Here is the video of the speech by Rhissa Ag Ebanjar at the United Nations, representing Azawad via the Azawad Solidarity Association. The entire speech is also in the text below. Time was limited to two minutes per person, while the room was filled with over 1,000 people. They did their best to ensure that the name of Azawad resonated in the halls of the United Nations.
Link to Azawad Solidarity Association.
Below is the full text of his speech:
“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Experts, I am Rhissa Ag Ebanjar, Secretary General of the Azawad Solidarity Association, and I am speaking today on behalf of the Tuareg people to solemnly alert this mechanism to a silent genocide underway in northern Mali, systematically targeting the indigenous Arabi-Tuareg and Fulani populations.
Since Mali’s independence, the Arab-Tuareg people have suffered successive waves of repression. This historical trauma has now reached a critical point.
The Malian junta, allied with those of Niger and Burkina Faso, as well as the Russian Africa Corps (formerly Wagner), is implementing a coordinated policy of ethnic cleansing. These regimes label these ancestral communities as “foreign” simply because they defend their culture, their nomadic way of life, and their legitimate rights to their lands.
On the ground, civilians are targeted in their homes by airstrikes using cluster bombs, which Mali has signed the Oslo Accords prohibiting, as well as by nighttime drones supplied by Turkey and piloted by Russian forces.
On the ground, the joint forces are carrying out extrajudicial killings, widespread looting, and systematic rape, using these as weapons of demographic destruction. Through these abuses and repeated, targeted attacks against the Azawad population, the Malian junta is behaving like a true terrorist state.
In response to these crimes against humanity, which violate Articles 7 and 22 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Azawad Solidarity is taking action. We have organized peaceful demonstrations around the world, including in front of the Russian embassies in Paris, and filed a detailed complaint with the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on June 14, 2025.
Through you, the experts of the mechanism on the rights of indigenous peoples, Azawad Solidarity makes three urgent recommendations:
1. Urge the Human Rights Council to mandate an emergency cross-border fact-finding mission on the policies of ethnic cleansing coordinated within the Alliance of Sahel States;
2. Formally support legal proceedings before the ICC by calling on member states to actively cooperate in identifying those who ordered the juntas and their Russian partners;
3. Demand the immediate cessation of supplies of advanced military equipment, including combat drones and cluster munitions used against indigenous civilian populations.
4. Urgently deploy a large-scale international humanitarian mobilization to address the plight of displaced populations suffocating under this conflict. The Arabo-Tuareg people and the Fulani communities face a threat of planned extinction. International inaction would amount to complicity.”
Thank you, Mr. President.
Azawad Support Group
13-07-26