 It's been a historic week for the continent of Africa and for the world as a whole. French troops finally withdrew from Mali after years of protests, after so-called anti-terrorist operation which also ended up in the killing of a lot of civilians and after its credibility has completely been destroyed in the region. We'll be looking at all of this in this episode of Mapping Fault Lines. We are with us Praveer Pulkai sir. Praveer sir, last week we talked about Afghanistan and the failed NATO war there Looks like we are back to another failed NATO or at least NATO members operation this time in the north of Africa. So we see that like I said French troops have withdrawn from Mali. There has been a series of protests over the years, not just in Mali but also in its neighboring countries which are often known as the G5 countries, the Sahel region. French troops there from 2013 supposedly fighting against Islamist forces but very very unpopular. So could you maybe first take us through why the French troops first came in and more importantly why were they so unpopular and forced to withdraw in such a disgraceful way? Well you know there is an important question for us to understand about the region itself that this region was essentially Francophone Africa. So France in its colonial role might have withdrawn after the Algerian war and so on but essentially still continued in different ways and we have talked about it earlier that for instance the control still the finances of these countries the Francophone Africa has a number of countries which essentially the currency is controlled by the Reserve Bank of France, the Central Bank of France. So that being what it is, it means that France has had an overwhelming presence in spite of the fact it is no longer in colonial possession in that sense of these countries. Having said that this also is the consequence of the whole unraveling of this part of the world and we can come to it later from which is basically Libya and you know the Mali intervention took place, the official French troops reaching there took place when the Tuaregs who were really bodyguards and part of the Libyan army they after the fall of Benghazi and Tripoli they came over with arms which they had because a part of Gandhaf's forces they came over and started their campaign against the Mali government trying to take over a part of Mali and as you know the ethnic divisions in all of these parts of Africa as a consequence of how these colonial states were formed essentially sitting down in the late 19th century and marking things on a map that this was the consequence of the fall of Gaddafi and then it opened destabilized the whole region and essentially who gained out of it were a set of forces which at that point of time decided to align itself with the Isis Al Qaeda forces and that's because of what was happening in the Arab world that's where the Isis Al Qaeda had strengthened but these were local militias, the local groups which were fighting a lot of them came from some of these aspirations of breaking away from what originally the colonial state was forming their own identities and that's where you have this whole growth of these forces aligning itself with certain regional or certain other ethnic identity groups you know Africa whenever these things take place the West calls it tribal wars now when it takes place for instance in Europe we don't call it tribal wars for instance when you have the Basques who have been fighting for their identity both in France and in Spain of course we know the Spain was one much more we don't call it tribal wars but when it comes to Africa all ethnic identities are consumed under this notion of tribal wars so you call this tribal wars that takes place in Africa fits in very nicely with the colonial view of Africa itself so this is the unraveling of a lot of this post-colonial states and Francophone Africa, France really stayed if you take the number of military interventions that have taken place with French troops in Africa post the 50s when officially the French started leaving their colonies the numbers are very large and even today this is the reason why when you talk about the unpopularity of France it is because they are aligned to essentially post-colonial governments whose strings they still hold and essentially of course the first strings they still hold so this is the other part of it after all you know if you control the economy people don't see you as their friend if the economy starts doing badly the French influence is weakening in these places there is a lot more nationalist forces which have come which have been overthrown on occasions by France or supported by France in the overthrow of various governments over there but you can see the dwindling of its popularity or its credibility but what we also see is the replacement of that by the United States you are really looking at the growth of American presence in this region so as France weakens or withdraws that vacuum might be filled by United States with exactly the same purpose again that which forces to support internally which military factions to support which government president to support and you will see the continuation perhaps of autocracies this time backed by the United States more openly then by the French or a combination of the French and the United States because they are working really together in this region the Mali example of course is the fact that they have been as you said local massacres they have also been very unpopular because they have supported leaders who have been isolated from the masses and therefore there was a coup that took place the section of the military took over and they basically said you know French troops can you go that we will be much better off without you not that they are democrats either but the point is that