The Rise of Wikipedian Statecraft: How Azawad, Spurned by the U.N., Earned Its Recognition Online

On Friday, April 6, at 0224 hours GMT, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) declared independence from Mali, taking the northeastern two-thirds of the country with them. Said to be substantially composed of returning mercenaries from Qaddafi’s Libya, the MNLA emerged last fall as the latest separatist movement pitting Tuaregs, who are Arab-Berber pastoralists of the sort romanticized in SUV names (cf. Cherokees), against the sedentary and much more densely populated black-African south. Claiming the government was doing too little to fight the rebels, Malian army officers staged a coup last month; only after they seized control in Bamako did the MNLA, with uneasy Islamist allies, overrun the north and proclaim Azawad founded. Reuters called the coup “a spectacular own-goal”. The military has now been forced to hand the reins back to an interim civilian government, which finds itself with some 300,000 sq. miles to reconquer.1

No foreign government or supranational organization has recognized Azawad’s sovereignty, and none seems forthcoming.

The African Union — which is basically pledged to maintaining the crazy-quilt borders left by European imperialists — called the Tuaregs’ online declaration “null and of no value whatsoever.” For months the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) had already been quietly considering intervention against the northern rebels; events whiplashed the 15-member bloc into putting down the junta in the south first.

Opinion outside Africa was unanimous, terse, and more than a bit generic. “A unilateral declaration of independence…would not have any meaning for us,” assured the defense minister of France, Mali’s old colonial master.

Farther afield, condemnation was left to aides and press releases. “The E.U.,” a E.U. spokeswoman said on April 6, “has made clear throughout the crisis that it respects the territorial integrity of Mali.” Russia, so fond of its own breakaway client states, said that “there are virtually no chances…for legitimization” of the Tuaregs’. The U.S. State Department issued a seven-line statement “reiterat[ing] our support for the territorial integrity of Mali” and “urg[ing] all armed groups…to find a nonviolent path forward for national elections and a peaceful coexistence.”

The U.N. Security Council did not hash out its own (14-line) press statement on the “need to uphold and respect the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Mali” until April 9; an earlier “Statement on Mali Crisis,” released post-coup on March 22, didn’t specifically mention the north or its insurgency at all.

But if the planet’s statesmen and diplomats failed to anticipate the course (let alone support the cause) of Azawadi nationalism — falling, when pushed, on the usual professional platitudes for faraway (non-)countries of which we know nothing — one great global institution took to the murky events in Gao and Timbuktu with remarkable avidity, and shows no sign of relenting any time soon. Happily for the Azawadis, Wikipedia’s interest may, in the long run of facts of things, prove the most critical “recognition” of all.

Just as happily for the amateur historian, its grand debates and minute deliberations — or, the Azawad talk page and revision log, respectively — are always already in the public record; no waiting on state archives or leaked cables here.

Stillbirth of a Nation Region and the Azaouad Interregnum

What the record shows (or microcosmically enacts) is this: An unusually accelerated path to self-declared nationhood, to be sure, but one with stages, steady accretion, internal logic — not the absurdist, out-of-the-blue third-world lark just reading wire headlines or foreign-office communiques might suggest. Wikipedia’s “Azawad” page was created 19:09, 3 February 2005. Over two years and five sub-incidental revisions, the main text remained unchanged. In its entirety:

Azawad is a Tuareg region in Northern Mali.

This independent Wikipedia existence of old “Azawad” died 02:48, 21 March 2007. With no objections, User:Arre — a prolific contributor on Northwest Africa, who would later disappear amid charges of original research and “blind reverting” — redirected “Azawad” to a new article. Arre’s “Azaouad” introduced Tuareg separatism to the (discourse on) the region:

Azaouad or Azawad is a name for parts of northern Mali, mainly made up of Sahelian and Saharan geography. It does not correspond to any single administrative region of Mali.

The area is dominated by Touareg tribal populations, as well as nomadic minorities, including Hassaniyya-speaking Moors close to the Mauritanian border. Traditionally, there has been some resentment of central Malian control over the region, and several separatist or other rebel groups have been active in the region, notably in the civil war in Mali of the early 1990s.

Some of these movements have claimed it as part of a wider pan-Saharan Touareg homeland, while others have been content to demand improved services and/or autonomous status for the region. In late 2006, a flare-up in fighting in the Kidali Province was ended by Algerian mediation between the central government and Touareg rebels.

