Almamy SYLLA, Associate Professor, Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ULSHB)
Mali has had complicated relations with European states and the EU throughout the post-colonial period with regard to the management of readmission and its migrants in Europe. Despite the presence of a strong Malian colony in Europe, the public authorities have long been reluctant to comply with external injunctions in terms of externalized border management and migration policies, to the point that some analysts likened Mali to a bad student in global migration governance, i.e. one that always does the opposite of what it is asked to do. Mali has long acted in this way because of pressure from diasporic communities on governments to protect irregular migrants of Malian origin. However, there have been profound changes in this approach to migration management by the Malian public authorities. Indeed, for the past 10 years, Mali has been at the heart of the EU’s outsourced migration and border initiatives. The Valletta Summit was an accelerator in the history of outsourced migration governance in Mali, as so many initiatives, comparable to outsourced migration and border management policies of the EU, are at work in Mali, most often by proxy or under the radar.
Introduction
Mali has been at the heart of the discourse and practices of externalization of migration policies and borders from Europe to Africa for more than four decades. Europe’s renewed attention to Mali can be explained by its centrality on the migratory routes linking Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe on the one hand, and on the other hand the existence of a strong political economy of migration and mobility built around the secular lifestyles and initiation rites of its citizens. This has led Bruijn, Dijk and Foeken[1] to say that there is a “culture of mobility” and Hahn and Klute[2] “a culture of migration” in Mali that have been able to maintain themselves and resist historical and political contingencies in the long term.
The Malians who began to discover Europe through colonization constituted one of the largest contingents of the 60,000 Africans who lived in France at the end of the Second World War.[3] These migrant workers, for the most part, have become a difficult equation for the political powers in Europe, particularly in France, to solve because of the dependence of European economies on cheap labour, and because of the economic crisis of the 1970s. The economic crisis of the 1970s gave rise to feelings of withdrawal into identity and national preferences in the satisfaction of the needs of the labour market. This pushed political regimes to adopt restrictive measures to regulate labour migration in the post-war period and to encourage, or even coerce, classes of labour migrants, the undocumented, to return to their countries of origin through expulsion and state coercion.
Thus, in 1974, the political powers in France decreed the end of policies for the reception and employment of foreign workers, synonymous with the loss of the right of residence[4] and the production of undocumented workers. Mali and France tried to agree on migration protocols, which ended in political failures. As a result, France decided to expel undocumented migrants by means of charter flights, including the infamous 101 Malians of the Bernard Church in Paris in October 1986. The Charter of 101 Malians was a decisive turning point in the postcolonial management of Malian foreign workers in France. It has provoked strong reactions in both France and Mali through militant activism by pan-Africanist organizations and the defense of migrants’ rights[5]. It was this vast current of protest and indignation that aroused nourished the idea of creating migrant self-organizations in Mali at the end of the 1990s.[6]
It is in this context that the Association of Expelled Malians (AME) was created to demand that the public authorities provide better conditions for return and the requirement of a dignified return to the country of origin. Starting from this pioneering experience in Sub-Saharan Africa, migrants began to organize and demand the application of their rights, since democratic openness allowed them to exercise the rights to citizenship and free association. The paradox is that at the same time the expulsions of migrants were taking place on board charter flights without interruption. While the political bases of what would become the Schengen Zone, which advocated the noble vision of free movement, were slowly being put in place in Europe.[7]
As public opinion became more and more attentive to the cries de coeur of migrants’ organizations, large-scale transnational organizations began to take an interest in the expulsions of migrants from Europe, mainly in France, which had long been the preferred destination for sub-Saharan migrants, including Malians. This is how we see a decisive turning point in the way in which the issue of undocumented migrants is dealt with at the turn of the year 2000. It is during this period that the migration-security-development nexus[8] begins to be experienced because of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States of America.
This new paradigm permeates all development policies in Mali from this period to the present day, including European interventions in terms of security and the fight against terrorism in Mali. This new paradigm also goes hand in hand in the Global South with the implementation of drastic and selective procedures for the issuance of Schengen visas, the intervention of brokers in the issuance of visas (i.e. service providers of Western embassies), new identification technologies, tracing and sorting of migrants at land borders, maritime and airport transport. This is to say that the criminalization of irregular migration is unfairly seen as a breeding ground for international terrorism and transnational crime.
As far as Mali is concerned, this period saw the birth of two new EU tools/discoveries: the European Agency for the Management of Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (Frontex) and the enforcement of readmission policies. The establishment of Frontex is the materialisation of this new paradigm of migration and border management by the EU. Frontex has proven more effective in containing irregular migrants in EU bordering countries in Africa. But at the same time it has sadly distinguished itself by rights violations and migrant shipwrecks that Mbembe describes as the most successful manifestation of an EU’s necro-politics[9] to decide the life or death of who should enter Europe. This particular way of managing the EU’s external borders through the use of violence foreshadowed the “migration crisis” of 2015 that claimed the lives of hundreds of Malian migrants in the Mediterranean.[10]
The time of (dis)admission agreements
Following the reactions of civil societies against expulsions that we have described above and concomitantly with the implementation of the externalised mechanisms of the EU’s borders, readmission agreements have been rethought as an alternative strategy to expulsions and of sharing responsibility in the act of expulsion between the expelling and receiving states. It was in this context that Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior of France, visited Mali in May 2006 with a view to popularizing the chosen migration policy with the Malian government on the one hand, and Brice Hortefeux, then Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development of France, on the other, visited Mali in 2007 to finalize readmission agreements.
(In)junctions and refusals
Once again, migrant self-defense organizations, the Malian left and anti-globalization activists have risen up against this new outsourced policy of migration management in Mali through protest marches, meetings and speeches. The readmission agreements, under the guise of legal migration, were seen by migrants’ associations and the Malian left as likely to “reinforce the feeling of complicity and assumed participation of the Malian state in the expulsion of its nationals”.[11]
Faced with pressure from the street and that of diasporic communities, the Malian side capitulated, claiming that it did not agree with the clauses of the agreement relating to identification, the issuance of the pass by Malian consulates and the accompaniment of candidates for expulsion by Malian police. In reaction to this refusal by the Malian side, France, which had promised to legalize 1500 Malian irregular migrants per year as the counterpart of the enforcement of readmission agreements, suspended its cooperation aid to Mali[12]. The state of Mali has found itself between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, it must bow to the injunctions of France and the EU to continue to benefit from development aid[13], and, on the other hand, it must give in to pressure from the street (the front of refusal) to preserve the fragile socio-political balance. Faced with these two irreconcilable positions, the State of Mali decided not to sign the readmission agreements.
Faced with the failure of Mali to sign readmission agreements, the EU nevertheless managed to set up the Migration Information and Management Centre (CIGEM) in Mali, one of whose main missions was to raise awareness and prevent irregular migration. The creation of CIGEM follows a series of Euro-African political dialogues around the “Migration-Development” couple. Another stumbling block between Mali and the EU in terms of the externalisation of migration policies was the Laissez-passer Européen (LPE) at that period. In the wake of the implementation of the European Union Trust Funds (EUTF) and the Valletta Action Plan, Mali and the EU have engaged in a negotiation process to agree on the terms of the implementation of the LPE, which should allow the return of Malian nationals residing illegally in EU countries to their countries of origin.
Paradoxical as it may seem, before the agreement on the LPE was finalized, two Malians were deported in August 2016 in Bamako by France on board two flights of the airlines Aigle-Azur and Air-France. This led to a strong protest (street demonstrations) by associations defending the rights of migrants and the questioning of the government by the National Assembly. Following these actions, Mali suspended its participation in the negotiations on the LPE and instructed airline companies to no longer transport migrants to be deported with the LPE. And since then, the negotiations around the LPE seem to have been postponed indefinitely, since the unsuccessful media outing in December 2016 of Bert Koenders, Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, announcing the conclusion of an agreement on the readmission of Malian migrants between the EU and Mali. Mali protested against Koenders’ unsuccessful media outing and disassociated itself with the conclusions and recommendations of the High-Level Dialogue between Mali and the EU on migration.
The post-Valletta market: a soft moment for the implementation of outsourced EU policies in Mali
If there was no consensus on the unsuccessful negotiations of the different generations of readmission agreements between Mali and the EU in the long march of application of externalized migration policies, the formulation and implementation of the National Migration Policy in Mali (PONAM) from 2014 onwards were high entrance points of collaboration between Mali and the EU with regard to migration governance in Mali. Presented as a national initiative to provide a conducive and secure policy instrument for the migration of Malians, the implementation of PONAM has been too dependent on EU development aid and technical support. However, its methods of financing and fund raising have allowed the introduction of border and migration management practices and tools, but “under the radar”,[14] comparable to outsourced policies of border control and migration flows from the EU to Mali.
In this regard, the PONAM can be considered as a “Trojan horse”, or even a moment of opening up of Mali to EU policies in an organized political framework. As a result, all the projects implemented in Mali in the wake of the EUTF and the Valletta Action Plan have tried to work on the retention of candidates for irregular migration on the spot and the organization of the return of those stranded in transit countries in North Africa and the Maghreb. These retention practices, which are particular ways of dealing with the evil at the source, have been deployed around economic recovery projects and the creation of job opportunities in Mali.
While this approach is more flexible in applying outsourced measures of irregular migration management in situ and most often “under the radar”, it should be noted that the contexts of insecurity and the fight against terrorism in Mali are not conducive to irregular migration. Thus, the areas through which the main routes[15] are located have become not only battlefields between the regular armies of the Sahel and jihadist, terrorist and secessionist groups, but also a laboratory for experimenting with border control tools and measures through mixed interventions (i.e. cooperation between national security forces and operations to stabilize and fight transnational crime). These measures compensate for the official implementation of Frontex, which has been working in Mali for years by proxy and away from the gaze of migrants’ associations, through alert and monitoring cells and mechanisms for collecting information on candidates for irregular migration at border posts and airports.[16]
As a result, the criminalization of irregular migration, the intervention of the armed forces in border control in the name of the fight against terrorism and insecurity, and the judicialization of the cross-border issue through the creation of the Specialized Judicial Unit for the Fight against Terrorism and Transnational Crime, not only freeze the livelihoods of the populations in Mali, but also make whole swathes of the national territory and migration routes grey zones, whereas these areas should be free movement and free trade zones under the ECOWAS protocol in 1979.[17]
These outsourced measures and tools are sufficient evidence that Europe, which has long been considered the cradle of universalism and the symbol of the free world, is barricading itself and closing itself off to third countries such as Mali, which has become a third state in the global architecture of migration governance which has become highly hierarchical.
This closure consisted of the EU first establishing a partnership with countries in the Maghreb and North Africa, which are on the main routes used by irregular migrants, most of whom come from sub-Saharan African countries such as Mali. Thus, countries such as Libya, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have begun to barricade their borders, to implement hostile and inhospitable policies against sub-Saharan migrants[18] and to use migrants as a weapon in diplomatic relations between transit countries, countries of origin and EU states (i.e. Italy and Libya).[19] At the same time that Europe is applying closure policies dangerously and shamelessly, we are increasingly witnessing a very selective issuance of visas (by EU countries) that should allow legal migration. While visa applications are not weakening, visa refusals are increasing. This has created a kind of rent for the EU on visa rejections, which allowed it to make 130 million euros[20] in 2013 on the misery of those to whom it has always dedicated itself to developing in the Global South.
Footnotes
[1] Mirjam de Bruijn, R.A. Dijk et D.W.J. Foeken (2001). Mobile Africa. Changing patterns of movement in Africa and beyond. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
[2] Peter Hans Hahn et Geog Klute (2007). Cultures of Migration – African Perspectives. Publisher: Lit.
[3] François Manchuelle (1997). Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848–1960. Athens: Ohio University, p.2.
[4] Danièle Lochak (2020). Les circulaires Marcellin-Fontanet. Hommes & migrations, 1330. pp.14-17. 10.4000/hommesmigrations.1135.halshs-03478831.
[5] Jean-Philippe Dedieu et Assetou Mbodj-pouye (2016). The first collective protest of black African migrants in postcolonial France (1960 – 1975): a struggle for housing and rights. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(6), pp.958–975. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1081964
[6] Johanna Siméant (2014). Contester au Mali. Formes de mobilisation et de la critique à Bamako. Paris: Karthala/Les Afriques, p. 156.
[7] See the Agreement on the gradual abolition of checks at common borders, 14 June 1985, Schengen.
[8] Marie Deridder, Lotte Pelckmans et Emilia Ward (2020). Reversing the gaze: West Africa performing the EU migration-development-security nexus. Introduction. Anthropologie & développement, 51, pp.9-32.
[9] Achille Mbembe (2019). Necropolitics. Durham and London: Duke University press.
[10] Almamy Sylla et Susanne U. Schultz (2020). Commemorating the deadly other side of externalized borders through “migrant-martyrs”, sacrifices and politizations of (irregular) migration on the international migrants’ day in Mali. Comparative Migration Studies, 8, pp. 1-17.
[11] Clara Lecadet (2011). Le front mouvant des expulsés. Lieux et enjeux des regroupements et des mobilisations collectives des migrants expulsés. PhD dissertation in Anthropology. Paris: Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, p. 149.
[12] See Signe-Marie Cold-Ravnkilde (2021). Borderwork in the Grey Zone: Everyday Resistance within European Border Control Initiatives in Mali. Geopolitics, 27(5), pp. 1450–1469. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1919627 ; and Boulaye Keita, Boulaye and Soumana A. Maïga (2022). La mise en œuvre du plan d’actions de la Valette au Mali: Initiatives de dissuasion migratoire et de « réinsertion » des migrants de retour pour quel résultat ? L’Espace Politique, 46(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/espacepolitique.10900
[13] See Sadio Soukouna (2020). État malien entre négociations et résistances dans la formulation de politiques sur les migrations. Anthropologie&Développement, 51, pp. 69-84; and Aino Korvensyrjä (2017). The Valletta Process and the Westphalian Imaginary of Migration Research. Movements: Jg. 3, Heft 1. pp. 191-204.
[14] Signe-Marie Cold-Ravnkilde (2021). Borderwork in the Grey Zone: Everyday Resistance within European Border Control Initiatives in Mali. Geopolitics, 27(5), pp. 1450–1469. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1919627
[15] Almamy Sylla et Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde (2023). En Route to Europe? The anti-politics of deportation from North Africa to Mali, In: The Long Shadow of the Border, Routledge, pp. 74-93.
[16] Mali has been a member of the Africa-Frontex Intelligence Community network (AFIC) since 2010.
[17] See ECOWAS Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons and the Right of Residence and Establishment was concluded in Dakar on 29 May 1979.
[18] Almamy Sylla (2020). L’aventure libyenne et ses vécus politiques et sécuritaires pour les migrants maliens. Anthropologie & développement, (51), pp.137-153.
[19] Ali Bensaâd (2012). L’immigration en Libye: une ressource et la diversité de ses usages, Politique africaine, n° 125(1), pp. 83-103. https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.125.0083
[20] Benjamin Fox (2024). EU cashes in on €130m in rejected visa applications. Eurobserver, 5th June 2024. https://euobserver.com/eu-and-the-world/ar1aabb08b?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2ZrbnRd-gDUWD23M14l91gMEF9jznOBPzhgdQhRkfkaNR41x3uHjmZe8s_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw&sfnsn=scwspwa