Stratfor and Yvonne De Carlo

In a March post, Torn from today's headlines, I mentioned that rebel Taureg tribesman had moved to Libya in the 1980s to receive military training from Gaddafi. 

As well as exporting trouble to his neighbors, he used them as mercenaries. During the recent civil war Tauregs were the bulk of the troops he brought in to bolster his regime. The later atrocities, when blacks were being killed indiscriminately in Libya, was a reaction to the Taureg mercenaries.  

With Gaddafi's defeat many of the Tuareg mercenaries returned to northern Mali where they are causing chaos. Scott Stewart discusses the problems they are causing the government of Mali in his latest Strator article, the beginning of which is excerpted below. You can read the entire article by following the link after the excerpt.

For the article's Hot Strafor Babe I turned to the 1959 movie Timbuktu. The action movie revolves around Col. Dufort, who along with his wife has traveled to Timbuktu to take charge of the French garrison there. His efforts are complicated by an uprising of the Tauregs, as well as the fact that an American traveling companion is putting the moves on his wife, which she isn't exactly resisting.

Dufort's wife was played by Yvonne De Carlo, and so she gets the immense honor of being named the article's Hot Stratfor Babe.

Ms De Carlo started her career as a dancer, and moved to the movies in 1940s where she payed her dues by appearing in bit parts for several years. In 1945 her patience payed off when she finally landed a title role in Salome Where She Danced. Sounds like it must have been a classy movie. From that point she had a fairly successful movie career.

However, as she aged she transitioned to TV, and that is where most of us know her from. She played the role of Lily Munster in the Munsters, which is a fine exclamation point to her acting career as far as I'm concerned.

 
Mali Besieged by Fighters Fleeing Libya
 By Scott Stewart, February 2, 2012

Mali has experienced perhaps the most significant external repercussions from the downfall of the regime of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Stratfor has discussed the impact of the conflict in Libya on the wider region since international intervention began in March 2011. Instability in Libya due to that country's deep internal fault lines meant that re-establishing a government would prove difficult. As we pointed out, that instability could spread to neighboring countries as weapons and combatants flow outward from Libya.

Reports now indicate that thousands of armed Tuareg tribesmen who previously served in Gadhafi's military have returned home to Mali. The influx of this large number of well-armed and well-trained fighters, led by a former Libyan army colonel, has re-energized the long-simmering Tuareg insurgency against the Malian government. These Tuareg insurgents have formed a new group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). In mid-January, they began a military campaign to free three northern regions of Mali from Bamako's control.

The government of Mali has claimed that the MNLA is aligned with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). MNLA, however, has strongly denied any link to the group and said it will serve as a bulwark against AQIM. Given the U.S. and European interest in preventing the strengthening of AQIM, both sides have considerable incentive to take their respective positions. These developments make it an opportune time to examine the MNLA, its current offensive and the potential implications for Mali and the region.

The Tuaregs and the Origins of the MNLA

The Tuaregs are a semi-nomadic people who inhabit the interior of Africa's Sahara region, including parts of Mali, Algeria, Niger and Libya. (Click here for background information on the Tuaregs.) Tuareg militancy extends to pre-colonial times; the current conflict is merely the latest manifestation of a longstanding struggle between the Tuaregs and their ruler of the moment. In modern times, Tuareg insurgencies seem to occur almost every decade. They have fought the governments of Mali, Niger and Algeria since those countries' independence from France. Major Tuareg rebellions occurred in Mali from 2007 to 2009 and from 1990 to 1995.

During these rebellions, Tuareg militants typically exploit their mountain bases in Mali's northeast to launch hit-and-run guerrilla attacks against military targets across Mali's vast northern region, leaving the Malian armed forces spread thin.

The Tuaregs are a tribal people. Some Tuareg tribes in Mali -- such as the Oulemedens, Ichnidharans and Imgads -- tend to be more closely aligned than tribes such as the Idnans, Ifoghas and Chamanesse, which tend to be involved with armed opposition to the government.

Traditionally, the Tuaregs controlled caravan routes across the Sahara. In days past, those caravans carried gold, spices, salt or dates. Today, contraband including weapons, untaxed tobacco and even narcotics traverse the desert routes. Banditry remains common in the region.

The MNLA emerged against this backdrop on Oct. 16, 2011, four days before the killing of Moammar Gadhafi. Its leader is former Libyan army Col. Ag Mohamed Najem, who hails from the Ifogha tribe, at present the most radical tribe of the Tuareg opposition in Mali.

Read the rest of Mali Besieged by Fighters Fleeing Libya at Stratfor.
  

Just in case

Just in case the subject of Taureg rebels should come up, say for example in my next post,  I thought I would post some Taureg rebel music by the Malian band Tinariwen. They've appeared before on Flares, in my series on the music of Mali.

Unnatural selection

I've been languidly writing a series of posts about the music of Mali. Using contemporary Malian musicians as a backdrop, I've noted that West African music was taken to the New World via the slave trade. There, in the isolation of the Age of Sail, it evolved separately in the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America and Brazil.

In the mid 20th century the music of this diaspora returned to Africa via records, radio and Cuban advisers. African musicians absorbed these influences and integrated them into their music. At the same time African musicians were traveling to Europe where they encountered the Brazilian strain of the diaspora and, more importantly to their pocket books, found a European concert circuit that they could tour.  

