Professor’€™s expertise informs public about Mali invasion

PULLMAN, Wash. – Months of onsite investigative journalism by Washington State University English professor Peter Chilson into al-Qaeda’s takeover of northern Mali last spring have recently put him in high demand with the national and international media.

The flurry began when France intervened in the Malian crisis last week in an attempt to halt a further incursion by Islamists to gain control of Bamako, Mali’s capital city, and the rest of the country. The French intervention has received support from the international community, including the United States and several European nations.

The incursion coincided with the release of Chilson’s e-book, “We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali,” published by Foreign Policy magazine and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a media clearinghouse supporting writers who cover global conflicts for the U.S. media. The e-book, announced in Foreign Policy’s January/February issue, examines the implications of al-Qaeda’s newest base of operation and decries their devastation of ancient cultural icons. Links to selected Chilson radio interviews and to the e-book are available below.

“Peter Chilson’s work in Mali is some of the finest crisis reporting we’ve seen in a long time,” said Tom Hundley, senior editor, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. “Peter’s graceful writing, his deep knowledge of the subject, his gift for storytelling and willingness to go to where the real story was unfolding – all of this has made for a very rewarding piece of journalism…that will inevitably inform policy discussions on the future of Mali.”

In his e-book, Chilson recounts how the Tuareg nationalist campaign, mounted with support from al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups, ended in April 2012 with northern Mali’s occupation. Since then, more than 500,000 people have fled the north desert region, including some Tuaregs.

A Berber nomad group native to the Sahara, the Tuaregs pursued a secular agenda of preserving their culture through creation of an independent Saharan state, Chilson said. In the confusion that ensued following the rebellion, the jihadist groups, many of whose members come from outside Mali, quickly wrested power from the Tuaregs.

Chilson’s book is a “masterful blend of reportage and history, taking us back to the founding of French West Africa and right to the very front lines of a conflict that is destroying much of the historic treasure in the fabled city of Timbuktu,” said Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Susan B. Glasser in the book’s preface. “In a year when Mali unexpectedly vaulted to the world’s front pages, Chilson skillfully draws on his years of scholarly work and journalistic adventures in the country to produce the definitive account of a contentious new frontier.”

Since jihadists gained control of northern Mali, the region has imposed Shariah law, a strict interpretation of the Koran and the life of the Prophet Mohammed, Chilson said. It calls for thieves to routinely lose their hands to amputation and for adulterers to be stoned to death. It also calls for the destruction of anything perceived as idolatry, so ancient artifacts, including mausoleums of Muslim saints and historic mosques and libraries, have been destroyed.

“It has proved to be a serious blow to the heritage of a region steeped in ancient culture,” he said. “Timbuktu’s rich history, which extends back to the 13th century, has fallen victim to rebel destruction comparable to the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of two massive 6th century statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.”

The al-Qaeda jihadists also gained access to Malian airstrips and to a new arsenal of heavy weapons looted from Libya after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, Chilson said.

“Al-Qaeda has a much more stable zone for itself than the borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said, comparing the captured region to the 9/11 training ground. “They have a huge swath of desert that is very sparsely populated from which to operate. They can hide very easily in that desert.”

In December 2012, the United Nations Security Council voted to support an invasion of northern Mali led by the remaining Malian government in the south and several West African allies, including Nigeria, Niger and Burkina Faso, Chilson said. Some Tuareg rebels, who mounted and then abandoned last year’s effort for an independent Saharan state when the Islamists took control, have vowed to support Mali recovery efforts. But the Islamist advance into the south last week and France’s response with air strikes and the insertion of ground troops have sped up the international program to oust the Islamists from northern Mali.

“France is in for a long fight,” Chilson said. “There are only about 3,000 jihadists in the north but they are very well armed and trained.”

“We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali” is one of a four-part series commissioned by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to cover recent borderland disputes around the world. The e-book’s title, Chilson said, came from a casual comment by British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury at the end of the 19th century as Europe carved Africa into separate colonial domains.

“Salisbury casually admitted that the colonial powers had been ‘drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod…giving away mountains and rivers and lakes only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were…,’” Chilson said.

Mali’s problems, rooted in these divisions and exacerbated by the borders France left behind in 1960 when it granted independence to its eight West African colonies, are further explored in Chilson’s e-book.

Chilson’s coverage of West Africa is based in his deep understanding of the region and its history extending back 1,200 years to modern day. He has written about life and upheaval there for more than 20 years. His previous book, “Riding the Demon,” won the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. “Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories,” won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fiction Prize. Chilson is also working on a literary nonfiction book for University of Nebraska Press that provides an extensive history of Africa’s colonial borderlands.

“We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali:” http://atfp.co/UYBBZs
Amazon Kindle: http://amzn.to/10F1PFC

Jan. 17: The Leonard Lopate Show: Mali and Other Recent Military Interventions in Africa: http://wny.cc/WjG87o
Jan. 14: BBC Radio The World Tonight (Chilson interview begins at 16:32 into the broadcast):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ptgqj
Jan. 13: RTE News This Week (Chilson’s comments begin at 8:01 into the broadcast): http://bit.ly/106yYEk (scroll down under the black window to third link)

For more on Peter Chilson’s work, see http://www.peterchilson.com