The Struggle for Mali
When fighters linked to al-Qaida swept into Timbuktu on 1 April 2012, Dr Ibrahim Maiga found himself living a nightmare. The new rulers of west Africa’s most famous centre of Islamic scholarship immediately set about destroying its history. Over the following months they set fire to thousands of ancient manuscripts, destroyed the mausoleums of local holy men and forced musicians into exile. For the invaders, many of whom were from Algeria and other parts of the region, “saint worship” and music were un-Islamic. The new sharia court wasted no time issuing death sentences to anyone who violated its creed.
State officials fled before the onslaught, and Dr Ibrahim became the most senior medic in Timbuktu. Overnight, he found himself responsible for providing healthcare to a population of 60,000. “The first responsibility of government is governance, then security,” he said. “But the state left. They all ran away.”
The rebellion had started that January. Tuareg nationalists who had served in the army of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had returned from Libya the previous summer, armed with heavy weapons plundered from the collapsing regime’s arsenal. They then launched an uprising in pursuit of an independent Tuareg homeland in northern Mali. The government’s shambolic mismanagement of the uprising angered army chiefs, and in March they conducted a coup in the capital Bamako, hundreds of miles to the south. With the state in disarray, the Tuareg rebels teamed up with Islamist groups, and together they drove the army out of northern Mali – an area the size of Spain. But the jihadists soon cast the Tuaregs aside and imposed their own brutal form of governance across the northern regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.
The occupation lasted 10 months. On 28 January 2013, French and Malian troops retook Timbuktu, and it was placed under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers. UN vehicles still patrol the town, guarding it from bandits who raid the surrounding villages. But while the UN provides essential services, the government has yet to return. The few officials who have ventured north have been threatened, or simply assassinated. This June, a senior UN official in Timbuktu told us that “the return of administrators is a key priority”, but they admitted that many of the Malian officials who had been flown into the north on UN planes quickly abandoned their posts.
In the state’s absence, Mali’s northern desert has become a vast, lawless expanse at the centre of west Africa; a crossroads for drugs, people and arms that links territories held by Boko Haram in Niger and Nigeria to the bases of veteran jihadists in Libya and Algeria. It is a security nightmare for west Africa, and increasingly for Europe, which fears the creation of yet another haven for terrorism.
Despite the presence of UN peacekeepers and ongoing French counter-insurgency operations, Islamist militants have attacked civilian targets all over Mali. At least 342 people have been killed this year alone. Driving into towns on motorbikes, gunmen have torched government buildings and executed local officials. In March, a lone attacker hurled a grenade into La Terrasse, a popular nightclub in Bamako, then opened fire with an automatic weapon, killing five people. The most deadly attack came last week, on Friday 20 November, when 170 people were taken hostage at the Radisson Blu, a luxury hotel in the capital. Before the captives could be liberated, 19 were killed. Two foreign jihadist groups, al- Mourabitoun and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, claimed responsibility.
The next day, the Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta delivered a defiant statement outside the hotel, declaring that terrorism would not win. But the attack highlighted once again the chronic weakness of the Malian state.
The army’s ousting from the north, political turmoil in Bamako and the rise of banditry and terrorism have exposed a system that is corrupt and ineffective at almost every level. With the government unable to provide basic services to much of the population, many Malians have turned to more traditional sources of social support, material assistance and moral leadership – their imams.
In Timbuktu, three years after the jihadist occupation, one of the most prominent local religious leaders is Daouda Ali Maiga, who presides over a vast mosque on the outskirts of the city. When we met one evening earlier this year, lightning flashed outside and the wind whistled around the building as the first rainstorm in 18 months thrashed down on the roof. The electricity was out, and the ageing imam’s face was illuminated from below by a solitary torch. Around him, his students sat in the shadows, listening to his measured words. Like Dr Ibrahim, he stayed in Timbuktu throughout the occupation. As the headmaster of the Askia Daoud Centre, he ran one of the largest schools in the city.
“Today we have over 400 students and 19 teachers. We teach all subjects, not just Islam, but languages and modern sciences. We teach boys and girls, from seven years old onwards,” he said.
There are other schools in Timbuktu, but Daouda’s is special: when the economy was shattered by war he decided to stop charging fees. To fill the funding gap, he tapped into Islamic charities based in the Gulf, and activated his personal network of contacts from the years he spent in Saudi Arabia. He has even secured funding to send the best students to study in the Gulf. When he set up the centre, the imam of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca sent his own son to attend the opening ceremony.
Soldiers patrol outside the hotel in Bamako that was attacked by Islamic extremists. Photograph: Jerome Delay/AP
But locally, Daouda’s reputation has been tarnished by his involvement with the jihadists during the occupation. One day, a 25-year-old called Mahaman Diedou was accused of stealing a sack of rice. He was brought before the sharia court, which ruled that he should have his hand amputated. It was Dr Ibrahim, the medic, who had to tend to his stump after the sentence was carried out. Daouda was one of the judges.
Daouda insists that he took up the position under duress. During the occupation, armed jihadists would come to his mosque for Friday prayers. “If someone came to your mosque to pray and had a gun, would you refuse to pray with them?” he asked. “They forced people to do things. If you are with someone in appearance but oppose them in your heart you are not really with them.”
But there was a reason why the jihadists selected him as a judge. Daouda is a Salafist, a Saudi-trained scholar who had long preached against the Sufi practice of praying at the graves of holy men. He continues to espouse a deeply conservative faith that is at odds with the syncretic Islam, which blends many religious customs, that is traditionally practised in Mali.
Daouda eventually resigned from the sharia court, not because its sentences were too extreme, but because the jihadists refused to execute one of their own Arab fighters who killed a child. “They believed that the soul of a white person is more important than the soul of a black person,” he explained.
Imam Daouda Ali Maiga is a prominent religious leader in Timbuktu. Photograph: Jack Watling for the Guardian
Despite his role in abuses during the occupation, Daouda has remained an influential figure in Timbuktu. With state authorities all but absent from the region, an investigation into his collaboration with the jihadists has been dropped, and his school remains one of the biggest providers of education in town.
