NIGER: Tuareg ex-combatants to get promised assistance a decade after peace accord

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

NIAMEY, 14 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Ten years after the Niger government and insurgents signed an accord to end a Tuareg rebellion, authorities have launched an economic assistance programme for more than 3,000 ex-combatants in the north – the final phase as laid out in the peace pact.

Under the project, 3,160 former combatants will be granted around US $300 each in the form of micro-loans for projects in animal husbandry, the craft industry and vegetable gardening, Michele Falavigna, Niger UN Development Programme (UNDP) representative, said.

The UN says the launch was held up mainly for lack of funds, along with lingering instability in the north of this mainly desert nation of about 11 million people.

The US $1.8-million project is funded by France, the United States and Libya.

“It is historic, that countries that have sometimes had disagreements have been able to pool their resources to consolidate peace in northern Niger,” Falavigna told IRIN from the capital, Niamey, on Thursday.

The micro-credit project – to be run jointly by the government and UNDP – will be implemented in the northern Air and Azawak regions.

Since the 1995 signing of the peace accord, nomad groups have occasionally claimed responsibility for attacks in the north, complaining that the government was not holding up its end of the agreement.

The Tuareg rebellion began in the north in 1990, with an attack on the locality of Tchintabaraden, 800 kilometres north Niamey, and later spread to the far east of the country, where it was joined by other nomadic groups such as the Toubou.

The uprising centred on social, political, and economic grievances and dissatisfaction over what rebels called inequitable economic policy and excessive centralisation of the government.

The Tuareg rebels wanted a federal system that would allow them to run their own affairs in their mineral-rich areas.

The government and rebels signed the peace agreement in Niamey following mediation by Algeria, Burkina Faso – which both share borders with Niger – and France.

The accord stipulated in part: government decentralisation and the integration of former combatants into the defence and security forces, public service, professional training institutions, universities and secondary schools.

Around 800 former combatants eventually were integrated into the public services, but the socio-economic reintegration of the largest chunk of the ex-rebels had yet to be achieved.

Tuareg representatives welcomed the funds.

“We rejoice over the project and hope the available resources will be increased,” Mohamed Anacko, a former chief of the rebellion and now Niger’s high commissioner for the restoration of peace, said on national radio on Wednesday.

The launch of the project came a month after Niger’s President Mamadou Tandja nominated the former Tuareg rebel leader to lead the government office for the restoration of peace.

UNDP’s Falavigna noted that lingering insecurity was also cause for the delay in the loan project.

In the Air mountain range 1,000 kilometres northeast of Niamey, where international companies have been prospecting for oil, security forces have clashed several times over the last two years with what the government called common banditry. But the culprits claimed to be Tuareg rebels of the now-dissolved Air and Azawak Liberation Front (FLAA).

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