THE PRESS MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1985. Africa’s Christmas war

Press, 30 December 1985, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1985. Africa’s Christmas war

Christmas has become a popular time to begin a war. Vietnam invaded Kampuchea on Christmas Day, 1978. The Vietnamese are still in control and a sporadic guerrilla war continues. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979. There, the Russians are far from ending Afghan resistance and widespread guerrilla fighting has lasted for six years. This Christmas two West African States — Mali and Bourkina Fasso — attacked each other after mutual recriminations about a disputed border. The Mali-Bourkina Fasso fighting is not likely to develop into a prolonged war. Both States are poor, both have been affected by drought. Neither has substantial military forces, although that could change if outsiders became involved. Both countries are former French colonies. France is believed to support Mali in the conflict; • Bourkina Fasso has Libyan support. But the pressures from outside so far seem to be directed to achieving a rapid ceasefire.

Mali has one claim to world attention that is generally overlooked. Its territory includes the town of Timbuktu (now generally spelt Tombouctou) on the Niger River. Bourkina Fasso, known as Upper Volta until after its last military coup in 1983, tries to parade its virtues in its new name. In translation the words mean “The democratic land of honest men.”

The honest men are objecting to a border bequeathed them by the French at

independence in 1960. Behind that lies a suggestion that the arid landscape of the border may conceal valuable mineral deposits. There is also a revolutionary enthusiasm to make a mark, in West Africa at least, on the part of the young officers who awarded themselves the country in the last coup. Not that the Government of Mali, said to be rather more Westward leaning in inclination, is a model. President Moussa Traore has held office there since a coup in 1968. Recently he offered himself for re-election, as the representative of the sole legal political party, and claimed to have won 99.94 per cent of the votes cast.

The real tragedy is that both countries, each with a population of rather more than seven million, are miserably poor. Neither can afford a war, however brief. Both depend on foreign hand-outs to survive. This year, for instance, the harvest in Mali fell short of the country’s needs by almost half a million tonnes of grain. A couple of petty dictators scrapping about a patch of semi-desert in the midst of widespread hunger make an unedifying sight. Incidents such as the Christmas war between Mali and Bourkina Fasso continue to make it difficult to generate much sympathy for the very real miseries of the belt of African countries south of the Sahara; or to take seriously the pretensions of many African States to be listened to in the world’s forums.