Today, we run the second piece in our new series of articles on the Casamance conflict. The first article focuses on the root causes of Casamance Separatism. This piece discusses the formation and evolution of the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance, one of the main parties to the conflict. The CIHA Blog has also previously published two other articles on the Casamance conflict titled An Introduction to the Casamance Conflict: Implications for Peacebuilding and Feminist non-violent resistance in Casamance: AlañDi-So Bassène (1913 – 1940) in English and French.
______________________
Introduction
Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (Mouvement des Forces Democratiques de Casamance – MFDC) was formed in 1982 by Mamadou Nkrumah Sané and Abbot Diamacoune Senghor as a social protest movement. This name was borrowed from the first Movement of the Democratic Forces of Casamance, a regionalist political party for Casamance, formed in 1947 by a group of schoolteachers, notably Émile Badiane and Ibou Diallo. The party later dissolved after its amalgamation with Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Senegalese Democratic Bloc (BDS) in 1956. Even though the separatists’ aim was to build a continuity from the original MFDC’s standpoint, researchers could not help but find radical differences between the two organizations (Manga 2013, Foucher 2002, ch.3, Marut 2010, Capain Bassene 2014, 25). As Ngaïndé (2009: 59) puts it, “the MFDC of that time is neither independentist nor ethnicist, but rather aimed at weighing in on the course of decolonization. Its explicit objective was to promote the economic interests and political representation of the people of Casamance within the framework of the soon to be independent Senegal.” In contrast, in 1982, the newly formed MFDC began demanding separation from Senegal. The factors that led to these separatist agitations were covered in the first article of the Casamance series published on the CIHA blog. As a follow up to that, this essay discusses the emergence, composition and evolution of the MFDC and the goal of the rebellion – the creation of a nation state in Casamance.
The History of MFDC and the Meaning of “Independence”
Senegal’s accession to independence was accompanied by a resurgence of the feeling of insubordination that has always marked the history of the people of Casamance. Leopold Sedar Senghor, the first President of postcolonial Senegal, could not ignore this riot of a regional identity in Casamance. The strategy of President Senghor was the cooptation of the influential executives of the MFDC into the BDS, which would later be called the Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS). Thus, several figures of the 1947-48 MFDC stood by President Senghor until his resignation on 31 December 1980.
The nature of the new MFDC having little in common with the original MFDC is the result of the political tensions that grew in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea of separation from Senegal seems to have emerged in the late 1970s during meetings in the forests surrounding Ziguinchor. As early as in 1980, a still growing separatist movement regained the acronym MFDC (Faye 1994: 198), under the leadership of the charismatic Abbot Augustin Diamacoune Senghor, who until his death, was the Secretary General of the movement. Abbot devoted himself to the construction of a separatist discourse marked by radio broadcasts on the ORTS regional antenna, which recounted the history of Casamance. This turned gradually into “forums” where people expressed their frustrations: dispossession of land in urban and rural areas, imposition of a law on the national domain and a forest code that does not take into account the habits and customs of the region, cultural contempt in which the Casamance population are held by the “northerners,” etc. (Robin 2006: 4). Soon, a movement that started off with peaceful marches or dissent across the streets of Ziguinchor retreated into the dense Casamance forest and began secret combat trainings under Sidy Badji’s command, while taking advantage of the elusive borders and the cultural fluidity of the people of its two neighboring countries – the Gambia and Guinea Bissau; “This guerrilla force, sometimes known as Attika (“warrior” in Diola), mobilized fully in 1990. On 20 April, its first attack on the customs station at Seleti on the Gambian border, marked the start of the ‘military phase’ of the conflict” (Evans 2004: 4). The government of Senegal responded by appointing a military governor to the Ziguinchor region in May 1990 and upscaling the deployment of troops, thereby “accelerating the downward spiral of violence and human rights abuses of both sides” (Evans 2004: 4).
The rebellion has thus outlived two democratically elected Senegalese presidents with the third currently serving. The entire period has been marked by military and guerilla insurgence, peace deals, negotiations and upheavals within the ranks of MFDC itself. Meanwhile, the transnational maneuverings of the movement continued to not only provide them cover, it has equally made securing allies and collaborators in Guinea Bissau and the Gambia easy and provided them a chance to mobilize resources through illicit trade. It is this illicit trade, the targeting of civilian population, and their current lack of a united front that somehow delegitimize the movement’s original demands for autonomy.
The Composition, Evolution, and Fragmentation of the MFDC
The MFDC membership generally reflects the population dynamics in Casamance: the region is mostly populated by the Diola, an important part of them identifying as Catholics. They live alongside Bainouks, Mandinkes, Pulaar, Wolof, and other minority ethnic groups. Therefore, against a popularly held notion that the MFDC is only made up of the Diola Christians, Ferdinand de Jong (1999: 7) warns that locating Casamance nationalism in the Diola culture “reduces the political struggle to another variety of cultural essentialism…” and would not suggest “that the MFDC unites Catholics and adherents of local traditional cults against Senegal’s Muslim population”, which is how the Senegalese public understand it. The MFDC composition is diverse along ethnic and religious lines albeit its predominance by Diola speakers and Catholic Christians.