The collapse of the state has if anything increased Daouda’s influence and drawn greater attention to his teachings, but his Salafism was controversial before 2012. Daouda’s beliefs, at odds with the religious practices of a majority of his community, are deemed by many to be, like the jihadists, foreign. His connections to Saudi Arabia lead to accusations that he serves foreign interests. And yet, for all that, he continues to attract followers, expanding a communal divide.
The divisions that have hung over Timbuktu since the jihadist occupation reflect a struggle that affects the whole of Mali. The November attack was a reminder that a plethora of militant Islamist groups, many with their origins in Algeria, are free to operate in Mali. However they are not the only foreign forces seeking to change the way Islam is practised there. Local religious leaders, backed by foreign charities and governments, are pushing rival interpretations of the faith that are creating deep tensions in Malian society.
***
In July 2012, when the Malian government decided to send an envoy to talk with the jihadists occupying Timbuktu, they did not send a diplomat. They sent Mahmoud Dicko, president of the High Islamic Council of Mali. When Mali was desperate for foreign help in resolving the ongoing crisis in the north, it was not the foreign minister who toured Europe, but Dicko and his deputy, Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara, along with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bamako, Jean Zerbo. When a local community needs a new mosque, they do not call the Ministry for Religious Affairs. They call Dicko. Neither Dicko nor Haïdara holds government office, but they have the power to mobilise street protests that can prevent laws being passed.
Although they work together, the two men are bitter rivals. Dicko heads the minority Salafist community, a recent addition to Mali’s colourful patchwork of religious groups. Haïdara, who has roots in the Maliki tradition that has dominated Mali since the 13th century, is one of the richest, most influential holy men in west Africa. Malikism, a school of Islamic jurisprudence, incorporates communal custom to assist in interpreting the Qur’an and hadith, a practice rejected by more literal interpretations of the faith.
Both Dicko and Haïdara exemplify how religious patronage has supplanted the institutions of the Malian state. In their spiritual role, they wield immense moral authority, and through the essential services they fund, have a practical relevance to the lives of ordinary Malians in regions where the government has disappeared.
Mahmoud Dicko, president of the High Islamic Council of Mali Photograph: Paul Raymond for the Guardian
Dicko was born in 1954 in the desert village of Tonka, near Timbuktu. Son of a religious judge, he was raised by a conservative family and memorised the Qu’ran by the age of 15. Wahhabism, the austere form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, has had a presence in Mali since the 19th century, when it was brought back by Malians who had travelled to Mecca on hajj. It won few converts as it rejected the mixing of local traditions with strict Islamic law. But during Dicko’s teenage years, Saudi charities began to fund mosques and schools in Mali’s cities, and some young Malians were offered the chance to go to Saudi Arabia to study. Dicko was among them. After a short spell studying Arabic in Mauritania, he headed to Medina, the second most holy city in Islam, where he studied Islamic theology.
On his return to Mali, Dicko worked briefly as an Arabic teacher, then, like many of the early Gulf-educated graduates, became an itinerant preacher, giving sermons and leading prayers around Bamako. He quickly built up a following, and in 1983 a community of Salafists invited him to become imam of a mosque in Badalabougou, a middle-class suburb of Bamako.
Haïdara was born a year after Dicko , near the city of Ségou in the south of Mali. Educated at a French school, he began preaching as a teenager in Bamana, a language spoken across Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Senegal. He continued his religious education under Saad Touré, a local scholar steeped in Mali’s Maliki traditions. Haïdara moved to Bamako and began to distribute his sermons on cassette. By 1991, when mass protests prompted the army to overthrow the dictatorship of Moussa Traoré, Haïdara had gathered a large following.
Traoré’s government had long suppressed civil society, but the 1991 constitution created a new space for cultural and religious expression. Religious organisations were quick to take advantage, and hundreds of new Islamic associations were founded. Few would be as influential as Haïdara’s Ansar Dine (Arabic for “defenders of the faith”). Over the course of the 1990s, its membership grew into the tens of thousands. Relying on private donations, Haïdara established a nationwide network of schools, hospitals and mosques.
But given the country’s secular constitution, these associations had little political clout. Mali has been officially secular since its independence, a legacy of French colonialism. The state has become so detached from religious institutions that a senior UN official liaising with the Malian government in Bamako earlier this year told us that “Malian society is not fundamentally religious”.
In 2002, a group of senior imams set out to change this state of affairs by establishing the High Islamic Council, widely referred to by its French acronym, HCIM. The council brought together around 400 Islamic associations, giving them a platform through which they could coordinate their activities and influence government. Dicko and Haïdara, both influential preachers and respected imams, were elected to its executive committee. In 2007, Dicko was elevated to the presidency. The Salafists were on the rise, and the council was to become a key player in Malian politics.
In August 2009, the Canadian government and other donors pressed the Malian parliament to change the country’s conservative Personal Status and Family Code. Under the proposed new law, girls would have more inheritance rights, women would no longer be required to obey their husbands, and only secular marriages would be recognised. The HCIM saw the bill as un-Islamic. Dicko and his colleagues mobilised protests across the country. Tens of thousands demonstrated on the streets of Bamako. Weeks later, under intense pressure from the HCIM, the then president Amadou Toumani Touré refused to sign the bill into law. It was a turning point in Mali’s hitherto largely secular politics: a religious organisation had shown it could stop the government in its tracks.
The events of 2012 only increased the HCIM’s power. The army’s rapid retreat from the north exposed widespread corruption, prompting a collapse of confidence in the political class. Imams became the sole surviving source of moral authority. Unlike any of the country’s politicians, Dicko and Haïdara are both treated like rock stars by their supporters. And theirs is a popularity that politicians cannot afford to ignore. These days, President Keïta telephones Dicko twice a week.
Dicko stays aloof from the day-to-day business of politics, but he wields immense influence behind the scenes. Despite being a small minority of the population, Salafists have come to dominate the HCIM’s executive committee. This position gives them enormous influence, from the presidential palace to the poorest villages in Mali.
One consequence of religion in Mali becoming politicised is that differences in religious practice have become markers for political allegiance, fuelling an increasingly sectarian shift in Malian society. Where people once simply referred to each other as Muslim, they are now labelled Wahhabist, Sufi or Shia – and these labels, meant to suggest links to foreign political agendas, often accompany accusations of sinister intent.
