Tuesday, June 19, 2012

See you in November!

Belated greetings from Virginia.  This blog's been semi-dormant for a few months now, and will be for the next few months, too, I'm sorry to report.  Sadly, Mali's current political situation is in many ways as poor as it was when I left a month and a half ago.  The North of the country, including the regions of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu, are all in the hands of either Tuareg separatists or Islamists, who alternately skirmish and forge short-lived alliances.  Hundreds of thousands of the North's inhabitants have fled, either South into government-controlled territory, or into neighboring Niger, Burkina Faso, or Mauritania.  In Bamako, the political situation is still confused.  Many soldiers still seem loyal to Capt. Sanogo, who headed the March 22 coup d'état and has, despite his numerous protestations to the contrary, yet to give up his significant political power.  The ostensible head of state, interim-President Dioncounda Traoré, is still recovering in Paris from wounds received in Bamako at the hands of angry protestors in a move seen by many international observers as orchestrated by Capt. Sanogo.  Some cynical political observers have suggested that Traore is seeking to wait out the ongoing political crisis in the comfort and safety of his hotel room.  The highest-ranking civilian official in Mali is thus Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra, a former NASA employee and former presidential candidate (as was Dioncounda Traore).  Mr. Diarra has had little success as yet in reigning in the excesses of Capt. Sanogo and his men, nor in dealing with the crisis in the North.  Given the political crisis, the local regional power broker, ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), has been threatening with increasing vigor to send in a 3000-member military intervention force to deal with both the Northern and Bamako problems en même temps.  The backdrop to this tragedy is the ongoing Sahel drought, variously projected to leave 10, 15, or 20 million in need of food aid.  Many aid organizations have been forced to pull back from the North of the country due to banditry and the outright theft of goods, not to mention the danger of kidnapping and extortion.

As for me, it seems unlikely that I will be returning to Mali under the auspices of the Fulbright Program.    The State Department is understandably cagey about sending U.S. citizens into such an unstable situation and at this point I don't think that funding will be made available for me before the end of this year, when the funding will be cut for my year's group of Fulbright students permanently.  As such, I'll probably be returning to Mali on my own dime, something I hope to do in early November.  Obviously, I won't be going back if there's civil unrest in Bamako itself at that time.  However, I had always planned to return to Mali to continue my musical studies even after the full 9 months of my Fulbright term; having only been there a little more than 6 months, a return trip is even more crucial to me now.

So, there you have it.  As always, my thoughts are with all my Malian friends, musicians and otherwise, who are living with this uncertainty on a daily basis.  I can only hope that Mali's crises are resolved as quickly as possible.  In the meantime, I'm listening to and playing Malian music every day, and I have every intention of returning to Mali this Fall and spending another 6 months.  The blog will be in hibernation until then.  As always, I can be contacted at waraden.diabate@gmail.com.  Have a great Summer!