African states ready troops as France bombs Mali rebels

Kind of crazy that the Islamist threat is manifesting itself in Mali, as well as in many other places around the world. What do you think France should do, just let the Islamists massacre more people, stone people, chop off hands, in a territory twice as big as Germany? There are 6,000 French citizens in Mali whose lives are threatened by the Islamists just as much as those of the local population.

The free world has to fight the threat of Islamism, whether it manifests itself in our countries or elsewhere in the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/world/africa/islamists-harsh-justice-on-rise-in-northern-mali.html

Islamists’ Harsh Justice Is on the Rise in North Mali


There have been at least 14 cases of amputation since the Islamist takeover. Moctar Touré, above, was accused of stealing guns.

BAMAKO, Mali — Moctar Touré was strapped to a chair, blindfolded, his right hand bound tight to the armrest with a rubber tube. A doctor came and administered a shot. Then Mr. Touré’s own brother wielded a knife, the kind used to slaughter sheep, and methodically carried out the sentence.

“I myself cut off my brother’s hand,” said Aliou Touré, a police chief in the Islamist-held north of this divided nation. “We had no choice but to practice the justice of God.”

Such amputations are designed to shock — residents are often summoned to watch — and even as the world makes plans to recapture northern Mali by force, the Islamists who control it show no qualms about carrying them out.

After the United Nations Security Council authorized a military campaign to retake the region last week, Islamists in Gao, Mr. Touré’s town, cut the hands off two more people accused of being thieves the very next day, a leading local official said, describing it as a brazen response to the United Nations resolution. Then the Islamists, undeterred by the international threats against them, warned reporters that eight others “will soon share the same fate.”

This harsh application of Shariah law, with people accused of being thieves sometimes having their feet amputated as well, has occurred at least 14 times since the Islamist takeover last spring, not including the recent vow of more to come, according to Human Rights Watch and independent observers.

But those are just the known cases, and dozens of other residents have been publicly flogged with camel-hair whips or tree branches for offenses like smoking, or even for playing music on the radio. Several were whipped in Gao on Monday for smoking in public, an official said, while others said that anything other than Koranic verses were proscribed as cellphone ringtones. A jaunty tune is punishable by flogging.

At least one case of the most severe punishment — stoning to death — was carried out in the town of Aguelhok in July against a couple accused of having children out of wedlock.

Trials are often rudimentary. A dozen or so jihadi judges sitting in a circle on floor mats pronounce judgment, according to former Malian officials in the north. Hearings, judgment and sentence are usually carried out rapidly, on the same day.

“They do it among themselves, in closed session,” said Abdou Sidibé, a parliamentary deputy from Gao, now in exile here in the capital, Bamako. “These people who have come among us have imposed their justice,” he said. “It comes from nowhere.”

The jihadists are even attempting to sell the former criminal courts building in Gao, Mr. Sidibé said, because they no longer have any use for it. In Timbuktu, justice is dispensed from a room in a former hotel.

Many of the amputation victims have now drifted down to Bamako, in the south, which despite suffering from its own political volatility has become a haven for tens of thousands fleeing harsh conditions in the north, including the forced recruitment of child soldiers by the Islamists.

Moctar Touré, 25, and Souleymane Traoré, 25, both spoke haltingly and stared into the distance, remembering life before the moments that turned their worlds upside down and made them, as they felt, useless. They gently cradled the rounded stumps that now serve as arms, wondering what would come next.

The two young men had been truck drivers before Gao was overrun last spring. Both were accused of stealing guns; both said they merely acted out of patriotic feeling for the now-divided Malian state, with the intention of helping it regain the north.

In September, Mr. Traoré said, he was summoned from his jail cell after three months of a brutal prison term in which he was often fed nothing. Acquaintances had denounced him to the Islamist police; he was stealing the extremists’ weapons at night, he said, and burying them in the sand by the Niger River.

As ten other prisoners watched, he was ordered to sit in a chair, and his arms were tightly bound to it. With a razor, one of his jailers traced a circle on his forearm. “It pains me to even think about it,” he said, looking down, cradling his head in his remaining hand.

Mr. Touré’s brother, Aliou, the police chief, sawed off his hand. It took three minutes. Mr. Traoré said he passed out.