Among the Maliki majority, the Salafist minority’s takeover of the elected leadership of the Islamic Council is the subject of endless speculation. Imam Diallo, a Maliki leader and member of the HCIM executive committee, accuses Dicko of being “a moral referee who has started to kick the ball. How, in a country where only 15% of the population are Salafi, do they have so much power? With funding from Saudi Arabia. Dicko is trying to take over the country.”
***
A few days before the start of Ramadan in June, Combey Adamah explained his faith. Sitting in a small breeze-block shack, nestled amid wiry trees at the top of a hill overlooking Bamako, he was surrounded by a wicker tray of shells, a bible open at Leviticus, and an array of mystical symbols drawn onto the electric blue walls of his dwelling. Adamah is a witch doctor and member of a community of Rastafarians who live above the village of Lassa. In their hilltop retreat, the Rastas smoke weed, listen to reggae music and try and purge themselves of the material excesses of the world. Their beliefs are diffuse, combining Rasta wisdom, new- age spirituality and west African animism.
Witch doctor Combey Adamah explains how he works magic in the front room of his cinderblock house. Photograph: Jack Watling for the Guardian
Adamah is the son of a Christian father and Muslim mother. In Mali this is not unusual. The country has a long tradition of religious tolerance, and most Muslims incorporate indigenous religious practices into their daily lives, along with Islam. The Rastafarians of Lassa rub along happily with their Muslim neighbours.
“Muslims and Rastas are all equal here,” said Dani Camara, the son of a village elder. Lightly bearded and dressed in a long robe that would not be out of place in the Arabian Gulf, Camara was preparing for the Ramadan fast. “We get on fine. We all face the same problem: lack of water.” It was soon clear that Camara had more pressing concerns than the religious beliefs of his neighbours: the village has neither a pharmacy nor a medical clinic. Even in a village that is being swallowed up by the expanding capital, the government does not provide irrigation, decent roads or basic medical facilities. This is a common situation across the country, and a gap that Islamic charities are keen to fill.
One of the most powerful of those charities has its offices just down the hill from the Rasta sanctuary, in a multistorey office block beside a large mosque in north- western Bamako. Al-Farouk – named after the epithet for Omar, the austere second caliph of Islam who is a hero for Salafists – manages projects across Mali. Al-Farouk’s director, Imam Ibrahim Kantao, sat behind an ornate desk in his immaculate, air-conditioned office, signing cheques and approving plans for new initiatives. As well as sponsoring more than 300 mosques, 30 medical clinics and several schools, Al-Farouk runs the University of the Sahel, where 400 students learn Arabic, Islamic law and computer science.
Al-Farouk’s financial backers come from across the Gulf, Turkey and the UK. The charity moves more than $3m into Mali every year. It is charities such as Al- Farouk that provide crucial funding to Salafist schools, including the centre run by Daouda Ali Maiga in Timbuktu.
A rastafarian stands with Lassa’s Imam outside the village mosque. Photograph: Jack Watling for the Guardian
But Kantao is much more than the director of a charity. He is a leading figure in the Salafist movement and a founding member of the HCIM’s executive committee. He has risen to the post of HCIM’s director of external relations. The voting system within the HCIM gives each member association one vote, granting disproportionate sway to the Salafists, who also control many of Mali’s NGOs and the funds they disburse.
Kantao was open about wanting to exercise that power to advance their cause: “If you don’t speak out politically then you leave your country to rot,” he said.
He is well connected across the Gulf. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, sends Al- Farouk 400 computers a year for the charity to distribute to its schools and colleges. Maktoum’s charity also worked with Kantao to distribute 20,000 sets of clothes to Malian children in 2013. The best students from the University of the Sahel are sent for further study in Saudi Arabia, where Kantao himself trained as a young man. Kantao is also Dicko’s fixer when it comes to securing connections with the Kingdom.
“If Dicko wants a mosque he often asks me and I raise the funds,” he said. “If he wants contacts in Saudi Arabia he talks to me.” But despite the material benefits it brings into Mali, the Salafist bloc’s Gulf connections make some Malian Muslims deeply uneasy. Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks have shown, in considerable detail, the extent of Riyadh’s efforts to deploy aid in the service of promoting Salafism and to advance the kingdom’s political objectives – including in Mali, where many people now accuse local Salafists of serving foreign interests.
“We totally reject the idea of sending people to Saudi Arabia or elsewhere out of Mali,” said Mohammed Makiba, president of the Young Muslims’ Association of Mali. Makiba’s association was set up in 2007, the same year as Dicko’s election, to create educational and work opportunities for young people. The activities of its members range from establishing a scouting movement to organising blood donations to local hospitals and teaching the elderly to read the Qu’ran. Makiba believes that Islam should be a means for young people to get an education, find work and participate in development – not serve as a conduit for foreign agendas.
“Foreign funding for mosques and schools is a vehicle for foreign ideologies, because the Malian state has no policy on religion,” he said. The state’s history of laïcité has left it blind to the growth of religious groups, and powerless to tackle the expanding sectarian identification within communities. Until the jihadist insurrection of 2012, there was no government department overseeing mosques and religious schools.
Theirno Diallo, a former diplomat who is now minister for religious affairs, is tasked with monitoring an influx of foreign donations to Islamic charities and countering extremism. He has his work cut out: he admitted his department has no data on how many mosques there are in Mali, who runs them, or who funds them. “Today, with all the security problems, we can’t just let people build mosques as they like,” he said. “We need to know who is financing them, why they are being constructed, who are the imams and what message they bring.”
He agreed that the Salafist camp had more access to funding – and more political clout – than the traditional, Maliki majority. “The Salafists are more strategic,” said Diallo. “The other camp is scattered. Even if they’re the majority, they are divided.”
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The man who many Malakis look to for a counterweight to the Salafist rise is Cheikh Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara, who is said to be descended from the prophet Muhammad. For Haïdara, who is a multimillionaire, the connection between the Gulf-educated Salafists and the spread of extremism is indisputable, and he has used the funds at his disposal to promote religious education closer to home.
Cheikh Haidara sits in his palatial reception room on the fourth floor of his home in Bamako. Photograph: Jack Watling for the Guardian
“All extremists come from the Gulf. All of them,” Haïdara pronounced in the thunderous tones of a man who is a spiritual guide to millions. We met Haïdara on the first night of Ramadan in the fourth-floor lounge of his palatial residence in north-eastern Bamako. Sat on one of a dozen white leather sofas, he explained how “students who go to those countries change their views. They make them into Islamists. That’s what we’re concerned about.”
