Bamako created a purely national dialogue body to try to make peace, the day after the announced end of the agreement concluded in 2015 with armed groups in the North, under international and Algerian mediation.
The Steering Committee for the Inter-Malian Dialogue for Peace “is responsible for the preparation and organization” of this dialogue, says the decree signed by the head of the junta, Colonel Assimi Goïta, and published Friday evening.
The creation of this committee concretizes the denunciation of the so-called Algiers peace agreement, signed in 2015 by the civilian government of the time with the predominantly Tuareg independence groups of the North. This agreement has long been considered a primary factor in stabilizing Mali, which has been caught in security turmoil since 2012.
Tension with Algeria
The junta formalized on Thursday the end of this agreement which had been moribund for months, in a climate of diplomatic tension with neighboring Algeria. After months of deterioration in relations with Bamako, the independence group’s signatories to the Algiers agreement resumed hostilities in 2023.
The formalization of the death of the Algiers agreement is another act of rupture on the part of the colonels who took power by force in 2020. They broke the alliance with France and its European partners, turned militarily and politically towards Russia, and pushed the UN mission (Minusma) out.
Sovereignty
They have made sovereignty their mantra and placed the end of the Algiers agreement under this banner. “Now there are more negotiations outside Bamako. In a video published Friday on social networks, we no longer go [… ] to a foreign country to talk about our problems,” said Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga.
The Permanent Strategic Framework, an alliance of armed groups who signed the 2015 agreement before taking up arms again, “takes note of the junta’s decision,” said the CSP in a press release. “This decision calls into question all (the) principles” of unity of Mali enshrined in the Algiers agreement, he said. It calls its components to “review and updates their respective objectives to face this new situation”.