Notwithstanding this perceptive homogeneity, splits within the MFDC started as early as the rebellion and the subsequent peace negotiations that followed soon after. Evans (2004) reports that the main historical divisions emerged between the Front Nord (the Northern Front) and the Front Sud (the Southern Front) along respective areas of operations across both sides of the Casamance River. This division arose following accords signed in April 1991 in the Bissau-Guinean town of Cacheu. The accords aimed at consolidating the first ceasefire signed by Sidy Badji (the Chief of Staff of the armed group) and the Senegalese government in May 1991. Abbot Diamacoune Senghor and Nkrumah Sané were displeased with how the accords failed to include MFDC’s central demands for independence. In addition, suspicions of defection on the part of Sidy Badji – who agreed to meet President Diouf – caused his isolation within Attika. Sidy Badji and his followers regrouped as Front Nord and retired from active combat against Senegalese Military. By way of compensation, “they were allowed to retain de facto control of much of the northwest of Bignona department, with few or no Senegalese forces present in the area covered until recently.” Evans (2004: 5). The Front Nord further split in 2003 when Kamougue Jatta took over command following Sidy Badji’s death in the same year. The splinter group, which then became the most powerful group of the Front Nord, fell under the command of Magne Diame, a former close associate of Kamougue. Violent rivalries between Front Nord and Front Sud continued as much the same way as relations between the Senegalese army and the Front Nord militia deteriorated.
Meanwhile, Front Sud, which remained under the influence of Abbe Diamacoune Senghor and under the command of Leopold Sagna, was the more militant group operating on the South of the River. Although it remained the MFDC’s active military force for separatism, around 1999, internal divisions began to surface. The most hardliners regrouped under junior Lieutenant Salif Sadio in opposition to Sagna’s more moderate approach and coziness to President Abdou Diouf.
The peace process that began in the late 1980s is probably the most plausible explanation for this discord within the rebellion. Accordingly, Foucher states that “part of the civil wing of the MFDC is established in Ziguinchor, under the ‘protection’ and at the expense of the Senegalese authorities, to negotiate. The 1991 and 1992 agreements have since been followed by many others which have only aggravated the fragmentation of the MFDC” (Foucher 2009: 147). It then transpires from this reading that the situation was made more problematic by the position of central power which according to Foucher (2009), consciously or not, maintained this fragmentation. The MFDC factions adopted a defensive attitude, some choosing the path of negotiations, others preferring to maintain their warrior enclaves. Therefore, the Casamance conflict is characterized by very difficult war phases of 1990-91, 1992-93, 1995 or 1997-99 followed by a low-intensity violence. For several years now, the main fighting has been between the MFDC factions. The implosion of this movement, which is reflected in the multitudes of fronts and the numerous collisions among them have not only weakened the movement in terms of military force but above all, they have undermined an already highly contested “legitimacy.”
The Division of the MFDC and its Consequences for Peacebuilding
The fragmentation is certainly due to internal unrest and conflicting interests among MFDC, but also to the political strategy of the State that has succeeded in making the crumbling of the rebellion its main Achilles’ hill. Being busy fighting each other, the various fronts almost lost sight of their goal of independence. This strategy, however, has undoubtedly led to an over-efficiency effort to make inter-MFDC dialogue impossible as factional resentments now seem insurmountable. The situation is, therefore, this: on the one hand, sectoral negotiations/mediations do not seem to be yielding the expected results and do not pacify the region of Casamance. On the other hand, no possibility of agreement seems feasible between the various moderate groups that agree to negotiate with the State around federal or autonomist perspectives while ultra-radicals such as Salif Sadio and Nkrumah still claim independence and are in open conflict with the government.
The MFDC conflict in Casamance then appears to be an unmanageable conflict because it is polycentric and multipolar. Indeed, if in its beginnings, the MFDC claimed its withdrawal from the Senegalese entity through a guerrilla warfare, the situation quickly became more complex following a disconnection between the political wing (internal and external) and the military one (North, South, and West fronts), and above all an entrenchment of internal splits in the movement which, on top of the war against the State, have added more devastating fratricidal conflicts. This factor makes its resolution much more uncertain.
MFDC Separatism and the Nation State
The MFDC’s rationale for separation is aimed at creating a Casamance nation-state – a demand that remains unattainable. Several peace deals and negotiations (See Minorities at Risk Project, 2004) that have been tabled since the initial outbreak of violence have had this demand either missing on the table or suffered an outright rejection by the Senegalese authorities. However, in order to legitimize the separatist ideology, the separatist MFDC often reports that the Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor promised in 1960 to grant Casamance its independence in few years to come; “To the nationalist discourse of the state, the MFDC opposes that of the territorial unity of Casamance and the identity of its peoples” (Ngaïdé 2009: 61). The then President thus advanced the urgency of building the national unity of a state freshly out of colonization in order to bypass the demand for withdrawal from the great whole that the MFDC or in any case any party had very early on put on his table.
