BAMAKO - MaliÂ’s coup leader said on Saturday the junta would hand power to civilians within days in a deal under which neighbouring nations agreed to lift sanctions and help tackle Tuareg rebels who have seized much of the north.The March 22 coup by soldiers angry at ousted President Amadou Toumani ToureÂ’s handling of a two-month-old rebellion backfired, emboldening the Tuareg nomads to seize the northern half of Mali and declare an independent state there.
After three days of negotiations and growing international pressure to step down, MaliÂ’s junta announced late on Friday it would begin a power handover in return for an amnesty from prosecution and the lifting of trade and other sanctions.
‘It is the will of the committee to quickly move towards the transition,’ coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo said at the barracks outside the capital Bamako which has been the headquarters of his two-week-old rule.
‘In the next few days you will see a prime minister and a government in place,’ Sanogo, sitting in an armchair in the middle of his cramped office, said in an interview with Reuters, France’s i-tele and the Spanish-language channel Telesur.
A five-page accord agreed by Sanogo and the 15-state West African bloc ECOWAS for a return to constitutional order did not specify when the handover would start. The agreement calls for Toure, who is still in hiding, to formally resign. SanogoÂ’s junta must then make way for a unity government with MaliÂ’s parliament speaker Diouncounda Traore as interim president.
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In an interview with Burkina Faso state radio before he flew back to Mali on Saturday, Traore said the top priority was to restore order to Mali’s state institutions after the coup and to deal with ‘this problem of the north’.
‘Our goal is the territorial integrity of Mali and the pursuit of our democratic project,’ Traore said of a state which had been viewed as one of the region’s more stable democracies. He made no comment to reporters as he arrived in Bamako later.
Sanogo, dressed in battle fatigues and showing signs of tiredness, called on ECOWAS countries to help the Malian army with transport and logistics rather than send ground troops as they are discussing.
‘The Malian army still needs help precisely on logistics and air support but not ground troops to help us solve the security problem in northern Mali,’ he said.
‘We have to sit and talk. If they want to help us it should be according to our needs,’ added Sanogo, surrounded by aides and sitting beneath a large portrait of himself on the wall.
The African Union, ECOWAS and foreign capitals from Paris to Washington all dismissed Friday’s declaration by the Tuareg-led MNLA rebels of the independent state of ‘Azawad’, a desert region bigger than France in Mali’s north. Neighbours fear secession would encourage such movements in their own countries, while the presence of Islamists among the rebels has raised fears of the emergence of a rogue state with echoes of Taleban-era Afghanistan which sheltered Al Qaeda.