Of all the countries on that struggling continent, Mali is one I thought would never fall victim to an African cliché -- the military coup. I have been a visitor to Mali for the last decade, writing about West Africa's colonial borders and focusing on a country whose history I believed immunized it from becoming a Congo or Somalia, crisscrossed as they are by ethnic and religious violence. Since March, however, it had become a study in tragic collapse, caught between the ruins of Mali's democracy in the south and a rogue jihadi state in the north that threatens the stability of West Africa and the security of Europe.
For days, Isaac and I waited. By May 3, I could still hear gun battles from my hotel. There had been no announcements. State television was playing a numbing roll of documentaries, from Jacques Cousteau to a rock biography of Paul McCartney.
I still heard the occasional crackle of small arms. The heavier guns and mortars were silent. Except for a zone blocked off around the television station downtown and the airport, I traveled freely around Bamako, one of the world's fastest-growing cities and one where I have never felt unsafe in any neighborhood. During the week of the countercoup, I walked Bamako for miles. I bought bananas in crowded street markets and drank hot tea at roadside tables; at one, a man told me the U.S. Army could drop paratroopers on the north and solve Mali's problem in a few days. I hired taxis to take me across every bridge over the Niger (there are three), which splits Bamako north from south, and to important nearby towns, like Kati, which has one of the Sahel's largest cattle markets, as well as to the main army base.
On the street one morning, hearing the distant snapping of small arms, I realized that while the rebels were consolidating their hold on a newly acquired rogue state in the north, the Malian army was eating itself in the south, engaged in a bloody fratricidal grudge match. I thought about a contact I had in the presidential guard, a captain who'd been involved in monitoring conflicts along Mali's border with Guinea. I had met him the previous October in a cafe, where he told me about his work settling land disputes between Malian and Guinean farmers. "But we Malians," he had said to me, "we do not argue amongst ourselves. Our solidarity is our strength." When I tried him on the phone this time, he did not answer my calls.
According to Human Rights Watch, in that first week of May, while I was trying to find a way out of Bamako, 20 red-beret paratroopers were forcibly disappeared, and unconfirmed reports said they were executed and buried in a mass grave outside the city. Almost immediately after putting down the countercoup, regular army soldiers began a torture campaign against dozens of surviving red-beret soldiers, including mock executions, severe beatings, stabbings, and forced anal sex with fellow prisoners. Using sticks, guards stuffed rags in the prisoners' mouths to muffle their screams.
Yet what amazed me most about those days in Bamako was that the army was seldom seen, maybe because it couldn't spare the extra soldiers to patrol the city. There was no curfew, no random checkpoints. Life in the streets went on as if people didn't need the government.
Early in the fighting, the evening of April 30, a boyish-looking lieutenant speaking for the army junta had appeared on state television and declared that the countercoup had been crushed. As he spoke, the camera panned to the exhausted faces of other officers around him in green berets and a group of presidential guardsmen in handcuffs. The camera focused on apparently captured weaponry: a couple of mortars, some machine guns, and crates of hand grenades. Despite the lieutenant's claims, the fighting went on for three more days, at times intensely. On May 3, as the gunfire began to abate, the army chief of staff appeared on television to declare again that the countercoup had been put down. By the end of the following day the fighting was over.
I called Isaac, and we agreed this was our chance. The next morning, we bought new tickets and boarded an AfriqueTourTrans bus to the north. After the police checked our identity papers, we took our seats.
Once we were on the bus, a soldier sat in front of me with his automatic rifle between his knees. At every checkpoint on the road, he stepped off the bus to confirm for his colleagues that there were no suspicious passengers -- in other words, no light-skinned young men who might be Tuareg rebels. As for me, no one even asked to see my passport.
I mentioned this to Isaac later. "You're just another foolish tourist who didn't have enough sense to read the newspapers before getting on a plane," he said. "That's your new identity."
Next: Graeme Wood on the tiny peninsula that's still reeling from the Iran-Iraq war.
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