According to Ngaïdé (2009), at the time of independence, the Senegalese leaders devoted themselves, as was the case everywhere on the continent, to building a nation-state. There was thus a desire on the part of the government to consolidate or build up a Senegalese nation. The country’s authorities then strived to build a unitary and unified State, capable of enabling the political representation of all the communities. The project of nation building through the integration of the various components then took form in “legitimizing the production of an identity discourse and the manufacturing of institutions and apparatus to be used for its realization” (Diouf 1992: 10).
In this way, several measures were taken to homogenize and manage the national territory in the same way. It is in this context that Law 64-46 of 17 June 1964 on the national domain and Law 72-25 of 19 April 1972 on rural communities came into force. On the margins of this will, there was a separatist discourse mobilizing the feeling of difference between the people of Casamançaises and those of Senegal. The concept of nation state is thus at the heart of the mechanism that the State mobilized to maintain Casamance in Senegal and stifle the voice of irredentism.
Conclusion
The MFDC’s desire for an independent Casamance predates the formal outbreak of their violent rebellion. It has been over three decades of conflict and yet this goal remains elusive. If there is any wonder as to why the rebellion persists for this long even with no attainment of their ultimate goal in sight, Ferdinand de Jong’s work, Revelation and secrecy: Cultural models of performance in the Casamance revolt, Senegal (1999), in which, away from most analyses that focus on the political dynamics, he attempts to provide a cultural understanding for the dynamics of the [MFDC]”, may provide some insights. He explores, on one hand, the MFDC’s adherence and strong belief in a prophecy made by an [unidentified] spiritual leader that Casamance is meant to be independent someday, and on the other hand, their resorting to a cult like secrecy- [around activities in the sacred woods] De Jong (1999: 7). Fetishism and secrecy are two important features of the traditional religion, which, as with the MFDC, are accorded strong adherence within the Diola culture and traditions.
Authors:
Nyimasata Camara, Political Science Lecturer, University of the Gambia, and CIHA Blog Editorial Assistant
Moise Diedhou, Ph.D. Candidate, Gaston Berger University, and CIHA Blog Editorial Assistant
Mame Penda Ba, Professor of Political Science; Director, LASPAD, Gaston Berger University, and CIHA Blog Co-Editor
References
De Jong Ferdinand (1999), “Revelation and secrecy: Cultural models of performance in the Casamance revolt, Senegal,” Disaster Sites, no 4, Wageningen Disaster Studies.
Diouf Makhtar (1998), “Le Senegal, les Ethnies et la Nation,” NEAS, Paris.
Diouf Mamadou (1992), Le clientélisme, la “technocratie”et après? Trajectoires d’un Etat, Dakar, Codesria, p 233-278.
Evans Martin, (2004), “Senegal: Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance (MFDC),” Africa Programme, Armed Non-states Actors Project, AFP BP 04/20, Gatham House.
Faye Ousseynou (1994), “La Crise Casamancaise et les Relations du Senegal avec la Gambie et la Guninee-Bissau,” Le Senegal et Ses Voisins, pp189-212.
Foucher, Vincent (2002). ‘Cheated Pilgrims: Education, Migration and the Birth of Casamançais Nationalism (Senegal)’. Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Fourcher Vicent (2003), « Pas d’alternance en Casamance », Politique africaine, 91, pp. 101-19.
Foucher-Vincent (2009), « La guerre par d’autres moyens » La société civile dans le processus de paix en Casamance, Raisons politiques, n° 35, août 2009, p. 143-166.
Manga, Mouhamed Lamine, « Le Sénégal sous Abdoulaye Wade. L’échec d’une paix anoncée», In Momar C. Diop (Dir): Le Sénégal sous Abdoulaye Wade. Le Sopi à l’épreuve du pouvoir, pp 267-295, CRES-Karthala 2013.
Marut, Jean-Claude, 1992, « La Casamance: du particularisme au séparatisme », Hérodote, 65-66, pp.207-32.
Marut, Jean-Claude (2010). Le conflit de Casamance. Ce que disent les armes. Paris: Karthala.
Minorities at Risk Project, “Chronology for Diolas in Casamance in Senegal,” (2004), available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38d7c.html [accessed 25 February 2020]
N’gaide Abderrahmane (2009), “Identites Ethniques et Territorialisation en Casamance,” Etudes Africaines de Geographie par le bas, pp 39-78.
Robin Nelly, Babacar Ndione (2006), « L’accès au foncier en Casamance: L’enjeu d’une paix durable? » Dakar, avril 2006, p 15.