Whitewashing the Islamists

Submitted by Matthew on 20 February, 2013 - 8:46

Socialist Worker has avoided explicit support for the Islamist militias which ruled northern Mali from April 2012 until recently.

But in its 9 February issue it sidled to the defence of what it sarcastically called “the dastardly Islamists”.

“Media” accused the Islamists of destroying Timbuktu's unique holdings of ancient manuscripts. “But it was never true”.

In fact, the Islamists torched the building where the manuscripts where kept, but most were saved because staff had hidden them elsewhere shortly before the militias seized Timbuktu last year.

Socialist Worker takes the credit due to the Malian archive-keepers, people who know from close up that “dastardly” is too kind a word for Al-Qaeda and its allies, and turns it into excuses for the pillagers.

The archive-keepers couldn't save the ancient Sufi shrines which the Islamists destroyed, or the living people of Timbuktu.

“They looted and ill-treated people... destroyed the mausoleums of saints and amputated the hands of people they accused of stealing”, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn was told by Amadou Alassane Mega, a student who fled Timbuktu during Islamist rule. “They beat us up when we smoked or listened to music”.

A civic activist who stayed in Timbuktu told the New York Times, over the phone, that when the Islamists encountered young people of opposite sexes together, they forced them to marry on the spot.

There are good reasons, based on the history of French colonialism and neo-colonialism in west Africa, to oppose the French military presence.

They do not justify whitewashing the Islamists.

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