Mali Rebels Agree on Further Talks With Mediators

Northern Mali's Tuareg-led rebels said on Tuesday they have agreed to another round of talks with the government after the rebel coalition said it was not ready to sign a preliminary U.N.-brokered deal.

Rebels and northern community leaders said on Monday the proposed deal, which took months to thrash out and had already been signed by the government based in the southern capital of Bamako, did not go far enough in meeting their demands for autonomy.

“We agreed that there should be another meeting with the mediators and Mali government,” Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, a spokesman for MNLA, said by telephone from Kidal. He said the date and place of the meeting was to be decided.

U.N. and government officials were not immediately available for comment.

Mediators and diplomats including from the United Nations, African Union, France, China, Russia and Algeria, met with the rebels in their northern stronghold town of Kidal on Tuesday to salvage the peace process.

A collapse in peace talks could leave open the question of north Mali's political status indefinitely, a factor that may be exploited by Islamist militants active in the region.

The proposed deal aims to end decades of insurgency by Tuareg rebels.

Hundreds of residents marched in the Tuareg stronghold on Tuesday carrying banners saying “We won't sign” and waving flags for a region they call Azawad, witnesses said.

“This decision is entirely theirs,” Pierre Buyoya, high representative of the African Union for Mali and the Sahel, told Radio France Internationale in Kidal. “Our mission is to encourage them to take the right decision which is to sign.”

They last rose up in 2012 and briefly allied themselves with Islamist militants to seize the desert north. A French-led military intervention scattered the Islamists but the political status of the north has remained unresolved.

MNLA, a group of secular Tuareg rebels in the wider Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), said it rejected the proposal because it “did not take into account the legitimate aspirations of the people of Azawad”.

“It will be difficult [to sign] for all of the reasons we have already explained,” said MNLA spokesman Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, reached by telephone from Kidal on Tuesday.

A diplomat representing France said that sanctions such as travel bans might be considered against rebels if they do not sign.

The U.N. Security Council said in February that targeted measures might be considered against those “who resume hostilities and violate the ceasefire”.

One diplomat based in West Africa said, “We are locked in a game of brinkmanship. Sanctions are unlikely to be perceived as a heavy threat.” (VOA)