| They've been there for thousands of years. I guess they will be. |
When Mohamed Latey shot dead the local police lieutenant and stole his truck, he believed he was fighting for the freedom of his fellow nomads in the Sahara. It was the height of the Tuareg rebellion in the early 1990s, a four-year insurgency by a pale-skinned minority in remote northern Niger who felt sidelined and persecuted by a black elite governing from a capital 1,000 km away. Its fighters have long since handed over their mortars, anti-tank mines and grenade launchers, but resentment is still strong in a region synonymous with banditry and smuggling. "The state hasn't kept its promises, so some ex-fighters decided to go and find money for themselves," said Latey, 31, his face lit by the moon as he poured a glass of sweet tea. "For them, banditry and rebellion are one and the same. Someone who has no money, who has had nothing in his pocket for months, is going to go where he can find some."
The United Nations has tightened travel restrictions for its staff around Agadez, an ancient Saharan trading town, and Niger's army is about to deploy a special U.S.-trained company of 150 soldiers to fight outlaws in the region. Washington fears the history of poverty and rebellion makes fertile recruiting ground for what it says are terrorists. Some see the Sahel region on the southern fringe of the desert as a secondary front in its war on terror, drawing parallels with Afghanistan. "We have noticed patterns of trafficking, illegal activity -- there is potential interaction between various groups," said a senior U.S. official in the capital, Niamey. "Up to this point they have mostly been isolated cases of banditry, but the situation provides the potential for other kinds of action." |