It has become a cliche in the Francophone press to write of Haïdara’s ability to fill a stadium with worshippers. But a visit to his vast complex, which includes a hospital, a school, a fleet of Hummers, a mosque and his vast home, guarded by his army of security men, makes the claim seem like a careless understatement.
As he strode into his mosque to lead Friday prayers, his red silk robe flowing behind him, cries of “Allahu akbar!” and “Haïdara!” rang out from the congregation. Worshippers knelt to kiss his feet. At the entrance two devotees ran up, each to bear away one of his sandals. Inside, he settled on a low stool, in front of two television cameras and a ring of disciples, and as one of his entourage fanned his neck, began the evening’s lesson.
Despite the hundreds of people in the stifling building, Haïdara quickly built an air of intimacy with the congregation. He answered questions and even cracked jokes as he worked through that night’s Qu’ranic text. A young follower at his side read each verse in turn, then Haïdara translated it, explaining the Arabic in Bamana. With his height, deep voice and easy manner, he exuded charm and authority.
Haïdara has become deeply concerned by the politicisation of religion. “The constitution is secular,” he explained. “But some of Mali’s Islamic leadership got involved in politics. I totally reject this.
“Everybody needs religious leaders: they go to them with their dead so they can pray over the funeral. If they have a wedding, they need them to lead the ceremony. If there is a conflict between two people, the imams resolve the situation. Politicians are all against each other. An imam shouldn’t be against anyone.”
Although Haïdara sided with Dicko to block the reforms of the Personal Status and Family Code in 2009, his political interventions have been sporadic and ambiguous. Unlike his Salafist rivals, who are open about the need for religious figures to be moral guides in politics, Haïdara declared emphatically that “as long as we are alive we will resist” making the religious political. It is a battle that most Malians think may already be lost – and there are other reasons why Haïdara is not the best candidate to oppose what he describes as “foreign influence”.
On the wall above the plush couches in his reception room hangs a picture of Haïdara and King Mohammed IV of Morocco. For centuries, Moroccan kings, revered by Muslims across west Africa, have led the Tijaniyyah school of Sufism and taken the title Commander of the Believers. Mali has strong historical connections with Morocco; many of the notable families of Timbuktu hail from Fez, another centre of Islamic learning. Through his connections with the Moroccan royal court, Haïdara has been influential in promoting an initiative to educate 500 Malian religious students in Fez, ostensibly part of Morocco’s efforts to counter extremist ideologies. The fear is that this training is being used as a political tool in the nation’s regional struggle for soft power against Algeria.
Then there are Haïdara’s ties to Turkey. Boxes of Turkish Qu’rans were piled high in his waiting room. On the first night of Ramadan he dined with representatives in his waiting room. On the first night of Ramadan he dined with representatives of Turkey’s Gülen movement, an Islamic organisation that runs a vast network of schools around the world, including in Bamako.
Haïdara’s work with the Moroccan government has provoked criticism even from people who are deeply opposed to the Salafist project. Some accuse the Moroccan programme of only selecting elite candidates and failing to educate those most in need. But others see it as yet another vehicle for foreign religious influence in Mali. Hanan Keïta, a prominent female theologian, voiced an increasingly common fear that the competing agendas of religious communities – often with foreign support – had encouraged Malians to embrace sectarian identities. The schools and training programmes funded by specific sects, she said, deepened fractures among Muslims rather than uniting Malians to confront the many challenges that they and their country face.
“Students learn to be sectarian and only to serve their own constituency – rejecting other sects. That is fanaticism,” she said. “We are not a society where you say the wrong thing and they kill you the next day, but we could become that way.”
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At his modest house on a muddy back street in Bamako, Mahmoud Dicko trimmed his grey goatee, put on a simple black robe and a yellow turban, descended past the chalkboard in the porch where two of his children were doing their chemistry homework, and climbed into an SUV with a hulking bodyguard and two fellow imams. The car rolled to the end of the street, past goats scavenging in a pile of rubbish, and turned towards Senou, where Dicko had been invited to lead prayers at a newly constructed mosque a week before the start of Ramadan.
At the approach to the town, about 25 miles south of Bamako, hundreds of children lined the main road: boys on the left and girls on the right. “God is great,” they cheered in Arabic, “Welcome!” As the car turned onto a muddy track, they raced alongside, laughing, shouting and stretching out to touch the vehicle and get a glimpse of Dicko. A girl of about 12 fiddled with her niqab as she ran. The full face-covering is a rare sight in Mali.
Dicko’s car came to a halt before the mosque, a pristine blue and white building that dwarfed the surrounding mud-brick huts. Over a thousand people had gathered to pray at the opening ceremony, and were spilling out onto the sun- baked courtyard and the dusty street beyond. The imam was lovingly mobbed as he climbed out of the car. His bodyguard pushed through as Dicko picked his way into the mosque. Minutes later, the call to prayer rose from the minaret.
Crowds await the arrival of Mahmoud Dicko at the new mosque in Bamako. Photograph: Paul Raymond for the Guardian
Dicko appeared at the microphone and began his sermon. “The face of Allah delights in he who builds a mosque,” he said in Arabic, quoting the prophet Muhammad. He instantly translated, switching between Arabic and Bamana, his voice booming from the gleaming loudspeakers.
After the sermon and prayers were over, he and his entourage politely muscled their way back through the crowd. Dicko slipped 10,000 franc notes – enough to feed a small family for a week – to a few needy souls. Then he was off, back into town to inaugurate another mosque.
“For 10 years it has been like this,” he said as he took a brief break for a lunch of fish stew. He spoke in clear Arabic with a slight Gulf accent. “Yesterday I was in the office from morning until evening. Sometimes I go for a whole month and only pray once on my own. I have my mosque in Bamako too, but sometimes I go out 100km to a mosque and preach.”
It is easy to see why Dicko is adored by his followers. Approachable and given to smiling, he makes time for anyone. His phone rang every few minutes as he made his rounds. Politicians, fellow imams and villagers in rural Mali constantly call to ask for advice and prayers. Even after dozens of conversations, he never showed a sign of impatience, but carefully considered each request and offered his counsel and blessings. He never turns his phone off. “I don’t want people who need me not to be able to reach me. I find that hard. Even at night I leave it on, out of respect for people,” he said. When asked how many people in Mali have his number, he chuckled. “I don’t know. Maybe all of them.”