Between 17:27, 14 July 2008 and 14:56, 22 July 2008, a flurry of edits by User:Cuaxdon and the leading Wiki-Africanist User:T_L_Miles, vastly expanded “Azaouad” in both senses. The article grew from 1,263 bytes (roughly 150 words, in a single text-only section) to 5,197 bytes (650 words, with maps and table-of-contents box). The region was redefined as a basin corresponding to”the dry river valley which once carried a Northern arm of the Niger River”; this huge geological Azaouad/Azawad spilled across the borders of Mali, Algeria, and Niger.

The question of nomenclature remains deeply unsettled and suggests a time-bomb of further conflict should Mali’s Tuaregs ever indeed get a recognized state.2 For nearly five years after Arre’s March 2007 redirect/deletion of “Azawad”, Wiki intelligence on ethnic rebellion in northern Mali appeared under the “Conflict and separatist movements” section of “Azaouad”. This winter’s explosion of violence on the ground blew open the unresolved ideo-linguistic tensions in this settlement.

Was the area/word claimed by the new MNLA (Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad in the regional lingua franca) simply a spelling variant of “Azaouad”, as Wikipedia’s longstanding article and redirect implied? If so, wouldn’t full liberation for the rebels mean adjacent parts of Niger and Algeria as well — i.e., Azawad/Azaouad as a sort Tuareg Kurdistan? On the other hand, could anyone be certain that either Arabized term, “Azawad” or “Azaouad”, was still totally synonymous with the original Berber word “Azawagh”?

I’m sorry if you guys cannot read French, because most of the research on Tuaregs have been made in French so far, and if you can read “Encyclopédie Berbère”, there is two distinctives articles, one for the Azawad, which have ALWAYS BEEN the Malian desert, and the other one for Azawagh and Azawak, which is a more general term about the area where Tuaregs can speak “TAWELLEMET” dialect. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, I’ll soon provide an article on AZAWAD with crystal clear references and I hope that it won’t be reverted again as I’m getting sick of it. Best regards BabyFoot (talk) 15:35, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Totally agree with you. There should be two distinct articles, one named AZAWAD and one named AZAWAGH, clearly differentiated (although with explanatory notes at the start of each, referring to the other article; that should hopefully stop further reversions). But that means changing the title of this article from Azaouad (which is simply the French spelling of the name Azawad, as French doesn’t use a “w”) to Azawagh. Rif Winfield (talk) 08:28, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

In fact, Wikipedians were never able to confirm User:BabyFoot’s clear-cut distinctions, made on the then-“Azaouad” talk page. (Contra User:Rif Winfield, the letter ‘W’ most certainly exists in French.) With no independent Tawellemmet philologists forthcoming, the Azawad/Azawagh/Azaouad matter seemed headed toward a contentious vote; then, as the situation in Mali neared the final independence declaration, a conclusive talk-page detente was reached. (“Whole situation changed, merger proposal withdrawn. Let’s close this thing. —bender235”)

Their solution was, in its way, as momentous and brazen as anything the MNLA did that week — and far more likely to stick. “Azaouad,” the entry that replaced old “Azawad” in 2007 and for half a decade described the geographical and cultural region stretching across three countries, was renamed “Azawagh”. (The final transfer was carried out 15:07, 3 April 2012 by User:Malik Shabazz, an administrator otherwise not involved in the debate.)

With the transnational “Azawagh” basin established as such, a 19:09, 3 April 2012 edit removed the “Conflict and separatists movements” section entirely, noting it an “unsourced discussion that seems more appropriate to Azawad than Azawagh.”

Meanwhile, searches for “Azaouad” were redirected to a new article, “Azawad”, affirming them as variants of the same term and concept. Facing a potentially insoluble geographical-linguistic-political morass with no NPOV sources to guide it, Wikipedia — sure to be the first destination for any future inquiry into the meanings of Azawagh, Azaouad, and Azawad — disambiguated by consensus, and fiat.

What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Azawad

The April 6 statement on the MNLA website was, in a very real sense, then, 2012’s second declaration of Azawadi independence to the outside world. It was, like all such declarations since at least 1776, aimed at establishing legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. It was also — and this is less trivial than it sounds — directed against another (according to the authors, their former) government; the Tuareg list of grievances against the Mali state differ from Jefferson’s against George III mainly in the buzzwords of iniquity.3

But long before any of their own residents, let alone foreign rulers, accepted the sovereignty of Massachusetts, Virginia, or New York — and, eventually, their sovereign union — those places existed in the political and mental maps of contemporaries, in more or less the borders they took to war. The King should know; his family drew them. Similarly, Belgium before 1828, the Baltic States before 1991, East Timor before 2002, Kosovo before 2006, even Texas before 1836 all existed before they became “official.”

