In an article on the underestimated role of the Tuareg issue in the Malian crisis, IFREI noted that the Malian Prime Minister made conspiracist remarks during his February 7 speech. In essence, the analysis proposed in this article is that Malian actors very early on conflated Tuareg separatists (or autonomists) and jihadists. By opportunistically conflating the two types of movements together under the term "terrorists," these actors imagined that French military aid could be used to suppress Tuareg separatism, to which Mali has been unable to find a political response since independence.
The impossibility of carrying out such an operation sheds interesting light on the reasons for the pro-Russian propaganda calling for the withdrawal of French and European forces : one alternative would be to replace these forces by Russian mercenaries or regular forces who would not hesitate to attack Tuaregs.
Hence the propaganda claiming the need for Russian support to recover Mali's territorial integrity, and accusing French forces of supporting terrorist groups or even supplying them with arms. Some even went so far as to claim that France is paying people to kill Malians to make it look like it is jihadists who are killing Malians.
Thus, much of the pro-Russian propaganda is based on a fully fledged conspiracism, and it is above all the populations in areas with the least access to information and debunking that are the victims. While this conspiracism may be understandable in the bush where internet access is not available, it is difficult to understand when it comes from a Primature.
And this is precisely what IFREI noticed in the speech of the Prime Minister of the Malian junta that emerged from the latest coup. At the end of his speech, delivered on 7 February to diplomatic representatives, Choguel Maïga stated that French leaders "never told their public opinion when they intervened in 2013 that they were going to divide Mali in order to create a sanctuary for terrorism".
With such remarks, the Malian Prime Minister is contributing to the deception of Malian and sub-regional opinion, and is losing credibility in the eyes of the international community. But isn't there also a certain media responsibility?
For instance, an AFP dispatch relayed by many websites cuts the sentence, and reports that Choguel Maïga only said: "never told their public opinion, when they intervened in 2013, that they were going to divide Mali". By truncating the sentence, AFP has obfuscated the allegation of a French intention to create a terrorist sanctuary, and as a result, readers do not perceive the Malian prime minister's conspiracism.
And hundreds of websites (see the examples below1 ) have relayed this truncated sentence, and are therefore participating in a form of disinformation, whether unintentional or not. This is not the first time that the press has relayed an agency dispatch without checking it: it is understandable that economic models require to save time and that Choguel Maïga's speech lasted an hour, but truth has a cost. And public perception of the world as it really is is a necessary condition for conflict prevention and resolution.