Dicko’s sincerity and approachability has enabled him to reach an audience far beyond his core Salafist constituency. His austere lifestyle and dedication to his followers give him a powerful authenticity that many admire, including a large number of young people.
“There has been a big change,” he said, smiling with satisfaction. “Every day people embrace Islam more. Didn’t you see the crowds? It’s like this at every opening of a mosque. It’s the same at openings of schools. And it’s not just the poor, it’s every social class. Now there are mosques in the government schools, colleges, even in military bases and at police stations there are prayer rooms.”
To underline the point, as Dicko’s car passed a police checkpoint on the way to his next engagement, two officers raised their hands in a sharp salute – a remarkable gesture in an officially secular state. This transformation of Malian society is testament to the effectiveness of the Salafist movement. For Dicko, Kantao and Daouda the shift is something to be celebrated. Daouda, the Imam in Timbuktu, talks up the benefits of sending religious students to the Gulf. “People who go abroad find ideas different to those at home. They learn more about the world,” he said.
For the Maliki traditionalists, these changes represent an existential threat that they do not hesitate to associate with the jihadist incursion in the north – and the Malakis are not shy about equating the Salafists’ foreign funding with the foreign jihadists menacing the country. Mohammed Makiba, president of the Young Muslims of Mali, said: “We learned a lesson from 2012. When Malians study abroad they come back with dangerous ideas. These universities abroad don’t just teach Islam. They teach ideologies that are alien to Mali.”
No Criminal Record
Elena Danco cries and knocks at all the high gates of the houses on Episcopiei Street, near the big church in the center of Rășinari town, 15 kilometres from Sibiu. It’s Pentecost Sunday, June 3, 2012 and the streets are empty at 7.30 in the morning. Her sister, Maria Stanciu, is lying in a pool of blood, with her throat cut, and Elena can’t say whether she’s still breathing.
A few minutes ago, Iacob Sas, Maria’s ex-lover, showed up on their way to work. He had a disturbed look and Elena got scared. “Are you coming home?” he asked Mimi, as he used to call Maria. “No!” the woman repeated the answer which she’d been giving him for 33 days on end, since she had left home. Iacob kicked her in the belly, then punched Elena, who interfered to stop him. He took out the knife he had within reach and cut Mimi on the left side of her throat, jumped into his car and drove away.
If the two women had noticed him in due time, they would have avoided him, as they had done the night before. Since Mimi left home with David, the boy she has with Iacob, her former lover kept following her and asking her to come back. He called her relatives, he went to her mother’s house, where Mimi found refuge, he waited for her on her way to and back from the Hilton hotel in Sibiu, where she’d been working with her sister for a couple of months.
Elena calls an ambulance and tries to give her sister heart massage until the doctors arrive. It seems to her that she’s still breathing, though she’s not moving. She starts knocking again at all gates, but one of the houses is empty and another is located in the backyard, where no one can hear her. Eventually, an old woman comes out and looks at the whole scene in terror. Elena asks for a piece of cloth, which she presses to Mimi’s throat to stop the bleeding. She’s down next to her sister, crying. A neighbor passes by and she asks her: “Go home and tell Mum what happened”. The ambulance arrives 20 minutes later, but Mimi’s already dead. The doctors say that that they couldn’t have saved her even if they had been next to her when Iacob stabbed her.
Meanwhile, the man drives to an area in Rășinari called Valea Muntelui. He turns the rear-view mirror to himself and cuts the right side of his throat with the same knife with which he killed Mimi. His brother, Nicolae Sas, and a neighbour find him. They push him to the passenger seat and take him to the Emergency Hospital in Sibiu, where the doctors save his life.
***
A Jesus with brown skin and hypnotic eyes looks at me from the wall of the Maximum Safety Penitentiary in Aiud. Pictures of idyllic sceneries and saints of unnatural proportions painted by the inmates are displayed around. Iacob Sas, a 41-year old man, sits at the table in front of me. He wears a short-sleeved checkered shirt and dark jeans, over which his prominent belly overflows. Though short, Iacob has the robust body, muscular arms and big fists of a man accustomed to hard work. He seems a good-hearted, bald man, with a thinning moustache, who usually goes unnoticed.
He is an exemplary inmate: he participates in social reintegration activities and works to shorten his term. As he has no criminal record and manifests faultless behavior, he will be released on parole in 7 or 8 years – he was sentenced to 16 years and he’s already served 2.
He speaks slowly and weighs each and every word he utters during our conversation of two hours and a half. He speaks about his “infinite” love for Mimi and he turns red with excitement. He clasps the table edges with his pudgy fingers and his voice gains unexpected nuances of tears, laughter, tenderness and fury.
We are in the Aiud Penitentiary to document cases of domestic violence which degenerated into murder. Apart from Iacob, two more men agreed to reveal their stories: Vasile, a 74-year old man who, crying his heart out, tells us that during an argument he slapped his wife of 50 years; the woman hit her head and died. Gheorghe, 47, killed his wife during a fight in Austria, where they had gone to raise money for a better life. Dan, 41, strangled his girlfriend with the keyboard cable during an argument caused by jealousy.
These four men have a few things in common: they have no criminal record, they are all esteemed people in their communities, they don’t come from poor environments, and before the arguments with their partners turned into murder they had hit their wives or lovers once in a while. They are not isolated cases, but no Romanian institution can determine the precise number of women who fall victims to domestic violence or how many of them were killed by their partners. The Romanian National Prison Administration and the Ministry of Justice don’t have clear statistics of the number of men who killed their partners. All is known is the number of people sentenced for murder (709 in 2013), but no information is provided about the context in which those murders were committed. The data provided by the Romanian Police show that over 5,000 cases of domestic violence were registered in 2013, of which 155 were murders, and 75 attempted murders. However, these figures are acts of violence between relatives and no one knows how many were abuses between partners.
Inspector Aurelian Bocan, spokesperson of the Bucharest Police, says that at the moment, in Romania, domestic violence causes more victims than traffic accidents. “Unfortunately, the family has become a more aggressive and more dangerous environment than the street,” he says. The post-Communist social context in Romania potentiates violence, believes anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu. “The media models are violent, and the model of success consists of verbal violence: the one who speaks louder and hits the table more gets on TV.”