In the previous post in this series, An interlude in the record bins (it has links to all of the earlier posts if you're interested), I discussed how European promoters of eclectic music from around the world who were eager to increase their sales were frustrated by the difficulty in getting their albums binned in record stores. They solved that problem by creating a new music genre which they called World Music.

Should you find a record store that's still open and look through the World Music bin you're quickly discover that the geography of it is very distorted. Irish and Brazilian music are the 800lb gorillas in it, with African, and Middle Eastern music taking up the bulk of the rest of the space, leaving only a little room for a few dusty Hawaiian albums and polka bands. Missing entirely will be the enormously influential sounds of Bollywood, J-Pop and any hint of China.

What's up with that?

The song I've embedded above is the blind duo Malian of of Amadou and Miriam. They were fairly obscure even in Mali, only selling a few thousand records, until a musician named Manu Chao collaborated with them. The first album they produced with him sold over 600,000 copies.

Manu Chao is actually a French singer of Spanish ancestry (his parents left Spain after his grandfather was executed by the Franco regime). He started out doing rockabilly, drifted into French punk music and reinvented himself by traveling through South and Central America absorbing their style and using his linguistic skills to sing in a pastiche of languages. Oh, and he's a hard core leftist -- his band Radio Bemba Sound System is named after the radio gear Castro and Guevara used during the Cuban revolution.

The name World Music is a misnomer. It was chosen more or less at random, and these days it would be more accurate to call it The Music of Fuzzy-Headed Liberal Lonely Planet Backpackers. OK, I'm exaggerating to make a cheap joke, but regardless it is pretty clearly slanted towards a transnational mind set. 

From time to time I've ranted and raved on Flares that one of our big mistakes is not selling how truly revolutionary the American concept of individual freedom is. It is what brings people to our shores.  Consider the difference to Amadou and Miriam between a couple of thousand records sold locally and 600,000 and counting sold globally. We bewail the long march through our institutions -- why do we concede that territory?   

It frustrates the hell out of me.

Torn from today's headlines...

I've taken a much longer break than I planned from my "Magical Tour of the Music of Mali" series (Part 1: Father & Son, Part 2: 14 years later). I had originally planned for this to be Part 4, but decided to go with it now because of its ties to Libya.

In the earlier pieces I talked about how West African music moved across the Atlantic with the slave trade, passing through the Caribbean and split north to the U.S. and south to Brazil. It evolved in the New World during the relative isolation of the Age of Sail, but eventually the music reflected back to Africa, where Latin and blues influences can now be heard.

I happened to see some of that reflection. During the Yom Kippur I was on a ship that ran a blockade of the Bab El Mandeb strait and had a port call in Massawa, Ethiopia. Being a sailor, as soon as I got off the ship I headed to the nearest bar. 

Most of the bars were just an empty room lit by a bare light bulb, with folding chairs to sit on and beer and ice served from a card table. Entertainment was 45 records played on the kind of record players American teens used to have -- the kind where the covers could be detached and had the speakers in them. The records they played, with the volume cranked up to an ear splitting 10 on the dial, were all Motown tunes and featured a lot of James Brown. That, and American pop in general, was the music that dominated many of their radio stations.

The videos accompanying this post are from the Malian band Tinariwen. The rhythms and chorus are definitely African, but the electric guitar and bass are unmistakably influenced by American blues. Specifically,  American blues filtered through rock bands like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix according to their lead guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.   

The band is composed of rebel Taureg tribesman from the Sahara who moved to Libya in the 1980s to receive military training from Gaddafi. Another name they call their band is The Collective, so that should give you an idea of at least one component of their politics. Today, the mercenaries Gaddafi brought in to bolster his regime are primarily Tauregs.  And so we have West African rebels in blue jeans, listening to rock and soul music, spouting Marx, waving the Koran and worried most of all about clan feuds as we drop bombs on them. Tilt your head a certain way and I suppose it makes some sort of sense.

Of course, in between then and now Tinariwen and other Malian bands landed record contracts and tour dates in the West, but how that happened is a story for another post.

14 Years later

The album which morphed into the Buena Vista Social Club was originally intended to be a collaboration between musicians from Cuba and Mali. Problems with passports, visa or scheduling caused the Malian musicians to miss the original recording date so the producer cobbled together the group that eventually recorded the well received album.

As Will Hodgkinson in his article AfroCubism: Buena Vista take two relates, ""The conversations I  had with the Malian musicians after Buena Vista came out consisted of two subjects. They were: 'Oh shit', and 'When can we try doing it again?'" says Gold, who has finally made his planned Afro-Cuban collaboration happen, 14 years after the event."  

Above is a clip of the musicians finally playing together. 

Such a collaboration isn't at all surprising. West African music moved across the Atlantic with the slave trade and through the Caribbean where it split north to the States and south to Brazil. Since then the Caribbean, American and Brazilian have reflected their influences back to West African.  

Below is a clip featuring Toumani Diabate, from the AfroCubism clip above, playing with Ali Farke Toure who's music I linked to in my previous post Father & Son. In that earlier clip the blues influences were obvious, in this clip one can hear the subtle Latin influences.