A case study by Rania Hadjer
THE ETHNOCIDE OF THE TUAREGS, ARAB – TUAREGS AND FULANIS OF AZAWAD:
Propaganda dehumanizes to legitimize the unacceptable.
In the case of Azawad, the problem lies not only in the violence perpetrated, but also in its acceptability in the eyes of the public. As other tragedies throughout history have shown, ethnocide or genocide becomes possible when the victims are insisted upon as unworthy of empathy.
This mechanism, at the heart of propaganda, can be found in Rwanda in 1994, in Europe during the Holocaust, in the colonization of the Americas, and in the contemporary context of Palestine.
In Mali and Azawad, official propaganda has played a major role in creating a collective image: that of populations labeled as “rebels,” “traitors,” “terrorists,” or “allies of terrorists.”
This discursive construction obscures the reality: the discrimination, economic and political marginalization, and violence suffered by these communities.
Consequently, atrocities that should arouse outrage are legitimized, as the victims are perceived as “enemies within.”
Ethnocide manifests itself not only through the force of arms, but also through an ideology that strips these groups of their humanity in the eyes of the rest of the nation.
1- PROPAGANDA AS A TOOL OF LEGITIMIZATION
Propaganda relies on several recurring mechanisms:
- Dehumanization: reducing victims to animal or criminal categories, denying their human dignity. Hannah Arendt emphasized that this logic is part of the “banality of evil”: extreme acts become normalized when victims are no longer considered equal.
- Victim-blaming: Violence is presented as a “legitimate” response to threats. Tuareg populations are accused of being responsible for their own marginalization, of complicity with armed groups, or worse, of having a “natural inclination toward violence.”
- Invisibility: Media silence and the absence of institutional memory erase the victims’ suffering. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, “symbolic violence” occurs when injustice becomes invisible and internalized.
These processes neutralize empathy.
Society, conditioned to perceive certain lives as less valuable, fails to react to their destruction or, worse still, condones it. Examining these mechanisms highlights one constant: no mass violence can be accepted without prior dehumanization.
2- COMPARISON WITH OTHER HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY TRAGEDIES
Rwanda, 1994
The Tutsi genocide is a well-known example of the power of propaganda. Radio Mille Collines dehumanized the Tutsi by calling them “cockroaches” to be exterminated. This type of language created a climate where murder was no longer perceived as a crime, but as a form of “protection” of the nation.
Native Americans
During the colonization of the Americas, indigenous peoples were described as “savages” to be civilized, which justified their cultural and physical extermination. Once again, the denial of their humanity paved the way for ethnocide.
Palestine Today
The Israeli-Palestinian War is a contemporary example of this phenomenon. Israeli politicians, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, have used dehumanizing language, comparing Palestinians to “human animals” or an “existential threat.” This type of rhetoric sets the stage for the acceptability of mass destruction by presenting Palestinian suffering as an inevitable consequence of national defense.
The propaganda plays on fear, demonization, and the denial of the victims’ humanity.
3- THE ABSENSE OF EMPHATY AS A CONDITION OF ACCEPTABILITY
Jacques Sémelin, in his research on genocidal propaganda, highlights the crucial role of collective imagination, shaped by discourse. When a human group is perceived as an abstract threat rather than as real individuals, empathy disappears.
In the case of the Tuaregs and Arab-Tuaregs, as well as that of the Tutsis or the Palestinians: the destruction does not shock, because the victims were first symbolically erased. It is not just a struggle for territory or power, but a war of meaning: one that determines who deserves to be mourned and who does not.
Ethnocide is not just a military issue; it is above all a symbolic process.
Yesterday, on the post where I reported the deaths of five civilians, including three women and two children, killed by a drone strike in Kidal, someone commented: “Bravo Malian army,” thus congratulating the FAMa for the murder of innocents.
My first reaction was to respond virulently to this unbearable cynicism. But I changed my mind, telling myself that it would be more productive to theorize this knee-jerk and inhumane reaction and make it a case study.
For this comment is not an isolated aberration; it is the direct product of these mechanisms of propaganda and dehumanization.
What I read in this “bravo” is the echo of the same process by which lives become invisible, deaths become deserved, and empathy is replaced by morbid satisfaction.
In other words, this comment is a concrete symptom of the way in which public opinion, influenced by hate speech, comes to applaud ethnocide.
More examples in the screenshots below 👇🏻
NOTE – What is described here in this excellent case study by Rania Hadjer is the former and current reality of Malian politics since its creation by France in 1960. The false propaganda by the Malian state is so embedded in the minds of the Malian public opinion that they have lost every trace of human empathy towards the victims in Azawad, because the Malian authorities has portrayed every Azawadian of these specific ethnicities, as a terrorist target, which they in reality are not.
And doesn`t the fact that the Malian authorities does not target or send any drones on the real terrorists who are now burning the south and the center, but instead goes and targets and kills defensless Azawadian women and children in tents far up in the north prove it?
They use authoritarian control over a territory that was unjustly handed over by a former colonizer, with no regard for the people already living there (since millenia). Handed over by force without the consent of the Azawadian people.
Then the ongoing attempt to erase their identity, collective memory, culture, languages, lifestyle and writings. It´s a physical genocide as well as a cultural genocide and also an ethnocide!
What is it based on? its just pure hate and racism. And the fact that they want the land but not its people, and to make an ethnic replacement once the original inhabitants are exterminated.
But the Azawadians were living there long before the artificial state of “Mali” was even created.
Therefore, this is a decolonization issue that has never yet been resolved. It`s continuous systematic violations constitutes a blatant violation of the founding principles of the United Nations and the African Union and of human rights.
As long as the Azawadians are denied their humanity and right to exist on their land it will never be possible for Mali and Azawad to co-exist. The only fair and just solution is independence for Azawad.
Azawad Support Group
20-09-25