Friday January 21, the funeral of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was organized by the civil-military power which caused his fall, in August 2020.
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Soldiers carry the coffin of former Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta during his national funeral in Bamako on January 21, 2022.
The ceremony was in itself a symbol, the summary of the events that have shaken Mali over the past eighteen months. This Friday, January 21, hundreds of soldiers, lined up along the place d’armes of the 34th battalion of military engineers in Bamako, watched the body of former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK) pass, motionless of the national flag and carried by six men in parade uniform.
At the end of the black carpet where the body is deposited, Choguel Maïga, the current Prime Minister of the Transition, presides over the ceremony, without saying a word. In the spring of 2020, he was one of the instigators of the large popular demonstrations demanding the departure of IBK and which would eventually lead to its fall during the military coup of August 18. He again who was chosen to lead the government put in place the day after the second putsch in May 2021.
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Died on January 16 following a long illness, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, who led Mali from 2013 to 2020, was thus seen paying the last tributes by those who forced him to leave power.
Reflection and consensus
But this Friday of national mourning, it was a question of making a clean sweep of the political battles of the past. It’s time for meditation and consensus to say goodbye to “this great baobab that has just bowed”, “pragmatic democrat”, “republican at heart” and “lover of culture” to the “legendary generosity who used to say that he had Mali “pegged to the body”.
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“He had no bitterness and held it against no one,” noted Boubacar Keïta, his third son, at the desk, briefly retracing the last weeks of this father, president who, since his forced withdrawal from political life, “ almost begged his interlocutors to come to the aid of those who have the heavy burden of Mali today”.
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To his fallers, IBK had, according to those around him, forgiven their gesture. Abstaining from any public comment on the national political situation and “despite his ardent wish to immerse himself in his rich library, he could not manage to ignore the problems of Mali. It gnawed at him more than anything, ”said Aminata Jeanne Keïta, one of the granddaughters of the former president, in front of an assembly made up mainly of Malian guests.
many absences
Sign of the growing isolation of the country, the funeral of the former leader was indeed marked by many absences.
First that of the delegations of Heads of State members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The junta having, despite international pressure, decided not to return power as promised after the elections, on February 27, Mali was placed under embargo by its neighbors. In January, after the announcement by the putschists of a transition that would last six and a half years, the sub-regional body imposed heavy sanctions, in particular economic and financial, against the country and the closure of the borders. On January 21, only a delegation from Guinea was present. Like Bamako, Conakry is led by a young colonel, Mamadi Doumbouya, who himself defeated President Alpha Condé in September 2021.
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At the international level, France, the European Union, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, Japan or even the United Arab Emirates and China were represented. “We will retain a great statesman and a person very attached to France. IBK was a Parisian, like me,” testified Joël Meyer, the French ambassador to Mali.
Another absentee from the ceremony: Karim Keïta, eldest son of the former president. The one who was president of the defense commission of the National Assembly is, since the summer of 2021, under the blow of an arrest warrant for his alleged implication in the assassination of the Malian journalist Birama Touré, disappeared in 2016. Karim Keïta took refuge in Côte d’Ivoire.