Malian troops raid Dyer murder suspects' camp

This major step-up in Mali's northern war with AQIM between Tuesday and today doesn't seem to have much press coverage (nor the murder of a Malian intelligence officer, Lt Col Lamana Ould Cheikh, in Timbuktu last week, which presumably prompted the big assault). Or maybe I'm reading the wrong papers. Maybe the Sun has it again? Anyway, various reports are saying that a raid on a camp at Garn-Akassa (don't know where that is, one source says "west of Tessalit", ie west of the Tanezrouft route from Algeria to Mali, 100km in side Mali) has resulted in the deaths of around 20 fighters. There's a lot of speculation at the kidal.info forum about what's been going on. This is where to go if you're interested in getting a more nuanced picture of what's happening in the Sahara. But even if you read French, some of the contributors can be pretty opaque, and Google's translation tool if anything makes them even harder to understand in English.

Why was a British plan to rescue Dyer cancelled?

An SAS mission to rescue Edwin Dyer is reported in the Sun, of all places. They surely have this sort of plan in mind for every hostage situation, but it's unusual for them to talk to the media about it – a measure of their anger at the decision not to carry it out. Unfortunately it sits very uncomfortably with Jeremy Keenan's analysis. Thanks to Jim Mann Taylor at the 153 Club for circulating the Sun story.

Get the Americans out of Mali

What are they doing in Kidal, anyway?

Easy to forget how long and deeply involved the Americans have been in a part of the world that most US taxpayers would struggle to identify on a world map. But I wouldn't want all the Americans out of Mali - sorry, terribly arrogant thing to say. The Peace Corps have been doing a fantastic job in recent years, helping promote just the sort of tourism that Edwin Dyer loved.

Dyer's murder in Mali: do the Americans share the blame?

I wish this post wasn't here, but it needs to be marked that the British hostage Edwin Dyer was killed last week in Mali, and the web of motives and connections behind his murder needs some exposure. I've no idea how close Jeremy Keenan's analysis here, in the Independent, is to the truth, but it feels uncomfortably plausible that the US has supported al-Qa'ida in the Maghreb. This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's nothing new – the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were supplied by the US to oust the Russians. And look what a mess that got us all into. Then again, there may be further levels of complexity beneath what Keenan outlines. And perhaps Barack Obama would like to do something about this. . . Perhaps he would dearly like to clear his "advisors" and intelligence people out of West Africa. But perhaps he simply cannot. Perhaps Bush's legacy, described in Keenan's book, The Dark Sahara: American's War on Terror in Africa, is going to persist, sickeningly, through Obama's first term.

Dyer's murder is a tragedy not just for his own family but for the desperately poor people of northern Mali, where a nascent tourism, based around music and cultural festivals along the Niger River, was just emerging. Insurance cover to go north of Timbuktu was already a problem, and the future of the festivals is seriously threatened if travellers stay away. But as Andy Morgan's article about the Festival in the Desert makes clear, this is an intrinsically safe part of the world, no matter what the British foreign office and the US State department might dryly advise, with their frightening statements and unhelpful lack of statistics.

Photo: on the road between Douentza and Gao: cracked windscreen, but cracking scenery and the buses felt safer than riding the K9 through Kingston on a Friday evening.

Visas for Mauritania now required in advance

A long gap in my rigorous blogging schedule. . .
Apologies to anyone who thought this blog had given up the ghost.

Mail from another Mauritania reader:

I am emailing you because there has been a change in Mauritanian border policy that might affect the readers of your blog. I have recently embarked on a journey through West Africa. I flew into Marrakech and planned to go overland from there. However, when I got to the Mauri border on May 13, I was warned by a lot of French tourists on the Moroccan side who were turned back by Mauritania to get their visa in Rabat. I made the trip through no mans land myself with a Mauritanian trader who knew the staff well, just to be sure. However, there was (and is) no way around the new policy (bribery, forged documents didn't help), that had been instated only a few hours prior (at 13:00). Everyone who needs a visa now needs to get one prior to arrival.
Joris Bouwsma

Any further news on this?
--

Travel in Mauritania - Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Atar, Chinguetti and Choum

News from a correspondent working in West Africa who visited Mauritania at the beginning of October. He writes: "If you feel any of this is helpful please feel free to post." I think it paints a very good picture of the current social environment:
"Mauritania was a great travel experience for me. The local people were genuinely hospitable and in many ways "the everyday" feels safer than most of the other West African countries I've visited or worked in. Everyone you speak to is deeply critical of the extremists. Clearly it is impossible to say if you were nonetheless "being watched" by other elements, or were in some sense "lucky", and the intense interest some people take in your movements can prompt some uneasiness (and rather evasive answers....). I tried to keep a low profile, spent time integrating with the locals and taking local advice, and emerged unscathed after ten days. At the risk of some fairly clumsy imagery, if you can mentally deal with the "elephants in the room" (coup/political instability; extremist threat), and the elephants stay in the corner, it is a great experience.
"There seemed to be hardly any other tourists around, and you may have seen that Point Afrique has now cancelled for this year. This is such a great shame for a people with so much hospitality ingrained in their "habitude". The only other tourists I saw were on the overland coastal route with cars or bikes - there were five 4x4s and five bikes at the Auberge Menata in Nouakchott and two 4x4s in Nouadhibou. In the interior I met two French guys who had a family connection in Chinguetti and that was it. Even the chameliers had gone into the brousse and were hard to find!
I was finding accommodation on the move and found that a lot of the auberges/campements were effectively closed. I say effectively because occassionally a person was hanging around who could open up a room or the terrace for you but that was about it. For example in Atar, would you believe, I found no lodgings open but was fortunately taken in by a large family who lived next to one of the out-of-town auberges. I bought them a whole chicken for dinner which we ate together outside on their rug, drank lots of tea, and then passed the night on a nearby terrace in the auberge complex. The person who sold me the chicken claimed I was the first European he'd seen all year (surely not true?).
"The iron ore train had recently had some problems (some robbers or a derailment or something) and the schedule was ramped down and all over the place. For example, the train was 11 hours late (3.30am arrival at Choum) and there were so many people that it was physically impossible to get inside the passenger cabins at Choum so I had to spend the trip outside which was pretty unforgettable in the Saharan heat and the dust, which does indeed work its way into your soul. As another example of people's hospitality, at Choum I fell in with a group of young Saharawis and Mauritanians who I met en route from Atar. We found a family in Choum to share dinner with - the father turned out to be the local gendarme - and then slept in their courtyard awaiting the train's delayed arrival, and then spent the next 13 hours sheltering-up and sharing tea on the train.
"The whole airport experience (I flew up to Casablanca) is an abomination of inefficiency, corruption and Mr Big syndrome, and Royal Air Maroc's monopoly-ticket pricing is outrageous. In short, I hope never ever again to have to be at the airport!"

Good news from Africa

Africa's economic growth seems relatively untouched by the credit crunch, according to this upbeat assessment on economist.com. But the same site recently covered a much more downbeat story on Africa's political scene presented by the World Bank's latest report on African politics, where the most resource-rich countries in Africa are fingered as the most corrupt and politically screwed up. Some of those emerging from disastrous conflicts, however – for example Liberia and Rwanda – are witnessing huge improvements in good governance.