Why the West is dangerously getting the conflict in the Sahel wrong: The role of information in mobilizing violence

By Abigail Gérard

Bernard Henry Levy with his self-protection Police officer, November 2019, Nigeria. © Paris Match

Faced with the accumulation of bad news about the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel, I cannot shake off the memory of an anecdote from my previous professional life. In December 2019, when I was an Africa reporter for Paris Match, I remember my stupefaction after the publishing of the article “In Nigeria, Christians are massacred, an SOS from Bernard Henry Levy". Paris Match is the first French mainstream news magazine. Bernard Henry Levy, ‘BHL’, is a public intellectual known for giving his opinion on international conflicts, while nobody asked for. He took a leading-role in causing the intervention in Libya in 2011. During his weekend adventure in Nigeria, with his characteristic field outfit (suit and wide open white shirt), BHL warned of the “pre-genocidal” situation of violence in the Middle Belt region. His “I was there” coverage included shocking pictures of mass graves. In short, it was saying : Fulani Muslim pastoralists are all part of Boko Haram and are killing Christian farmers, with the approval of President Buhari, a Fulani himself. He concludes his article by calling for intervention from the international community. The Fulani are an ethnic group of between 15 to 30 millions people spanning 15 countries of Africa, from Senegal to Ethiopia, known as pastoralists who follow the transhumance of their herds across the continent.

I tried to explain to my editor why this article was not only completely wrong (as researchers and journalists of the region unanimously claimed after its publication), but also very dangerous. The article has been widely shared, thus complementing the fantasy of the Fulani threat in the Sahel region.

This seemingly anecdotal publication made me question the function of information in the mobilization of violence and show how a misleading analysis is actively contributing to violence fuelled by an over-simplistic definition of the enemy.

Defining the enemy

Bernard Henry Levy talking to a young Fulani pastoralist, Nigeria, November 2019 © Paris Match

Defining the enemy helps to create an image of evil to fight (Keen, 2008). The idea is to stress the “them against us” paradigm to raise fear. The media largely shapes the comprehension of a situation, and then international interventions. In order to reach a large audience the media must translate complex information with a simple and manichean narrative. Remember Raoul Peck’s movie ‘Sometimes in April’ (2005). In the press conference scene a journalist asks the US Representative “who is the bad guy and who is the good guy?". Paris Match’s choice of this picture of a man with his swastika T-shirt illustrates what Noam Chomsky defines as “the manufacture of consent”. In other words, no matter how nonsensical it was to use a symbol of Nazism in a Nigerian context in 2019, what is important is the idea of danger fitting to existing views, and words will do the rest. “The weight of words, the shock of photos” (the magazine’s motto). When the enemy is elusive, as it is in jihad in the Sahel, more accessible enemies have to be found, and the ethnic lens is often the chosen one. As if ethnicity was an immuable given and never socially constructed nor manipulated, it is the easiest reading grid of a conflict.

The ease of the ethnic approach

Using ethnicity to explain a conflict by the media is inherited from a colonial vision of Africa. Colonial empires organized African societies and elites power distribution with ethnic differentiations to legitimise the power of one or the other. This, even if communities were living together since then in harmony in the Sahel (Bâ,1991). Ethnicity also appeals to the Western collective imagination, where ‘savages’ clash over questions of origin, of belonging to a group. The aim of this approach is to remove all rationality from violence. “The Fulani are the savagery of Boko Haram extended to all the miscreants - Christians and Muslims - of Nigeria and, beyond, of Chad, Niger and Cameroon'', says BHL. This, even if the “Fulani threat” recalls more fantasy than reality. If Fulani community was prone to jihad, why is there still no jihadist insurgency in Guinea, where the major concentration of the Fulani is (40% of the population)? As in BHL’s ‘analysis’, the rise of grievance against the Fulani in the Sahelian press flourishes. Worse, in Burkina Faso, “The Land of Upright People”, the government calls Koglweogo civilian self defence groups to take arms.

Koglweogo milicia members, in Komsilga, Burkina Faso © Pascal Maitre / MYOP

The Dead End of Militarisation of Conflicts

In 2012 jihadists groups appeared in Mali. French President François Hollande set up the Barkhane Operation in 2014 to stop the jihadists before they took the capital, Bamako. Since 2015, Burkina Faso is registering hundreds of attacks by jihadist and self-defence militias. Speaking about the jihad as a global threat, helps France to justify her intervention in the Sahel for the public opinion, and to call for troop support from other Western countries, even if for now no attacks were made on the European soil by Sahelian jihadists. BHL’s article too is fitting in the clash of civilization paradigm (Huntington, 2008) when he asked for the international community to defend Christian communities, as “they shared [Western] common values”. As a consequence of this binary narration of the conflict, states turn a blind eye to governmental violence in the name of the fight against global jihad. In Nigeria for example, governmental forces made more victims than Boko Haram in 2019 shows the Nigeria Watch Project. In Burkina Faso, researchers point at Koglweogo responsibility in the last Fulani villages massacres. Thus pushing those excluded from state protection to swell the ranks of regional jihadist insurgencies. A vicious cycle of violence has been established, where a militarisation solution is prefered over a socio-economic development approach. The shift in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs of more military and less diplomats does not announce a more holistic approach. Creating enemies will create wars, and wars will create even more enemies.

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“The fantasy of eliminating the evil ones suffers from a lack of any sense of becoming [...]” (Keen, 2008). Appropriate coverage of the Fulani issue would have stressed other questions to understand violence’s origin. What are the consequences of the State vacuum where violence happens? How do pastoralist nomadic communities survive with repeated droughts? How does the increasing food demand impact the relationship between pastoralists and farmers in the context of global land sharing? In mainstream media spectacular disasters get much more coverage than endemic poverty, without explaining that they are consequential of each other. Maybe that’s why I decided to quit and join the other side: The analysts and researchers explaining why BHL got the situation wrong.

23 Fulani were killed by farmers from the Dogon community, Mali, July 23, 2019 © Bridge Africa

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