with friends and colleagues the attacks on government army bases that were taking place in remote corners of the desert; the rebellion seemed far away. In March 2012, he traveled with a small group of fellow librarians and conservationists to a provincial town in neighboring Burkina Faso to assist a government library with a manuscript digitization project. On the drive home, they learned that Mali’s military had declared a coup d’état and sealed the country’s borders. Haidara and his team spent another week stuck in Burkina Faso. At last, during the last week in March, the frontier opened, and they drove to Bamako.
Arriving in the capital, Haidara grasped for the first time the gravity of what was happening—the collapse of the government army, the speed of the rebel advance. He spent one night in Bamako, and then decided that he had to go home. “Abdel Kader, you mustn’t go now. It’s dangerous,” friends and colleagues advised him. Haidara shrugged off the warnings. Heading north with a driver in his SUV, he spent the first night out of Bamako with friends in Sévaré, a town on the Niger River, halfway between Bamako and Timbuktu, and the site of the region’s only airport.
“Don’t go to Timbuktu,” his hosts begged him.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have things to do there, and if I’m not there, I won’t be at ease. Even if there’s a war going on, I need to be there with my family.”
Haidara departed at dawn with his driver. Four hours into the trip, they encountered heavy traffic coming from the north. People were on the run. A long caravan of vans, trucks, small cars, all-terrain vehicles, minibuses, coaches, motorcycles, and jeeps snaked along the rutted highway, with many people traveling on foot, all enveloped in a cacophony of honking horns, revving engines, and screeching brakes. Soldiers, teachers, clerks, librarians, traders, housewives, market women, children, most of the population of Timbuktu, it seemed, hung from the windows of overheated cars and buses, clung to the backs of motorcycles, balanced on the bus roofs with bundles of clothing, bulging suitcases, mattresses, duffel bags, footlockers, cardboard boxes. It was a seemingly endless flight of humanity enveloped in a cloud of dust, diesel exhaust, and desperation, all anxious to escape the rebel takeover.
For the first time, the horror of what was happening in his hometown struck Haidara. Yet he had already come this far, and it felt too late to turn back. As he continued traveling north, the flow of panicked people continued. Refugees on the roadside advised him to turn around. The paved road soon surrendered to a red-earth track that wound past geological oddities—saw-toothed mesas, fingerlike pillars of red sandstone rising sharply between sloping buttes. Then the track disintegrated further into two shallow grooves through the sand. Haidara rode on for a hundred miles past a sea of thorn trees, shallow depressions, and dried riverbeds, until he crossed a wide, barren slope and arrived at last at the Niger River.
Tuareg secular rebels had taken Timbuktu that morning, driving into town in eighty vehicles flying the separatist tricolor—green, red, and black, with a yellow triangle at the hoist—and the ferries had stopped running. Haidara searched the barren mud bank until he found a pirogue for hire to cross the wide waterway, and said farewell to his driver. They motored at a steady pace for about twenty minutes on a wide diagonal course across the Niger. The yellow-sand north bank, with its rolling dunes and clumps of low bushes, grew ever closer, until clusters of mud huts and palm trees appeared, and they moored the boat in the small port of Korioumé, eleven miles sou
thwest of Timbuktu. A friend picked him up in a battered Mercedes. On the stretch of highway to Timbuktu, which ran past rice fields irrigated by the Niger, Tuaregs in fatigues, armed with Kalashnikovs, seemed to be waiting behind every tree. The insurgents searched the car, ripped open bags, and interrogated them a dozen times.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Bamako.”
“Where is your own vehicle?”
“I left it on the other side.”
A hot gust of wind blew sand across the asphalt road as Haidara and his companion passed through the southern entrance gate to Timbuktu—two eight-foot-high square pillars constructed of small blocks of limestone. Gunfire rang out, some of it unnervingly close. They advanced cautiously into town. The flag of Azawad, the independent homeland that the Tuaregs had dreamed of, now hung from the City Hall, the governor’s headquarters, and the district courthouse. In the vacuum left behind by the fleeing police and army, looters, including some Tuareg rebels, were rampaging across the city, breaking into houses, shops, and government offices, and grabbing everything they could. Haidara was stopped and frisked, and the car was searched at more Tuareg rebel checkpoints. Haidara’s friend dropped him off at his home in the Bella Farandja neighborhood, on the eastern edge of the city, bordered by the desert. They wished each other good luck.
Behind the twelve-foot-high walls of his compound, in the stone courtyard, he was reunited with his wife and their five children. Several nieces and nephews and three household employees were also lodging at the Haidara home. The shooting continued through the night and into the next day, making it all but impossible to sleep. At last the gunfire died down, and he ventured into the main marketplace and Timbuktu’s government district. He walked past looted shops, the gutted City Hall, and other administration buildings that had been trashed—their doors removed, documents scattered, windows smashed in.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 13