Of course, independence on the basis of preexisting jurisdictional units, set up by old regimes of varying sobriety and sensitivity to local conditions, is a dicey proposition — with Mali a prime example.4 The logical alternative, though hardly mutually exclusive in practice, is securing new political borders to fit imagined ethnic, linguistic, or cultural ones. (And if those disappoint, to create “facts on the ground”.) People knew there were Bulgarians before the nineteenth century; they know there are Kurds today. Where independent Bulgaria or Kurdistan might lie tends to be a question answered bloodily.

As far as we can tell, the MNLA is not a national liberation movement of Africa’s Tuaregs. Even before “full adherence to the UN charter,” the April 6 declaration promises “recognition of existing borders with neighboring states, and their inviolability,” which would leave around 1.8 million Tuareg co-ethnics in Niger alone.

This MLNA-watermarked photo shows Azawad really is a nation of rebels.

Likewise, its website even trumpets the presence in MNLA ranks of Songhais, Peuls, and Moors.5 So the rebels merely wish to separate the Azawad region from Mali — but does anyone know where Malian Azawad (as opposed to Saharan Azawagh) is? The word “Azawad” corresponds to none of the internal jurisdictions of Mali (or for that matter, Niger or Algeria); in fact, the straight-shot southern border claimed by the rebels almost perfectly bisects the province of Mopti.

Azawad has never named a subnational unit of government, nor did its geographical meaning ever seem to hold much purchase for outsiders, in the way of the Congo, the Ukraine, the Levant, or the (Scottish) Highlands.” The first appearance of the word “Azawad” in the New York Times came last year (August 31, 2011), used (and undefined) in passing in an article on Tuareg pop music. “Azaouad” and “Azawagh” have never appeared, in the paper’s archive going back to 1851.

By contrast, Kosovo made its first Times appearance on January 20, 1912, one of 120 before 1981 alone. Jubaland, (re)established in 2010 as one of the many autonomous statelets in disintegrating Somalia, first entered the Times 110 years before (“Rising in Somali-land; British Sub-Commissioner Slain by Treacherous Natives”); between 1900 and 1981, it appeared 47 times. The Chechens make an ignonomious debut in 1919 (something about massacring Armenian girls), but in 27 additional articles before 1981, they generally became sympathetic arch-victims of Stalinist terror.6

Admittedly, mention in the New York Times (or Times of London, or Le Monde) is a measure of existence — or the right to exist — that’s crude and culturally myopic in the extreme. But then, the modern international system is set up, more less, to promote the prerogatives of diverse myopias. It almost goes without saying: Before the U.S., E.U., or U.N. can extend diplomatic recognition to a state, Americans, Europeans, and the world must, however vaguely, recognize the word.

Thus, if April 6 was a traditional Jeffersonian (or Miskitian) declaration against the government of Mali and its old sovereignty over rebel territory, its precursor, effected on Wikipedia two months earlier, was also something of its logical prerequisite: With little fanfare, this first “declaration” decided Azawad’s irrevocable independence from “Azawagh” (now a wholly separate word), its total annexation of “Azaouad” (now not even synonym, just a secondary spelling), and its future sovereign existence as a concept corresponding to the region, in Mali and only in Mali, which the MNLA would soon claim as an independent nation.

Diplomatic Momentum

On the ground, attacks commenced January 16. By February 1, the Malian Army’s so-called “tactical pullout” left the rebels in control of key northern towns like Menaka. They started laying siege to Kidal, a regional capital, three days later. On Wikipedia, It was BabyFoot who, as s/he promised and after several setbacks, “provide[d] an article [that] won’t be reverted again as I’m getting sick of it.” The new “Azawad” was born 10:50, 4 February 2012:

Azawad is a disputed area in Northen Mali.

A 03:49, 5 February 2012 edit by User:Lihaas — a self-described anarcho-primativist Ron Paul supporter who endorses, among other things, the impeachment of Barack Obama (and Cheney and Bush), the U.S. annexation of Canada, and the independence of Silesia (despite also being a German monarchist), and who averages close to 50 daily contributions Wikipedia-wide on breaking international affairs — reverted “Azawad” as a redirect to “Azaouad”. BabyFoot and an anonymous user at a French IP (85.169.121.210) — quite possibly the same person — returned five days later, leaving 12:21, 10 February 2012:

Azawad is the part of Mali defined by the districts of Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal. Some saharan nationalism raised there in consequence of the Tuareg rebellion in 1963, 90s, and 2006 in one hand, and during the Azawad war in 2012.