this any outside force aligning with a local set of leaders does not earn credibility for the local leaders and they now have gone to the Wagner group for instance who they think will not play the same role or who do not have the same identity in the eyes of the people and this is ex-colonial power which is what France was I think this is the change that we are likely to see but let us not forget that it is two implications for the region which is the French weakening and the United States replacing them and the other part of it that what did the fall of Gaddafi what impact did it have in Africa as well as the Mediterranean because when Gaddafi talks about it he says if I go that these are the two regions which are going to be affected and what is said has actually come true Good thing you mentioned that Praveer because that is what I was coming to as well the fall of Gaddafi is really some kind of a trigger moment for conflicts that take place across the region you mentioned of course we are talking about the Sahel region but also to the east maybe also you went to the south in countries in Africa so why was this such an integral moment so to speak one of the things that people do not understand about Gaddafi that he had an enormous influence on the continent of Africa the reason for that was that he was seen as a nationalist figure that he was definitely an anti-colonial figure that he fought for African Union to be the major force in Africa and if there are any conflicts there African Union should be the one which should intervene and resolve it and at that point it is called the Organization of African Unity also Yes Name wise too Yes and there also it is again important that any institution in Africa has generally been funded by the colonial or ex-colonial or imperialist powers and they have therefore having bankrolled these organizations also controlled them this was an exception because Gaddafi used the fact that he had a lot of oil money he used it to essentially bring the African Union that as an independent power that it had its own bureaucracy it had its own institutional structure and it was not dependent on the west and Gaddafi's role therefore that anti-impealist or I will call it the non-aligned role the really the global south asserting itself this in Africa this was very important and Gaddafi played a key role because you see other countries and this is also interesting that all the other countries which threw up such leaders most of them went out in coups engineered by the United States and its allies the France and of course British In this region Thomas Sankara for instance in Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara then in Cruba in Ghana just a little below but this is very much there the figures who were really important was also in the non-aligned movement and Cruba was a very very important figure on that and of course Julius Niare and others were there who could not be displaced so easily but if you take the Francophone Africa this has been much more of an issue because Francophone Africa the France never really left so Gaddafi's fall was a re-emergence they thought of re-emergence of the kind of power they held in Africa and you can see it even today Africa Union is no longer the body it is it's not able to intervene in most of these issues that are coming up and that independent role of Africa Union is not there and actually Gaddafi had warned Tony Blair they had a phone conversation because the west wanted Gaddafi to go and they said why don't you resign hand over power and go and Gaddafi had said all the transcripts were there today because they were given to a parliamentary in a UK parliamentary committee so he said that you don't understand what's going to happen if I go what you're supporting over here are not just any group these are essentially allied to ISIS Al Qaeda forces and what you're going to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalist or sectarian groups over here it will impact Africa, northern Africa particularly but it will also affect the Mediterranean that's exactly what has happened after that of course Europe played a major role in this because it was led by France and Britain with the tacit implicit support of the United States but the front running forces were really France and UK if you remember when NATO intervened in Libya they imposed what they called a no-fly zone which is something that they have been trying to impose in other countries also but they have backed off given what the consequences have been in Libya and the United Nations Security Council realized particularly Russia and China this is a very dangerous thing so they gave the right essentially of the NATO forces to bomb whoever they wanted in Libya on the ground and then the special forces were also there who were not officially the army but really were the US, France and British special forces and they worked with the so-called sessionist groups or the groups which wanted to be free of Gaddafi and as you know the consequences of what happened Gaddafi was killed and of course the whole of Libya descended in anarchy the biggest consequence of this was the huge amount of money and arms and ammunition which then left Libya both for Southern Africa as we saw in Bali and other places but also for Syria if you remember there's a whole rat line which is well-attested which the United States and the ambassador was killed in Benghazi where he went he was actually supervising a lot of the arms transfer which was taking place and those arms all ended up with ISIS, Al-Qaeda, affiliates in Syria so this whole region was opened out to these kind of forces and Libya's fall was really one of the is in fact a very key event in this Rabbir you mentioned the military in another key country which is right now also seeing a rise in conflict is Somalia