***
In 2006, Mimi and her husband at the time went to work in Spain, with the couple who had been witnesses to their wedding – Iacob Sas and his wife, Elena Şogan, and their two children. At the Austrian border, Mimi’s husband, who had been caught working illegally in Greece, was sent back to Romania. Mimi decided to go on without him. Shortly after reaching Spain, Mimi and Iacob started an affair.
When Mimi got pregnant they took responsibility for their relationship and divorced to be together. They stayed in Spain for another two years, then they returned to Rășinari, where Iacob resumed his work as a shepherd: they bought sheep and agriculture machinery and set up a small farm on the land inherited from his parents, in Podu’ Sevișului. However, they were feeling the pressure of a community who was judging them. “See, people in the village inflate, deflate, gossip, it was total mental madness,” says Iacob.
Mimi was the woman whom Iacob, who had already been married twice, had been looking for all his life, and “from bed to home, everything was perfect.” But sometimes a thought would cross his mind that maybe she was staying with him because he had two cars and was decently wealthy. “Is it too good to be true? Is she pretending, only so she can be with me?” he kept asking himself.
Mimi’s father had worked with Iacob at the Astra Museum in Sibiu and he knew that he was a violent man. Besides, Mimi had learned from relatives and friends that Iacob had beaten his former wives, that he used to threaten his first wife, Mioara Iliuț, with the knife and he’d kept his second wife locked in the cellar. “Girl, Mioara is of tougher stock than you and still she couldn’t live with him! What do you think you’ll be able to do?” Mimi’s father warned her.
Iacob’s brother, Nicolae Sas, a family man proud that his 15-year old son can already drive the tractor, also disfavored their relationship. Nicolae, Iacob and their sister, Ana, grew up in a family of hardworking shepherds, who spent most of their time in the fields, tending to their animals.
The parents had the children help them since they were very young and they taught them that if one wants wealth, one has to work. “We didn’t fear our mother that much, she’d mostly just yell at us, but we respected our father: it was enough for him to say once that something was not good,” recalls Nicolae. Iacob’s younger brother has always devoted himself to raising sheep, unlike Iacob, who sold the flock inherited from their parents and got a job. “In all his adventurous life, we sometimes had arguments, we didn’t talk to each other for long periods,” says Nicolae. He doesn’t judge his brother for being a womaniser, but for divorcing twice and “having four children with three women”: one with his first wife, Mioara Iliuț, two with his second wife, Elena Şogan, and another one with Mimi.
“Despite what happened between them in Spain, he shouldn’t have separated and he shouldn’t have left his children from his second wife,” says Nicolae. “I didn’t like what they did.” Despite this, he avoided giving any advice to Iacob, as his brother would easily lose his temper.
***
Rășinari is the oldest village in Mărginimea Sibiului and it has the highest population – 5,600 inhabitants. The place where Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran was born is famous not only for its inhabitants’ wealth, but also for the aggressiveness of the men who fight for land, women or simply because they’re drunk.
A simple search on Google will give a list of local “horrible crimes” – shepherds or young men killed in “cold blood” and scandals at the local pub, parents beaten by their children and children beaten by their parents. In 2012, a group of tourists who had camped on the bank of the Valea Caselor river were attacked with stones and axes by several locals because they had refused to drink with them.
In 2005, Adriana Vidrighin, a social assistant at the town hall, opened a disco in the center of Rășinari. She hired four bodyguards from Sibiu to quiet down those who broke tables, chairs, crates, windows, ash-trays and bottles. “All night long they would find reasons for scandal: ‘Oi, why did you spill beer on me, why did you look at my girl?’,” remembers Vidrighin. As the bodyguards flirted with local girls, a real war burst between them and the villagers, so the bodyguards were forced to find refuge in a cellar to escape.
The Rășinari man likes to have a beautiful woman, says the social assistant, but once she becomes his, she no longer needs to be so beautiful. Because of this, Vidrighin sometimes sees women in Rășinari “wearing make-up,” in other words with bruised eyes.
Aggressiveness is a trait learned in the family, says psychologist Alin Leș, an expert in criminology. “Most of the time they are given directions: ‘Don’t let the woman walk all over you’ or ‘Don’t end up under your woman’s heel’.” A man who develops in such an environment will try to dominate women, and a girl who grows up near an aggressive father will believe that this is how a partner should be.
When Mimi left home for the first time, says Iacob, he was shocked: he had never hit her and there had been no fight between them. The woman simply left out of the blue. “I call everybody, I call her mother and she tells me: ‘She’s done with you’. I thought she was kidding: ‘I’ll come to you right away’. ‘You have no business here,’ she answered.”
Mimi’s native house is up on a hill, on a rough and steep country road. Houses of rich people line the street on both sides: the old, stone houses, some built 100 or 200 years ago, are renovated and in good repair. The inhabitants of Rășinari are hereditary shepherds and they’ve always been rich, even during Communism, when they were not affected by collectivization and could keep their flocks of sheep, paying a quota to the state budget in exchange. Today, people who stayed in the village still raise sheep.
As in the rest of the village, the heavy gates separate family life from the indiscrete eyes of the passers-by. The big wooden blinds on the windows are fully closed. In the neat yard with a tractor, a barn and a coop for the tufted hens, lives Elena Danco, Mimi’s sister, with her husband and their daughter, her mother, Maria Stanciu, and David, Mimi and Iacob’s son. Elena and Mimi’s father died of lung cancer.
Mimi mentioned Iacobs beating her only when the situation worsened and she started to run away from him, says Elena. “She told me once that he beat her black and blue at Podu’ Sevișului, where they keep the sheep, ‘til she fainted. He’d sprinkle her with water ‘til she recovered and then he’d beat her again with a stick.”
“My husband sometimes gave me the odd slap too, everybody quarrels out of trifles, don’t they, but not that much that I’d be afraid to live with him,” says Mimi’s mother, a woman with deep rings under her eyes and wrinkled cheeks. “My man was a drunkard too, we had ups and downs in our life, but anyway, I never saw such things.” Maria Stanciu and her husband had four daughters and they sometimes witnessed their father beating their mother: Mimi, her first born, who would have turned 31 this year, Ana, 29, Paraschiva, 27, and Elena, 25.