It should not be mistaken with Azawagh which is a tuareg word to talk about the area between south algeria, niger and mali.

Eight hours later, this obviously amateurish effort was overturned (“sorry, that’s nonsense”) by User:Nightstallion, a long-serving administrator whose even-handedness and voracious knowledge on matters of state, E.U. politics especially, make him perhaps the Grotius of today’s Wikipedia.7 “Azawad” once again redirected to “Azaouad” (today’s “Azawagh”). But Nightstallion’s resistance would, like Machiavelli and the fading autonomy of Italy’s city-states or Metternich and the twilight of dynastic Europe, prove a last gasp of the old order.

BabyFoot reestablished new “Azaward” for the third, and presumably last, time 11:59, 21 February 2012. This first edit was 195 bytes. User:GiantSnowman, an administrator, tagged the article as needing improvement (namely, reliable sources to establish verifiability and notability) 12:30, 21 February 2012; at this point, the article was 441 bytes. BabyFoot’s last edit of the day, 12:47, 21 February 2012, left Azawad at 1,258 bytes, with a very rough contents box but essentially no content in any of his/her imagined sections:

Then, the great instigator of “Azawad”’s rebirth more or less drops from the scene. Yet the article continued to grow — still distinctly slap-dash but, over 500+ edits, achieving a depth of coverage, neutrality of treatment, and interconnection to related topics unimaginable had BabyFoot stayed alone at the helm. By 15:45, 18 March 2012, it stood at 3,408 bytes. The coup in the south started with the Malian Army revolting March 21; taking advantage of the chaos, rebels captured the regional capitals of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu on March 30, March 31, and April 1, respectively. The 23:45, 1 April 2012 version was 4,339 bytes.

Edits to “Azawad”, no less than events in Azawad, now picked up pace. The last version before the MNLA’s declaration, 00:14, 6 April 2012, stood at 8,141 bytes. By 05:36, 6 April 2012, it was 10,653 bytes. At 07:55, 6 April 2012‎, it hit 19,503 bytes. At the end of self-declared Azawad’s first day — 23:51, 6 April 2012 — some 100 edits had left “Azawad” at 28,943 bytes. At the end of the second day — 20:11, 7 April 2012 — 32,748 bytes. As of 13:22, 16 April 2012, 39,447 bytes, which is close to where it stands today.

Azawad’s 50-day path from unceremonious redirect to solid 40 kB entry free of “needs improvement” tags8 may not be proof of Wikipedia as a perfect marketplace of ideas where the most plausible and best documented always wins out. But it also refutes the old idea of the free encyclopedia as a bazaar of grudges and pet causes that lets those with greatest time to kill and obscurest axes to grind succeed in determining truth for the rest of us.

BabyFoot is, most assuredly, either a committed Tuareg patriot or slightly deranged Azawad-lobby foreigner; the account was created February 3 and has only edited Azawad-related articles. But the community’s reaction to BabyFoot’s early activism in truth resembles, to risk slight hyperbole and great offense to both parties, a United Nations of private citizens — slightly less deliberative and immensely more decisive, but equally predicated on the diversion of impassioned, at times violent, petitioners through the institutionally conservative channels overseen by experienced mandarins and proven technocrats.9

Or rather, that is, it resembles a hypothetical U.N. that works. One-issue users like BabyFoot may bang shoes, pitch tents, invoke Satan. Most are easily reverted — and failing that, blocked — into submission. But once consensus coalesces around a cause like independent “Azawad” (the article), the heavy lifting of its creation is supervised and to a large extent carried out by the likes of User:RJFF, User:Kudzu1, and User:Khazar2 — well-known Wikipedia stalwarts with thousands of productive edits under their belts, rafts of good-conduct medals (jpeg decals, really) awarded by other editors, and demonstrated track records as either area specialists, (amateur) experts on separatist movements, or both.

