Crisis in Mali
Thursday, 31 January 2013 | A Public Affair
On Thursday January 31st, host Allen Ruff spoke with co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies Emira Woods about the current situation in Mali. Woods is an expert on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on Africa and the developing world. She has writes about diverse issues of national importance, from debt, trade and development to U.S. military policy. Emira serves on the Board of Directors of Africa Action, Just Associates, Global Justice and the Financial Policy Forum. Woods is a regular commentator on CNN’s Your World Today, BBC’s The World Today (Weekend), and appears regularly on Al Jazeera and Voice of America.
On January 15th, Woods discussed the African conflict on the PBS NewsHour: “There cannot be a military solution to this crisis in Mali, the crisis has its roots in political and also economic processes, with people in the northern part of the country feeling completely marginalized from the rest of the country… So clearly what you had was an opportunity because of the intervention, the NATO intervention in Libya, unleashing weapons, both from Qadaffi’s coffers as well as from the international community, weapons flowing from Libya, across borders of Algeria, into northern Mali, to be able to actually create a crisis, and further destabilize northern Mali. So I think what you have is a situation where unilateral intervention could create complications down the road, both for civilians that could be targeted in these airstrikes, as well as for further complicating a political crisis that may not be resolved militarily.”
Read more about Emira Woods:
http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/emira
Listen to the entire program:
