Reuters Spillover from the overthrow of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi last year has been stirring a toxic cocktail of rebels, weapons, refugees, drought, smugglers and violent militants in Africa's turbulent Sahel region. Now this backwash of instability from one field of the Arab Spring has now claimed its first government south of the Sahara — with this week's coup in Mali, where renegade low-ranking officers in the West African state toppled President Amadou Toumani Toure. They overthrew him early on Thursday because they said his government had not adequately supported the Malian army's fight against an advancing Tuareg-led rebellion in the north that was swelled by arms and former pro-Gaddafi fighters from Libya. “It was a cascade effect,” said Yvan Guichaoua, a lecturer in African politics at the University of East Anglia, speaking to Reuters from the Malian capital Bamako where the mutinous soldiers have been stealing vehicles and looting petrol stations and businesses. But despite frequent bouts of gunfire, there appears to have been relatively little bloodshed so far. Mali, Africa's third largest gold miner and a major local cotton grower, was viewed on the continent and in the wider world as a relatively stable democratic state in a permanently restless region dogged for decades by coups and mutinies. It was an ally of regional and Western governments in their efforts to stop attacks and kidnappings by Al-Qaeda-associated militants from spreading southwards down through the Sahara. Such violence is already causing bloodshed in Africa's top oil producer Nigeria, in the form of the Boko Haram sect. “It's clearly unfortunate for Mali ... This is plunging one of the most stable countries in West Africa into instability,” Gilles Yabi, the Dakar-based West Africa project director for the International Crisis Group think tank, told Reuters. “Disputes should not be resolved by arms. It's a bad sign for other countries which are in the process of consolidating their democracies,” said Nadia Nata, political governance officer at the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). The United States had been providing counter-terrorism training to Mali's army. One of the coup leaders, Captain Amadou Sanogo, president of the newly formed National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDR), said he received training from US Marines and intelligence. But the overnight coup, carried out apparently by mid-level and junior officers, will put an end to such support for the moment. The World Bank, the African Development Bank and European Commission have all suspended aid funding to Mali. The coup leaders of the CNRDR have promised to hand power back to a democratically-elected president “as soon as the country is reunified”. But the Tuareg rebels in the north, whose recent battlefield humiliations of the Malian army triggered the putsch in Bamako, are already pushing south, taking advantage of the confusion. The coup chiefs' seeming inability to control the soldiers under their command, to judge by the pillaging and wild shooting in the streets, bodes ill for the immediate future.“There is no clear agenda ... what will happen next is very unclear,' said Guichaoua. ICG's Yabi said: “This is giving an impression of chaos”. The uncertainty was compounded on Friday when the African Union said it was told President Toure was still in Mali, safe and protected by loyalists, not far from Bamako. Amnesty International said coup leaders had arrested several members of Toure's government. It demanded their release. Despite Toure's public image as a steadfast “Soldier of Democracy”, analysts said Western backers like France and the United States had been less than happy recently with his government's efforts in countering the threat of Al-Qaeda and its allies in Mali's vast and remote desert north. __