Khazar2, in particular, may well be the digitized poltergeist of Richard Holbrooke. (Actually, s/he is the reincarnation of User:Khazar, returning recently after a mysterious diplomatic kerfuffle with other editors. “The experience almost burnt me out on WP entirely, but after a recent diagnosis of fibromyalgia forced me to retire and stay largely housebound, I thought a return was my best way to keep contributing to planetary education.”) His/her knowledge of minor human rights movements and nano-minority politics is, well, encyclopedic. A very brief excerpt of “some articles I’ve created or significantly re-written and am trying to help keep an eye on”:

2012 insurgency in northern Mali – 2012 Malian coup d’état – 88 Generation Students Group – Abdul Samay Hamed – Abduljalil Alsingace – Aboubakr Jamaï – Acid (hip-hop) – Ahmad Taufik – Ales Bialatski – Ali Salem – Alice Nkom – Alisher Karamatov – Angkhana Neelaphaijit – Annakurban Amanklychev – Armando Valladares – Aung Pwint – Azam Farmonov – Azawad – Azawagh – Azimzhan Askarov – Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights – Bakhtiyar Hajiyev – Bambang Harymurti – Beatrice Mtetwa – Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta – Bernas – Bertrand Teyou – Bill Foley – Bobur Square – Byron Barrera – Cary Vaughan – Censorship in the Maldives

In the days before and hours following the MNLA declaration, Khazar2 and like-minded Wikipedia grandees took the lead in transforming “Azawad” into a reasonably functioning article on a disputed region that had declared its independence. (Somaliland and Kosovo were cited as models). Like blue-helmeted peace keepers (again, in a hypothetical, ideal world), they oversaw incremental changes with an eye toward minimizing provocation and maximizing practicable consensus and third-party verifiability:

15:41, 6 April 2012‎ Khazar2 (talk | contribs)‎ . . (22,386 bytes) (-34)‎ . . (→‎Etymology: nonnotable British scholar, as the claim seems uncontroversial, probably no need to bring him into this at all.)

19:17, 6 April 2012‎ Khazar2 (talk | contribs)‎ . . (26,879 bytes) (-5)‎ . . (→‎External link: calling the MNLA the “official government” may be a slight overreach)

One can’t emphasize enough that the great bulk of information imported into “Azawad” since the end of February does not resemble a discourse of legitimization as might have been familiar to scholars and civilians (not least Encyclopedia Britannica contributors!) in the age of romantic nationalism. There’s no “Since the dawn of recorded history, Azawad has been the eternal homeland of noble, nomadic Tuareg tribes.” Nor has “Azawad” become a running record of breaking news; such “recentist” (to borrow an editor’s word) developments are mostly offloaded to articles like “Tuareg Rebellion (2012)” and “2012 Malian coup d’état”.

Instead, “Azawad” is packed with often utterly banal and uncontroversial descriptions of physical geography (“[L]ong interdunal indentations that are framed by Pleistocene longitudinal dunes characterize the present landscape”), demographics (“Northern Mali has a population density of 1.5 persons per square kilometer”) and history.

Indeed, Khazar2’s largest single expansion, 05:37, 6 April 2012, nearly doubled the article’s size with information from existing Wikipedia articles on the history of Timbuktu and environs, under various medieval native empires (Gao, Mali, and Songhai) and, ultimately, the French after Europe’s nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” The facts therein, if ever controversial, were nothing new and had been hashed out over years by their respective Wikipedia communities. But placing this lineage of previous sovereignties in “Azawad” (including “Under Malian rule”) does imply a position on the present situation, and the future conditions of possibility.

Consider “Piedmont”, an article on the modern region around Turin that, quite appropriately, highlights the old Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which united (or conquered) all of Italy in the 1860s. By contrast, “Piedmont (United States)”, about the long chain of foothills abutting the Appalachian Mountains (and named for their supposed similarity to the Italian region), doesn’t trace the hill country’s rule by Indian chieftains, then the British, then the central government in Washington.

For Wikipedia, the American Piedmont is simply not a region that implies political cohesion and difference in that way. And two months ago on Wikipedia, Azawad as understood today wasn’t even a region (or “physiographic province”); its sovereignty was more remote than the Piedmont seceding from the United States.

The scramble of leading Wikipedians to catch up to events — to fill in “Azawad”’s unsexy blanks of geography, climate, history, census data — is undoubtedly a minor triumph of heroic volunteerism. For what amounts to an NGO charged with cataloging and cross-referencing the whole of mankind’s knowledge, right this instant, it also shows a remarkable institutional maturity. Self-organized (and self-financed) teams of rapid-response specialists seem capable of swooping down and instituting the accepted apparatus of articleness whenever a new asteroid is found, a long-time-bridesmaid sports team finally breaks through, or some rebels in Toyota pickups storm a desert trading post.

The quandary in the final case, in a world where Google can deliver more schoolchildren and diplomats to “Azawad” in an hour than drop by the provinces of northern Mali in a year: Does expert Wikipedia entry-making basically amount, whatever your intentions, to backdoor real-world nation-building?

