Soberly titled “Report on the events of Moura from March 27 to 31, 2022”, the 41-page documentpublished on Friday May 12 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is a terrible indictment for the Malian army and the Russian paramilitaries of Wagner who accompany it, presented here as “foreign military personnel”.
The UN indicates that it has “reasonable grounds to believe that at least 500 people were killed in violation (…) of humanitarian law” during a military operation carried out more than a year ago in the village of Moura, about fifty kilometers from Mopti, in central Mali, by these joint forces. Acts which could, according to High Commissioner Volker Türk, constitute war crimes and, “depending on the circumstances”crimes against humanity.
In detail, investigators from the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Mission in Mali specify that“It’s about twenty civilians killed on March 27 by airstrikes carried out by the Malian Armed Forces (FAMA) and foreign military personnel, to prevent the population from fleeing”. Then, after a three-hour assault in which a dozen jihadists present on that market day reportedly perished, “ at least 500 individuals, including twenty women and seven children [ont été] executed » by the same authors “between March 27 and 31 after the area has been completely controlled”. The fact-finding mission says it has the names of at least 238 of these victims and has “reasonable grounds to believe that 58 women and girls were victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated by the FAMA. »
“Extreme brutality”
In the aftermath of the events, the staff of the armies of Mali had for its part assured that it had carried out “a large-scale air-land opportunity operation (…) following very precise information which made it possible to locate the holding of a meeting between the different katibas (jihadists) in Moura, stronghold of terrorists for several years” and flattered himself with“a very heavy toll” of 203 combatants of armed terrorist groups killed. A version quickly challenged by testimonies obtained by the press and by human rights organizations.
The NGO Human Rights Watch then denounced “the worst atrocity” perpetrated in Mali since the beginning of the conflict in 2012, evoking the massacre of“about 300 civilian men”, mostly from the Fulani community. Following these “allegations of alleged abuses committed against civilians”, Malian military justice had announced the opening of investigations, the first results of which are still awaited.
In fact, Bamako first worked to prevent any independent investigation, then to block the publication of the work of the UN’s human rights division, whose director, Guillaume Ngefa, has been declared “persona non grata” in Mali in February. Although the latter’s teams were not authorized by the Malian authorities to go directly to the scene of the massacre, they were able to conduct 157 interviews with survivors, witnesses, people designated to pick up and bury the bodies , displaced persons, victims of rape, obtain satellite images and forensic reports to establish the course of these five days of killings in Moura, a village that fell under the control of the Katiba Macina, affiliated with Al-Qaeda, in the extreme brutality of Malian soldiers and “white gunmen” who supported them.
“Shooting them in the back”
Without identifying them as Wagner’s paramilitaries but recalling that the Malian junta recognizes the arrival of“instructors” sent by Moscow and that the head of Russian diplomacy himself declared that Bamako and the company founded by Evgueni Prigojine are bound by a commercial agreement, the authors of the report indicate that these “Whites”speaking “an unknown language”, “sorted to determine who was considered a jihadist before directing the victims thus identified towards the direction where the elements of the FAMA executed them by shooting them in the back. »
In the same logic of obstructing the manifestation of the truth as its ally, on April 9, 2022, Russia had exercised its right of veto in the Security Council on the request for the opening of an independent investigation. Since then, Moscow and Bamako have constantly denounced the use of the struggle for the protection of human rights for political ends. In December in Geneva, the Malian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Abdoulaye Diop, had thus, during a meeting with the UN High Commissioner on this subject, denounced “the instrumentalization of the question of human rights for the geopolitical agendas of certain partners”.
“The Malian authorities are trying to prevent the publication of the report, to play down its content, but they won’t succeed. Even with a delay, the report will come out,” then assured a source in Geneva. With more than a month late, it is now done. The whole question now is to know what the legal consequences will be, particularly at the level of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has jurisdiction over Mali, and its political impact, while the United Nations Mission on the ground continues in a climate more hostile every day in Bamako.