Mimi would hide in her parents’ house with her son David for a couple of days, then she would make up with him again. “Either he beat her so much, she wasn’t thinking straight, or… I’ll never understand how he got her to go back to him,” says Elena, a thin woman with a nicely-outlined body, who works in the kitchens of the Hilton Hotel in Sibiu and in a boarding house in Păltiniș, and in her spare time works the land inherited from her parents.
Iacob was very jealous and he allowed his girlfriend to visit her mother or sister only accompanied by him; when she talked on the phone he would sit next to her, recalls Elena. She couldn’t go anywhere by herself: he would drive her to the farm, where she had to do cleaning and work the land. Though she sold meat and dairy products at the market, Mimi had no access to the family money and had to give Iacob all she gained.
Once, when she left home, Mimi got a job at the Hilton Hotel, where her sister was working. The woman felt the need for financial freedom. Again, Iacob convinced her to return home, but he didn’t manage to make her give up the new job.
“That wasn’t a normal schedule: she worked until 12 PM, but 12 wasn’t a fixed hour,” says Iacob. “If there was a wedding or a christening party she had to stay longer. I told her: ‘I never know what time you finish work, what you do, how you do it’.” Besides, says the man, “things had changed, she was no longer the woman I had known before.” Mimi cooked only simple dishes, she no longer tidied up, and their “intimate life was zero.” “And I started telling her off. I never hit her. (Iacob hesitates.) Once she lied to me in Spain, then I wanted to…”
Iacob asked an acquaintance of his, also a Hilton employee, to tell him how Mimi behaved there. He told him that she had no lover, but she spoke on the phone a lot. “Then I understood why she kept a charger in her bag and why she had another phone card,” says the man.
On May 1, 2012, Mimi left home for good, without any reason, says Iacob. “I get home – nobody. Well, it’s clear, she got the habit.” He called everybody again: his relatives, friends, everyone told him to leave Mimi alone. He waited for her a few times when she went to or back from work, but the woman refused to talk to him. Besides, she had begun to behave the way he didn’t like: she was smoking and wearing short dresses.
Because Mimi had changed her phone number, Iacob used to call her mother and her sister every day. He waited for Maria Stanciu on her way to and back from work, asking her to tell her daughter to come back to him. He would follow Elena and Mimi at night on the streets when he knew that the two women were coming back from work together. Sometimes he would come to the house of Mimi’s family and tried the door.
This time Mimi wouldn’t have made up with Iacob again, says Elena. “She was very determined and happy. Sometimes she told me: ‘Now I really feel that I’m living, I’m free, I can rest assured, nobody beats me anymore’.” But Iacob was missing her and couldn’t sleep, though the doctor prescribed him pills. “I turned to the left, I saw some slippers and I got so, so sad; I went into the other room to get dressed, I saw her clothes in the wardrobe and again I got sad.” He often followed her just to see her: “I fed on seeing her passing by,” says he. On Pentecost Sunday, Iacob claims, he hadn’t wanted to kill her. “I only intended to get her to come back home and to ask her to tell me what happened, to analyse, to judge, if you want, but when I opened the car door – I always kept a knife there …”
***
One reaches Podu’ Sevișului, where Iacob and Nicolae inherited land from their father, after a few kilometres on a muddy road, among gardens and meadows with grazing cows. The old wooden sheep pens built by their grandparents were renovated by Nicoale and Iacob. There is no house nearby and the shepherds are the only passers-by. According to Mimi’s relatives, it’s here that Iacob used to beat the woman.
Nicolae Sas also heard the rumors in the village, but he says he’s never seen him beating the woman. He knows that Iacob once beat his first wife, Mioara, and she grabbed a knife to threaten him, but he didn’t witness the scene himself. He did, however, see him fighting with each of the three mothers of his children and he knows that they left home several times.
“Back then I heard that he kept Mimi locked up but I don’t believe this,” says Nicolae. “Once her mother started to yell at me, asking why I had stated in court that I hadn’t seen him beating her. I heard them quarrelling once in a while, I can’t say for sure that he didn’t beat her, but I didn’t see it either.”
When Mimi left home for good, Iacob had the idea that she had an affair with another man. Nicolae knew he was pressing her to get back home and that he complained that he couldn’t sleep. However, he didn’t give it any importance when Iacob told him that he wanted to kill her. “He told everybody, but who believed him? You might say ‘I’ll kill you!’ but you don’t really think of doing it.”
Mioara Iliuț, Iacob’s first wife, is a woman with pale eyes and generous breasts outlined by a deep cleavage, well-known for her rough character. She speaks fast, raising her voice, and has a cynical remark about everyone. She repeats about ten times that “we used to quarrel,” when speaking about her marriage with Iacob, but she claims that the man never hit her.
“He turned mad easily and sometimes he said: ‘You deserve to get slapped hard enough to blow your head off,’ but then he’d calm down,” says the woman. “The truth is that we separated because of our parents. He pulled my hair only once – I had longer hair at the time – and then my father didn’t allow me to live with him any longer.” Iacob was jealous, though Mioara never provided him any reasons for that. When people ask her why she split with the Major, as they nickname Iacob, she answers: “We had some fights and we both came to the conclusion that instead of fighting all the time and beating each other, let’s share everything and God be with us!”
However, a woman from Rășinari who has known Iacob for many years, but has declined to reveal her identity, says that Mioara was sleeping with a knife under the pillow, because she feared Iacob; as for Elena Şogan, his second wife, Iacob used to beat her and treat her like a servant. Even in Spain, though Iacob was already with Mimi, he continued to control Elena, who was shivering in fear of him. The woman also warned us that Elena Şogan wouldn’t admit that Iacob beat her, especially since she keeps in touch with him, often visits him in the penitentiary, and the villagers believe she’s trying to make up with him.
“There were fights, as in any family, but I can’t say that he beat me,” says Elena Şogan from the very beginning. She’s a plump woman, wearing comfortable working clothes. She has fleshy fingers, painted with blue nail polish that chipped on the sides. “He sometimes raised his voice, but I wasn’t such a mild one either, and often I didn’t obey him.”