Independence: De facto and its Discontents

The cardinal tenet of serious Wikipedian citizenship is a one-way relationship with facts — to report them (as researched by qualified others), not make them. Wikipedia cannot declare a territory sovereign; it cannot “recognize” a declaration of sovereignty, in the way of endorsing its legitimacy; it can only report that, according to trustworthy sources, a region has been declared independent, and the group doing the declaring is able to back it up with force on the ground.

In addition to the 190 or so states in the U.N. General Assembly, Wikipedia uncontroversially reports a plethora of others — from Taiwan to Transnistria — as “de facto” independent. Whether the Taipei regime deserves to exist is a POV matter; the fact is it’s a different government than Beijing.

Yet the “Azawad” episode illustrates how Wikipedia veterans — quite possibly led, or forced, by Wikipedia newcomers — are beginning to realize their primary constitutive role in forming the facts they’ve devoted themselves to dispassionately gathering. Wikipedia can’t exchange ambassadors to recognize a breakaway nation, it can’t send arms or take a vote and declare the rebels welcomed into the community of nations. But, with very few historical exceptions, de facto precedes de jure.

If Wikipedia cannot send an embassy, it can bestow an infobox. The contents of a geopolitical infobox can be even more deadly dull than the passages on Pleistocene geology and predominant shrubbery in the main text: Alongside the basics (capital, head of state, languages), it offers a state flag and motto (if either exist), a color-keyed map, time zone, international calling code, and whether the place drives on the right or left. But with the rise and rise of Wikipedia, its infobox may have also become a novel rung of public diplomacy: international recognition, not of the legitimacy, but the facticity of a de facto situation. Or put another way, the article for Piedmont, Italy has an infobox. “Piedmont (United States)” does not.

User:67.249.16.169 first added an infobox to “Azawad” 04:14, 2 April 2012. What transpired on “Talk:Azawad” was a remarkable exchange in which leaders like Khazar2 and Kudzu1 seemed to both implicitly acknowledge Wikipedia’s role in determining “de facto” and immediately disclaim it:

I won’t revert again, but I’m a bit skeptical of the infobox that the MNLA has already declared its independence as of January. This 1 is the source for that claim. And generally, I’d like to wait until I see the independence claim in some world media before we make it on their behalf here. I’m uncomfortable calling this even a declared nation until we have solid and explicit confirmation from reliable sources. Other people’s thoughts? Khazar2 (talk) 04:54, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>I may only have used Google Translate for reading this, since I don’t speak French, but it sure does seem to me as if it can be considered declared. 217.210.7.205 (talk) 05:20, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>Good point. I’m skeptical of the January claim, and perhaps it’s made me too finicky. But why hasn’t this claim shown up in world media yet? Is there a reason to be skeptical of this website that we’re not seeing? Again, for a claim this big, I feel like we ought to wait for a reliable source, rather than a primary source. Khazar2 (talk) 05:23, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>>Now that the rebels are in full control of northern Mali, I suppose it will come quick, as media turn their attention from the fighting itself. 217.210.7.205 (talk) 05:27, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>>Definitely worth keeping an eye on over the next 48 hours or so. I believe negotiations with Mali are ongoing as well, and it would seem to me the junta is really out of options for dealing with the north. Kudzu1 (talk) 06:22, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

…

I’ve only done one revert myself. Given that others obviously share my concerns, I’ve pulled it again for now. I’d be interested to hear from editors who support this infobox, however, as to what sources support its insertion; my mind’s by no means made up. Khazar2 (talk) 16:24, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>I think we should take a wait-and-see approach. Personally, I expect a declaration of independence imminently, but there’s no need to jump the gun on it. Kudzu1 (talk) 17:46, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>I thinj consensus is qauite CLEARLY against the infobox (and with reasosn too)…removign it should not be warring as it would be vandalism to insert it without consensus 9AND as per the other article, a consensus discussion is NOT appropriae inside a month) Lihaas (talk) 18:41, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>>I agree with your conclusion, but not with your argumentation. You should know that the term “vandalism” has a very narrow definition on Wikipedia (WP:VAND & WP:NOTVAND). Having the infobox or not is a content dispute and not a question of vandalism. Repeatedly introducing it without consensus and without discussing is a very uncivil act, though. RJFF (talk) 19:46, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>>>When a rebel army takes essentially full control of a region and declares it a separate entity from the country claiming it, why should it be treated any differently from other unrecognised countries like Somaliland. Just because Azawad has not yet organised a government does not make its independence invalid. I can understand why 17 January could be considered dubious as an independence date, though it was the start of the insurrection whose goal was the creation of an independent Azawad. Still, it is effectively independent as of yesterday, given that the Malian army has withdrawn. I first put up the country infobox given that independence was a fait accompli. It was taken down because of a lack of sources, so I put it back up and asked for opinions. I don’t see anything wrong with that – it’s a legitimate topic for discussion. 67.249.16.169 (talk) 22:07, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