where recently we have seen two or three instances of attacks by Al-Shabaab militants who were associated reportedly associated with Al-Qaeda and of course Somalia another old playground for the United States and its allies they've brought a huge amount of suffering, military operations and yet we see that after all this time Al-Qaeda seems to be very active so what's happening there and how is it connected to the processes you're talking about both in Ethiopia and in Somalia the US has intervened on different sides at different points of time Somalia is a particularly important example because if you take General Wesley Clark's talk about books book that he wrote and also his television interviews he said seven countries are going to be dismantled essentially that there will be coups military operations that will take place and seven countries Iraq was of course the key one at that point of time but there are six others and Somalia and Libya are the two countries which also figure in that if we look at the map and you can see from the map that this really are the two sides of the Mediterranean so one is the Horn of Africa which is where Somalia is and the other is of course the gateway to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic so that's where Libya is so these are the two countries you don't understand the significance of all of this unless you look at the map that's why geo strategy becomes important geo politics becomes so important so Somalia was a target for them for that reason and it was strategically extremely important for them to control it and they thought that if it goes into hands like Islamic court council which was a lot of local groups which had established after the dissolution essentially of the Somalian state had got together and had established certain amount of jurisprudence within their boundaries and all of them had got together for the coalition government which represented supposedly these forces yes they were not shall we say on the Westminster pattern they had Islamic identities because they were enforcing in the absence of a central government they are enforcing therefore what they saw as a traditional law and as you know Somalia has a very large number of Muslims the majority of the country is that and therefore they sought their jurisprudence not in a colonial jurisprudence but in a traditional jurisprudence therefore the name Islam there are nothing to do with at that point with ISIS, Al Qaeda some sections may have been there but they were not very strong there are really small sections and Americans of course used Ethiopia the Tigray TPLF who was at that time a power in Ethiopia actually also brought into power by them by the US and other forces and they intervened militarily with Ethiopian forces to throw out this Islamic court government which was there which as I said was a coalition and having got rid of them they brought back the same warlords they fought earlier if you remember Black Hawk Down well they were fighting against a warlord the same bunch of warlords were brought back against the Islamic court regime that had come into being and the consequence has been US bombings US special operations over here number of people killed and no Somalian state for the last 10-15 years and it still continues so this is the consequence that what happened in Afghanistan at least the Taliban came to power what is happening now over here is nobody is in power so there are some towns which are controlled government in Somalia but they don't control the country and its consequences have been seen now in Kenya it's also in Ethiopia so the consequences of an unstable country or a country which has no central authority and also the Somali pirates have become famous because the fishing has been destroyed over there and it's destroyed by European and other countries fishing in Somalian waters so what you see as pirates are essentially X fishermen who can't fish anymore so all of this is again the consequence of the US finding enemies where they are not any and then converting those who are not its enemies into what they said are the people they are fighting so the relationship between Islamic fundamentalist forces which is what al-Shabaab has grown into what you also see developing in Mali also see developing in other parts of Central Africa all of this is really feeding into the anti-imperial anti-colonial instincts of the people and finding who has the guns and who therefore is the best to align with and I think these are the consequences that you are seeing how it can be resolved is well if African Union strengthens itself if the local forces can get together if the imperial colonial forces decide that they should lay lay their hands off these regions instead of doing what they are doing in Somalia the US has just recently bombed again other groups, other players and if we look at the map again you will see how many bombings they have carried out we don't know how many special operations on the ground they have carried out we do not know what CIA operations are there because they are supposed to be secret they are not reported at least the air operations we know at least some pictures are there again acknowledged and unacknowledged so if you see this Somalia and Libya the two classic examples where US intervention or imperial intervention exclolol interventions have destroyed these countries and more may follow unless, unless as I said the African countries get together and say can we get rid of you and let's see how we can solve our own problems thank you so much Rabir well it's not in vain that they say that may the US or in this case it's allies like France not take an interest in your country's democracy and security we will be covering many such issues in future episodes of mapping fault lines as well until then keep watching, just click