“I said nothing. I let them do it,” he said.

Moctar Touré had his hand amputated several weeks later. He said it took 30 minutes, though he fainted in the process, awakening in the hospital bed where the Islamists had placed him afterward.

Mr. Touré said his brother had insisted that the sentence be carried out.

“They asked my own brother three times if that was the sentence,” Mr. Touré said. “He’s the commissioner of police in Gao, and he wants to die a martyr,” Mr. Touré said quietly. “He joined up with the Islamists when they came to Gao.”

Aliou Touré, reached by telephone in the Sahara, said the decision was a simple one.

“He stole nine times,” he said of his brother. “He’s my own brother. God told us to do it. God created my brother. God created me. You must read the Koran to see that what I say is true. This is in the Koran. That’s why we do it.”

Moctar Touré had a different story. The Islamists had pressed him into joining their militia, he said, but the training was brutal and Mr. Touré quit. One day they saw him carrying some guns, and they accused him of wanting to subvert the new order. He was jailed.

Sweat streamed down Mr. Touré’s forehead as he recalled the terrible memories, sitting on a bench at a busy bus station here, 600 miles from Gao.

The Islamists had called out five prisoners that morning; four were to be witnesses. They took them all to an unused customs post at the edge of Gao, and Mr. Touré was ordered to wash himself. The Islamists told him what his sentence was to be.

“I was helpless,” he said. “I was completely tied up.”

Now, Mr. Touré spends his days hanging out at the bus station near a cousin’s house. Mr. Traoré hopes to learn a new trade, given that “I can’t be a driver anymore,” he said.

Mr. Touré, for his part, is in despair. “I have no idea what I am going to do,” he said. “I’m completely lost. Night and day, I ask myself, ‘What is going to happen?’ Nobody has helped me.”

The people in Gao have protested the amputations several times, according to Human Rights Watch, even halting them once by throwing stones at the Islamic police and blocking the entrance to the main square.

“To come to Gao and inflict these sentences they call Islamic, I say it is illegal,” said Abderrahmane Oumarou, a communal councilor there, reached by telephone after last week’s amputations.

As for the Islamists’ justice, “I don’t give credit to their accusations,” Mr. Oumarou said. “You can’t replace Malian justice.”

Mr. Oumarou said the Islamists had been busy lately writing “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” in Arabic on the former Malian administrative buildings in Gao.

“Their accusations are false,” he said. “They said weapons were stolen. But these are lies.”

 

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What in my post do you disagree with?

 

forgive me, but something about drones, extraordinary rendition, multiple wars and interventions, support of dictatorial regimes designed to suppress Islam through the denigration of democratic rights.

got a lot to show for it!

Glad to see France has the grapes to get involved in stopping human rights abuses, but defining it is a "fight against Islamism" is the same old tired mentality that gets this happening again and again. If France overstays their welcome (as Western nations tend to do), Mali will just become another hellhole. Stop the human rights abuses, ensure a stable enough government, then get out before you want to imprint a "culture" and "nation-build" (has anyone learned???).

 

Go France! Go for the throat.

 

Incoherent post by the intern.

 

Ad hominem attacks with no substance suit you well ATW.

I love you though man, so it's cool. Just pointing out how your attitude leads to dysfunctional policy creation and enforcement, and turns humanitarian interventions into long protracted ideological conflicts that make everyone's lives more miserable.

(also pointing out that calling for a war on extremist Islam is cliché and redundant. I don't think there's an ideology the Western nations have been fighting harder for the last few years as evidenced again by this intervention.)

 

All that blablabla in this and your previous post does not change anything about the fact that we have a situation in Mali in which Islamists are terrorizing the population of a country based on what they believe to be mandated by Sharia, and this is what France and the rest of the free world have to fight against.

Your idiotic drivel that "If France overstays their welcome (as Western nations tend to do), Mali will just become another hellhole" fails to recognize that Mali is a hellhole right now in the parts which are controlled by Islamists.

 

In f***ing Mali they get involved, but f*** Syria right? The 60,000 innocent civilians that Bashar Al-Assad's regime massacred in cold blood deserved to die right?? What a f***ed up world we live in.