>>>>>FWIW, I agree with you that independence appears to be a fait accompli here, and I wholly agree that your edits were legitimate and not vandalism (even if I disagreed with them). Nor will your work go to waste – it’s just a question of waiting to see how reliable sources for international news describe the status of Azawad, and then some form of your infobox is very likely to be introduced. So I apologize if it seems like we’ve been too hard on you! Khazar2 (talk) 01:21, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

As it happened, when the MNLA “officially” declared independence on its website four days later, it was previously skeptical Kudzu1 who re-instituted the infobox, exactly two hours after the initial announcement. Khazar2 immediately endorsed the move, and the infobox has remained since. Meanwhile, as of 04:44, 17 April 2012 the hemispheric map used in Mali’s own infobox had the Azawad portion shifted to a different shade of green.

A Wikipedia infobox may become the new key to legitimatizing a nation.

The “Azawad” talk page exploded in anger, with enough force that it was covered in the New York Times. “Wikipedia cannot create countries — stop playing games”, yelled the new petitioners. “This page should be removed, it is a slap in the face of the Malian nation,” offered one anonymous visitor. “This article is ridiculous and brings wikipedia into disrepute.”

The regulars, as they always seem to in such matters, wore the protesters down or, rather, rode them out. Any number of self-declared, unrecognized separatist nations (Somaliland, South Ossetia, et al.) have comparable articles with country-style infoboxes, they said, and so, for that matter, do Star Wars planets. Riposted User:Evzob: “Wikipedia does not exist for the dignity of the Malian nation. The region in question is part of Mali in the sense that other states recognize it as so, and in the sense that the government in Bamako claims it – but not really in any other sense. I think this article properly reflects that.”

The long-term guardians of Wikipedia were right, of course; whatever Azawad was on April 6, it was not a place where the Malian junta/government in Bamako
had any sort of monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Yet the onrush of angry “Malian nationalists” (if that’s who they were) introduced some tantalizing geopolitical — one’s tempted to say, ontological — perplexities. What exactly does sovereignty over vast tracts of empty desert, or over Central Park, really entail?

What happens if I step on that patch of grass being reseeded, or fail to pick up after my dog, and nothing happens? Is sovereign control something only demonstrated negatively, enforced in the breach? And, if so can any encyclopedia — that great positivist project — really get a handle on it?

More concretely, the folks furious that “Azawad” now has an infobox and all the accouterments of self-declared statehood seem to have, in the end, a much better understanding of the power of today’s Wikipedia — it’s capacity for shaping the mentalities that, two minutes or two decades later, will create on-the-ground reality — than the grizzled editors and administrators themselves. What it says matters, even to the billions who have never browsed a talk page or absorbed the internal guidelines on what counts as notable, verifiable, and NPOV.

In the age of Wikipedia, verifiability itself — for centuries predicated on documentation, whether from 1870’s leading Oxford Africanist or the latest AP story — suggests immediate political considerations. We know that the MNLA’s former allies, Ansar Dine — who want to implement Sharia law over the whole of Mali — immediately rejected its April 6 separatist claim and now hold sway over much of “Azawadi” territory. Is the fact that no talk page is considering an unrecognized Ansar Dine state with de facto control over parts of north Mali and claimed sovereignty of the whole country just a deficiency of P.R. — a matter of those hardcore Salafis neglecting to challenge MNLA’s flash-enabled website and easily-referenced French and English communiques?

Indeed, is it that much of a stretch to imagine the MNLA releasing its definitive April 6 declaration at least partially in response to the ambiguity that was gripping the “Azawad” talk page starting April 2? Wikipedia, with its 1 billion monthly visitors, would be willing to go with our declaration of sovereignty at this instant if only they could “see the independence claim in some world media before we make it on their behalf here.” Let’s get a press release on the web NOW.

Ancient Freedoms

Wikipedia is not the world. A ECOWAS invasion, or a revived Malian army with U.S. weapons, or a true Islamist revolution, or all three could crush the MNLA tomorrow. If that happens, “Azawad” probably won’t disappear or redirect to “Azawagh.” ‎It could quite likely lose its infobox.

