Tuareg separatists have denied the existence of a mass grave that the Malian army claimed to have discovered last week in Kidal (north), a rebel stronghold city recently taken over by the junta and its allies.
These “allegations”, “obviously fabricated”, are “a pure diversion obviously intended to mask the horrible massacres committed by the terrorist duo Wagner-FAMa (Malian armed forces),” the separatists said in a statement, Wednesday, November 22, 2023.
“In the Kidal region, no allegations even in the form of rumours have ever been reported by any source about human rights violations by CSP-PSD forces,” an alliance of armed groups, they continued.
They denounce “a clumsy maneuver to ignore all the massacres perpetrated” by the Malian armed forces and their allies of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, whose junta denies the presence.
The Malian army claimed to have discovered this mass grave on 16 November during security operations. This mass grave recalls the atrocities committed by terrorists without faith or law,” the army said, without further details.
After eight years of calm, hostilities resumed in August in northern Mali between regular forces and separatists.
The withdrawal of the UN Mission, pushed towards the exit by the junta in power, triggered a race for control of the territory, the central authorities demanding the return of the camps, the rebels opposing it.
The takeover in mid-November by the army of Kidal, bastion of the independence claim, is a symbolic success for the colonels who took power by force in 2020.
In the shadow of the fighting on the ground, the two sides also clash on social networks, including X (ex-Twitter), TikTok and Facebook, through support accounts, many of which have been created recently, against a background of misinformation.
“Each side gives its version of what is happening on the ground and discredits that of the opponent it presents as propaganda,” Seidik Abba, a Nigerian journalist and political analyst specializing in the Sahel, told AFP recently.
The ruling junta broke the historic military partnership with France and its European allies to turn to Russia and urged the UN mission to leave.
After the departure of French troops from the Gossi base in central Mali, the Malian army also announced that it had discovered “a mass grave” in 2022. The French army had immediately denounced a manipulation, and broadcast drone images showing, according to it, Russian mercenaries burying bodies a few days earlier.
