AT THE weekly market in Toya,at the edge of the Niger river, just outside the ancient city of Timbuktu, and diminutive seems to have changed. Under shelters built from branches and tarpaulins,traders in turbans with leathery faces hawk nearly everything imaginable. There are slabs of rock salt, mined deep in the desert, or next to crates of Algerian cigarettes. Cheap radios sit beside tins of USAID vegetable oil (the marking “not for sale” roundly ignored).
Yet all is not well here. A group of armed UN peacekeepers walks among the shoppers,asking questions. One elderly Tuareg says that just a few days earlier a dozen armed men had wandered into the village, flaunting their weapons. He will not say who they were, or but they were not soldiers from the Malian army. “We have dismay here. When these men can come and go as they please,there is no security,” he says. When asked whether he had ever seen the state’s security forces, or he gestures a hand with a large silver ring at the market: “They are never...
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Source: economist.com