But, win or lose this time, if Azawadi somehow becomes the defining petty nationalism of the twenty-first century, it’s worth considering the career of the twentieth’s. Serbia, reliable sources tell us, was a moderately powerful kingdom for about a hundred years in the middle ages. Then it lost a battle — on a date traditionally given as June 28, 1389 — and disappeared forever. The seed of modern Serbia emerged in 1804, and it took at least a hundred years of stirring speeches, triumphant skirmishes, state symbolism, and national history curricula to convince these Serbians, new to politics (not to mention literacy), that their nation was founded in defeat in that field of blackbirds, 1389.

When the heir to the throne had the temerity (or ignorance) to visit a semi-Serb part of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914, he was shot. As communism lost its spell, and it was beginning to look like the semi-Serb parts of Yugoslavia would need something else to hold them together, Slobodan Milošević delivered a brilliant, infamous speech on that sacred field, June 28, 1989.

The point is, no Serb was born with a mystic memory of the 28th of June, A.D. 1389; barely attested to in the records, the Battle of Kosovo had to be instilled, drilled, conjured by all the power and terror of the modern state, church, family. If, five years from now, a Tuareg child in Gao living under the Malian jackboot wonders, unbelieving, about that glorious moment in the ancient past when her people became free, I won’t have to mythologize. I can show her: 23:43, 6 April 2012.

Surely, this must mean something.

1 For the most enlightening account of the Mali/Azawad mess, see Frank Jacobs’s recent New York Times Opinionator piece. A take-off from his Strange Maps series for the Big Think, Jacobs’s Borderlines column has been even more consistently fantastic since it premiered last October. One can’t help thinking that if the Times really wanted readers to know and care about geopolitics, it’d pull asinine Friedman, flippant Dowd, miscast Bruni, and missionary Kristof from the print paper, hand their column inches over to the likes of Jacobs (he uses a lot of images!), and pocket the millions saved in salary, expenses, and internecine ill-will. With the kind of punchy, low-overhead op-ed bench strength being built online, how long till papers of record realize no one really demands, expects, or likes their commentary to come from emeritus hard-news reporters put out to luxurious, self-indulgent pasture?

2 Though lacking — so far — a disputed fetish object like Alexander the Great, the contours of the potential problem are almost identical to the Macedonia naming dispute, after 20 years still as hilarious and intractable on Wikipedia as off.

3 Jefferson managed to accuse the King of “Death, Desolation and Tyranny,” not to mention “Cruelty and Perfidy” (all caps his) in a single bullet point regarding foreign mercenaries. The MNLA best him on specificity, with one item “recalling the massacres, the atrocities and abasement, the plundering and genocide of 1963, 1990, 2006, 2010 and 2012.” But perhaps they should have conserved the ammunition. Dispatching yet another challenger, the Sage of Monticello remains champion in the game he invented through sheer rope-a-dope rhetorical stamina: Ten or fifteen not-terribly-differentiated “abuses and usurpations” might have looked like overkill (and, crawling with “swarms of Officers,” “pretended legislation,” “plundered seas,” “ravaged coasts,” “burnt towns,” and “merciless Indian savages,” sounded like hysteria); 27 was an Enlightenment knockout. For their part, the Tuaregs could muster only three grievance clauses against Mali, plus two ancient gripes with France.

4 On this point, at least, the Soviet Union did a much better job in Central Asia than Europe’s old empires did in Africa and the Middle East. Whether by actually following population patterns or — more often and more likely — proactively and dictatorially manufacturing nationality, they left Kyrgyzs who actually believe they are Kyrgyzs, or at least definitely not Kazakhs.

5 Though this online commitment to diversity seems, like that of the average Midwestern liberal arts college, less fundamentally factual than cosmetically tactical.

6 Apparently on a whim, Stalin decided in 1944 he wanted the Chechen language, culture, and identity — that is, the Chechen people — wiped off the map. Their rehabilitation and reemergence eleven years later was third-page news in Times.

7 In real life, as it were, Nightstallion is a college student at the Technical University of Vienna.

8 “Togo”, by comparison, is 40,118 bytes as of this writing; “Mali” itself is 50,822.

9 The Wikimedia Foundation eyes a constituency of 1 billion by 2015, against the U.N.’s 7.2 billion. The difference, however, seems more than made up for by — to borrow a term from European Union discourse — the democratic deficit of the latter compared to the former.