Gendarmerie vows to block destabilisation of Mali

Burkina Faso’s gendarmerie commander, Colonel Mamadou Traore, warned on Saturday that his command would not allow any group to destabilise neighbouring Mali.

“We want to ensure our Malian brothers that our territory cannot be used to undermine the stability there,” he told reporters in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou.

Traore is the chief of staff of the gendarmerie, a paramilitary unit in charge of security across the nation. His statement came two days after gendarmes arrested Allassane Ould Mohamed, the leader of the Tuaregs, at a former refugee camp in Djibo Mentao, 200 km north of Ouagadougou. Mohamed’s arrest was announced on Saturday. His wife told IRIN that her husband had been arrested because of an interview he gave to the international media earlier in the week.

On 20 August, Mohamed said that some 2,000 Tuaregs had been abandoned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since the official repatriation of Tuareg refugees ended in 1997. Mohamed demanded that the UNHCR and the Mali government provide the former refugees US $3 million for their return home otherwise they would “take action”. He said the Tuaregs were not prepared to go back as beggars.

“The Malian Embassy in Ouagadougou was embarrassed by Mohamed’s declaration and really took his threats seriously,” an official at the Burkina Faso Minister of Security told IRIN.
“We must be cautious this time because during the rebellion we were often accused of siding with the rebels,” the official, who demanded he not be identified, added.

The deputy coordinator of the UNHCR office in Ouagadougou, Marguerite Camara, said those who had chosen to remain after the official end of repatriation were no longer refugees. In addition, she said, they ignored advice to report to the Foreign Ministry to regularise their status in Burkina Faso.

During the peace talks to end the Tuareg rebellion against the Mali government, most rebel leaders lived in Burkina Faso. Thousands of people, mostly Tuaregs, fled fighting between the Tuareg and the army in northern Mali in the early 1990’s. Following a peace agreement in 1994, about 20,000 of the 25,000 Tuareg refugees in Burkina Faso were repatriated under a UNHCR-sponsored programme.