Her former husband, Iacob, was a womaniser, she tells us, laughing. He slipped up from the very beginning of their 12-year marriage. She turned a blind eye to it and focused more on their two children, while he was trying to be discreet. She also knew when he started an affair with Mimi, but she couldn’t believe the woman would come between them.
When she was married to Iacob, Elena left home a few times. “He never could shut up, and once he started yelling I was off and away; then he’d beg me to come back. If we were in the field, he’d yell at me: ‘Why didn’t you do this and that?’ Of course I wasn’t wasting time, but I was doing something else, and he would swear at me because I hadn’t done one thing or another.” Sometimes the man was jealous. “We were at a wedding and I was wearing this fashionable dress, with three buttons undone and he told me to button one up but I said no.”
Elena found out from her children, who went to visit their father, that Mimi left home several times, but she doesn’t think that he was violent. We ask her whether she still loves her former husband. “Yes, many people think that. You think that I take his side, don’t you?” Elena replies.
Even if people in the village deform reality, “a woman who gets beaten doesn’t go spread it in the street if she has a problem, it’s just not done. Each minds his own family,”, says Maria Iftincă, an old woman from Rășinari. “In a rural, patriarchal society, what I do within the four walls of my house is my business,” anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu confirms. “In this type of society, interfering in a family is an intrusion, both legally and morally. Legally, I don’t have any access to doing therapy with a family, though I have every proof that something wrong is going on there. ‘He’s in his house and one cannot interfere’.” Besides, in Romania, the family remains the main value of society. “How can I come out and admit that I’m a loser, with a broken family – this would be public shame,” says the anthropologist. “Even if you’re willing to do it, there’s one more thing: you’re an informer, how can you bring out intimate business? What you do in your family is your business; did I ask you what you do in your house?”
***
The priest from the Church on the Hill in Rășinari, Ioan Avram, who buried Mimi and held the wedding service for Elena Danco, found out about Mimi having trouble with Iacob from the women’s mother. She no longer knew what to do and where to go, so the priest advised the woman to “follow the path of prayer.” “Women in general come and complain about their husbands being aggressive,” he says. “Many come and say: ‘Father, I’m getting a divorce, I can’t bear it any longer.’ But I urge them to be patient and give them another chance, to pray more, to fast, to confess more often, for as the Saint Apostle Paul says, ‘Man is sanctified by his woman, and woman is sanctified by man’. And some women have managed to succeed through patience.”
“Our problem is that women would rather go to church then come to us,” says Alin Dragomir, chief of the police station in Rășinari. He complains that women don’t denounce their husbands’ abuses, though policemen have always proven to be open to their problems. In Mimi’s case, for instance, they didn’t know the he used to beat her and that he harassed her family after she left him. It was only a week before the murder that one of the woman’s cousins filed a complaint. “I called them both to the station, Iacob and the victim, then they made up with each other and she filed no complaint,” he says.
Though the policeman talked to Mimi alone, she didn’t tell him that she was threatened. The very few women in Rășinari who appeal to the police make up with their husbands in two weeks at the latest and withdraw their complaints, so the criminal investigation can’t go on. Besides, neither the neighbors, nor the relatives report any case of domestic violence. “The inhabitants of Rășinari have this spirit of conservation, they keep everything to themselves, they don’t really like to cooperate,” says police officer Alin Dragomir. And when women end up at the local clinic with traumas, they say they fell and don’t go to the Forensic Department to get a medical certificat which would enable them to file a complaint, says Egri Eduard, a general practitioner in Rășinari.
“Due to the pathological jealousy and the violent outbursts manifested by the defendant repeatedly, his concubine was forced to leave their common home and return with their underage son to her native house in Rășinari, Sibiu county; the cohabitation relationship was resumed only after the defendants’ demands,” reads Sas Iacob-Ilie’s prosecutor’s charge in the archives of the prosecutor’s office attached to the Sibiu County Court.
The witnesses cited in the prosecutors’ charge state that “the victim was the defendant’s concubine, and their relationship was marked by frequent separations caused by jealousy and his violent behavior; starting from May 1, 2012, when the victim left the defendant’s house and refused to resume their relationship, the defendant repeatedly threatened her with death.”
“For almost a month, after requests and threats, addressed in direct conversations or in phone messages or conversations, defendant Sas Iacob-Ilie tried to convince Stanciu Maria to resume their relationship and return to his house, but the victim rejected these requests,” it continues.
Over the two years since he was imprisoned in the Aiud Penitentiary, Iacob has continued to think about Mimi and sometimes talks to her. He’s tormented with doubts and keeps wondering whether the woman was with another man after she left him. He asked the prosecutor who investigated the case to find out during the autopsy examination whether she had sexual intercourse in the last 24 hours before the murder, but the prosecutor was outraged by such a request.
The inmates who serve their first sentence can’t bring themselves to accept their guilt, says Ioana Reuț, a penitentiary psychologist. “They try to find all sorts of excuses – she was cheating on me, her family interfered between us – so as to somehow sweeten the story and help them get over their own deeds more easily.” Besides, Reuț adds, these men are not aware that dominating a woman, controlling, hitting her is a crime, since this is what they’ve seen in the environment they come from.
“A crime belongs to everybody, not to a single person, as it concerns us all,” says Alin Leș, an expert criminologist and psychologist. He believes that the moral guilt of a community which didn’t interfere lies behind this murder. “This might have been avoided by filing a complaint, by insisting more on your own child’s rational thinking and by all the other wives’ letting the police know about the abuses they suffered,” Leș adds. “People knew what was going on, but nobody did anything. It’s discordant that Iacob had no criminal record and yet we learn from various sources that he used to beat people, be violent, torment women. In fact, he did have a criminal record, only it wasn’t written down.”
***
A 7-year old, weak, toothless boy with sharp elf-like ears sits by Mimi’s grave. David, the boy growing up with his grandmother and aunt, comes to the cemetery each day to talk to his mother. He tells nobody how sad he is, and lately he’s stopped crying so much for his mother. The worst is March 8, Mothers’ Day, when the teacher tells the children to invite their parents to the event. “Mommy is dead and my father is a murderer,” David answered a villager who asked him who his parents were. He doesn’t like to hear people fighting and if someone raises one’s voice at home, he gets scared. His schoolmates are sometimes mean to him and, when they pass by the church, they tell him: “Look, this is where your mother died.”