 

You know ATW, bolding terms doesn't make your point better.

Mali is a hellhole. So was Bosnia (caused by Orthodox Christians). So was Rwanda (caused by Christian Hutus). So was Lebanon (caused by a mishmash of Christian militias gone wild and Islamic folks). So is Syria (caused by a Baathist regime one would very much doubt is fundamentalist).

Proper humanitarian interventions done right were timely, and blind of any overarching need other than to protect the innocent. Your attitude is worrying, and seems to stem from some Western psychological impulse to root out any competing ideology, despite the fact that said ideology is already being warred against on a constant basis. There is no more deadly occupation than to declare yourself an "Islamist" or to be even in close proximity to declared "Islamists" as drone victims, Mubarak-era prisoners, and "oops, the CIA kidnapped me by accident and tortured me because I have a similar name to an Islamist" people can attest to.

I have no qualms with France going in and intervening in a dire humanitarian situation, but if they're going in with an attitude akin to yours, that is ultimately dysfunctional, and the intervention will, far from making things better, make them worse.

 

I had a history professor in college who told me "politics is simply who gets what, when, where and how..." How right he was.

 

So you admit that your previous post was idiotic (as usual). "If France overstays their welcome (as Western nations tend to do), Mali will just become another hellhole." How "would it become" a hellhole if it already is one?

None of the examples given above were primarily motivated by religion. If you could read, you could see from the New York Times article posted that many of the human rights violations committed in Mali are primarily motivated by the Islamists' understanding of Sharia.

Moreover, and more importantly, pointing at examples in which possibly an earlier intervention should have taken place in order to be an incredibly annoying smartass about an intervention taking place now, to save lives, is just really stupid, even for you.

One more thing:

France is intervening under a very leftist government. Therefore, you can't even play your usual "oh the evil culturally imperialist right-wing hawks in Western countries are attacking a poor Islamic country" card. There is simply no reasoning with these Islamists. They are scum, and they need to be fought.

End of story.

 

Ah, ATW with your semantic games. Mali is a hellhole, and will become a permanent hellhole if France comes in with the wrong intent (i.e yours).

oh, so we should only intervene in situations that fit your mandate of atrocities caused primarily by religion, because interventions should be judged on when people die to fit your thread titles.

But never mind the fact that factually speaking, religion played a huge, and some might argue primary factor in all of those conflicts. They weren't going around killing left-handed people in Srebrenica. Never mind that---

I don't believe you are reading what I am writing ATW. I support this intervention, just not under the guise of some fantasy of yours of eternal war on Islam---but because people are suffering under the ground and the international community has a responsibility to act. So I applaud Hollande's administration for upholding this duty, especially in difficult domestic times. I will condemn it just as quickly if his intent turns out to be the same as yours.

 

There's the level-headed approach to international relations the world needs more of.

 

It's kind of hard to tell if you are simply too stupid to understand the difference between a war on Islamists who decide to chop off people's hands, stone and murder humans and want to create a Taliban style regime of terror on the one hand and "an eternal war on Islam" on the other hand or if you deliberately try to slanderously pretend that I want "an eternal war on Islam".

I guess it's a mix of both - you are stupid and a slanderous liar.

If you think that fighting a regime of religiously motivated terror equates "an eternal war on Islam", then, in fact, you are really stupid or a really annoying prick. Or both.

 

You know, there's a fair bit of irony in calling me slanderous by attacking your ideas whilst calling me stupid and a liar. Thicker skins will prevail though.

Eternal war on "Islamists" then, ATW, I'm so sorry if I offended your sensibilities. you are after all, that reasonable Western man that calmly and distinctly thinks things through, and reacts most elegantly and intelligently with a clear line of subtlety that shows you have thought things through rationally, and without the use of overarching stereotypes.

I got nothing against you ATW, but that kind of attitude is just a stinker.

Anyways, I have to be off, but please, we should continue this discussion sometime in the future---just keep on making your threads about Islamism (I'm sure there will be another one tomorrow).

 

It's not a discussion. It's me schooling you, and always has been. You are like that little annoying kid that keeps embarrassing himself, but keeps coming back.

 

cool, whatever helps you sleep at night.

later!