BAMAKO, Mali: Mali’s new president-elect Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is now presented with the challenge of finding a resolution to the simmering separatist rebellion in the country’s north.
Based on his recent campaign visit to the rebel’s stronghold, though, it looks like the path to reconciliation won’t be an easy one.
Rebels from the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad — the name they give to their homeland — tried to block Keita’s plane from landing on the runway. When that failed, they hurled stones at his parked jet to show their disapproval.
Keita won’t have much time to prepare for negotiations: Under an agreement signed in June, talks with the separatist Tuareg rebels are supposed to take place within 60 days of the new government’s formation.
The talks are expected to be “extremely politically sensitive,” said Bruce Whitehouse, a Bamako-based Mali specialist who teaches at Lehigh University. Keita might be effective in the talks, said Whitehouse.
“He’s somebody who can sort of straddle the fence and appeal to different groups at the same time,” he said. “He might be well positioned to make some difficult risky moves and still be able to represent himself as doing the right thing by the Malian people.”
Many voters, though, say they want Keita — who is widely known by his initials “IBK” — to take an uncompromising position with the NMLA. They blame the separatists for creating Mali’s political disaster. Army soldiers who were unhappy with then President Amadou Toumani Toure’s handling of the rebellion launched a coup, and the power vacuum allowed Al-Qaeda-linked militants to take ahold of northern Mali.
“I voted for IBK because we want a president who can liberate the north,” said Sata Keita, 28, who is not related to the new president. “He should not negotiate with the Tuareg rebels because people should respect the law and Mali will not be divided. IBK should not tolerate these excesses. We need a total change in Mali.”
The Tuareg rebels did not endorse either candidate, though at least one representative of the group said he favored Keita over his opponent Soumaila Cisse, who had said he was against any autonomy for the north.
Early Tuesday, a spokesman for the rebel group in Europe said they had “taken note” of Keita’s victory.
“We hope that with him and his team we will end up at a just, equitable and definitive solution that will allow Azawadians to make decisions that will be suitable for their development,” said Moussa Ag Assarid, an NMLA representative based in Europe.
Tuaregs, the lighter-skinned nomads of Mali’s north, petitioned their colonial ruler France at independence 53 years ago to be granted their own territory independent from the rest of the country. The Tuaregs pointed to the linguistic, cultural and racial differences which have long made them distinct from the black ethnicities that make up the Malian majority.
Mali’s government has faced waves of rebellions over the years, signing agreements that promised the north greater resources and influence. The one that began in early 2012 forced the Malian military in retreat from the north, and Islamic extremists took advantage of the chaos to seize control and implement their harsh interpretation of Islamic Shariah law. The jihadists ultimately ousted the secular Tuareg separatists as well.
After a French-led military intervention in January 2013, the jihadists fled into the desert and Tuareg rebels began returning to the area. In the town of Kidal, the flag of Azawad now flies instead of the Malian one, and rebels remain in control of numerous government buildings.
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Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal.
Mali’s new president Keita faces Tuareg challenge
Mali’s new president Keita faces Tuareg challenge
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
