Clash between rival Muslim groups leaves 13 dead

Fighting between rival Sunnite and Shiite Muslim villagers in Western Mali over the construction of a new mosque left 13 people dead and about 20 wounded last week, police and court sources said. The incident, which may also have been related to a land dispute, took place on 25 August in the mainly Sunni village of Yerere, 18 km from the town of Nioro du Sahel, close to the Mauritanian border, 540 km west of the capital Bamako, they said. Fghting broke out when a group of individuals armed with guns and knives attacked workers who were building the first ever Sunni mosque in Yerere. The village already had seven Shiite mosques. The sources said police subsequently arrested about 20 people, including four who are suspected of having masterminded the attack. The conflict had been brewing since 1995 when the chief of the mainly Shiite village refused to grant a plot of land to the Sunnites who wanted to build a mosque in Yerere. This prompted a prominent member of the local Sunnite community to offer a plot of his own land for the mosque instead. Despite objections from the village chief, the government approved its construction in 1996, but construction work only began in May this year following the death of the chief. Last Monday "Around 10 am when the construction workers were getting ready to make some concrete, a crowd of well-armed individuals attacked the construction site where they shot some of the workers at point blank range....the manhunt continued into the individual homes where two Sunnite women were shot dead at close range,", a police source told IRIN at the weekend. Aly Maiga, a member of parliament, said that the Yerere killings may well have had more to do with a land dispute than with religious differences. In the last three years, there have been several cases of land disputes with religious and ethnic overtones leading to outbreaks of serious violence. In 2000, tribal fighting over a land dispute led to the death of 29 people in Tenenkou, 600km north of Bamako. And at least five people were killed last year at Ansongo near the northern border with Algeria as the result of another land dispute. Both incidents broke out after the parties involved refused to abide by court orders. Maiga warned that Mali's judicial system has sometimes been guilty of fueling land disputes by reviving cases that had already been settled by customary law. Mali fought a rebellion by the Tuaregs - a light-skinned nomadic people with strong links to the Arab world who mainly live in the desert north of the country- from 1989 to 1996. The Tuaregs accused the government in Bamako of neglect. However, this former French colony of 12 million people, has been at peace since then and is now widely regarded as a model of democracy in Africa.